when your house burns down

your bibliomancy forecast for the week of january 13th

LIFE RX 13 JAN 25

This week’s newsletter will be a little unusual because I can’t pull a card from the tarot deck. The deck is gone, along with my house and everything in it. They all burned at some point between Tuesday night, when the fire started in Eaton Canyon, and Friday, when our landlord called to tell us our house was gone.

The symbols and archetypes of the tarot deck are not only printed in images on cards, though. They are real things, real vistas, real masks that we put on. So, even though I couldn’t choose a card to examine this week, I wanted to continue to write this newsletter, because quite clearly a card chose me.

from Leonora Carrington’s tarot deck

the tower, and the opening paragraph from Susan Straight’s Mecca:

The wind started up at three a.m., the same way it had for hundreds of years, the same way I used to hear the blowing so hard around our little house in the canyon that the loose windowsills sounded like harmonicas. The old metal weather stripping played like the gods pressed their mouths around the screens in the living room, where I slept when I was growing up.

the aleatory

The Santa Ana winds woke us up at 3:30am. They were not supposed to come until that evening. J said it was like the first scene in a movie, and it was. All the palm trees were blown south, pinned at 45-degree angles in the sky. I prepared for the power going out. We had our coffee. I moved my car from under the live oak where I usually park it and prepared for the power to go out, which it did a few hours later.

Mid-morning, I heard about the Palisades fire starting. Understand, you hear a lot about fires starting in Los Angeles, but this was different. The fire spread so quickly that people fleeing abandoned their cars in the street, which then made it impossible for firetrucks to get through.

The winds settled, the power came back on. I finished my work. It seemed like a slightly annoying but normal day. The power went out again. I read in the last sunlight of the day—it seemed uncanny that I happened to pick up Susan Straight’s Mecca, a book which I had around for years but hadn’t cracked into.

In the evening, lots of smaller fires started to pop up closer to home. Each one made my heart leap, but each one was knocked down almost as quickly as it was reported. But then I got a notification for another fire, a few miles away in Eaton Canyon. And immediately, I heard wave after wave of sirens going up the street, and helicopters overhead.

I took down the cat carriers. I told myself I was just doing it out of caution—I usually try to have the cats’ carriers out for a few days before they have to go somewhere so they don’t get too panicked about being in them.

And almost right away, the emergency alert began blaring from my phone. Mandatory evactuation, immediately.

There are other things to tell about this night, and all the nights since, but for now, I want to tell you one in particular. My sweet cat Goose is difficult to get into a carrier on the best of days. I have had to cancel vet appointments because I couldn’t wrangle him in time. Basically I have one chance to pick him up and get him zipped in—but if I blow that chance, he hides under the bed and won’t come out, no matter how many toys and treats I tempt him with.

So, of course, I blew my first chance getting Goose into the carrier.

The power was out. I was chasing him around the dark house. I kept closing doors so he couldn’t hide in the bedroom, the bathroom. It was horrible—I was scaring him. I started loading up other things in the car to give him a moment to possibly calm down, but it didn’t matter. There was no calming down. There were only more helicopters overhead. I could see the fire from my front door.

Eventually, I had everything in the car except for Goose. I got down on my hands and knees and pulled him out by the back leg and wrestled him into the carrier. He was so scared and so upset. It broke my heart that I was adding to his terror. But it had to happen that way, because I knew something he didn’t know. And I knew that it was my responsibility to keep him safe, even though I couldn’t do this without momentarily putting him through something traumatic.

When turn a card over in a reading, the person you’re reading for almost always asks, “Is that good?” When you turn over the tower, they don’t ask. It is very obviously not good. In most decks, the card shows a tower on fire or struck by lighting, with one figure falling from the top and one already on the ground.

And the meanings that go along with it are also fairly obvious: shock, dissolution, endings, acts of god. The crumbling of once-mighty structures and relationships. But there is a less obvious meaning, one which I think is possibly useful (but also might piss you off).

You know who they keep in towers, don’t you?

Prisoners.

this sweet boy doesn’t know what a fire is, or why we have to leave

For Goose, it was probably the worst night of his life. And not because his home was destroyed, or because the high winds made it impossible for fire crews to use aerial support, or because climate change can create hyper-factored conditions which are fucked up in ways we have not even fully considered. These things are all true, but Goose doesn’t know about them.

As far as Goose is concerned, it was a horrible night because he was yanked out from the safety of his couch, thrown in a small dark box, jostled in a car with the smoke of encroaching fires—a car swerving around downed tree branches and 100-mph gusts that toppled semis—then finally set down again in a house he had never seen before. And whether he knows it or not, all of that pain and terror had to happen as they did because the alternative was worse.

I have thought about this many, many times in the week since. When I double over crying in the grocery store, at donation centers where I’m picking through towels and bins of donated toiletries, when I mourn the special T-shirts and friends’ poems and books and the little carved animals that sat on a ledge in the kitchen, when I mourn the evenings of feral parrots flocking overhead and the particular slant of sun and morning coffee listening to Ernest Tubb and every quiet, gorgeous, absolutely remarkably perfect evening when I went for a walk in my neighborhood and could hardly believe my luck that I got to live there, I think that it was one of the most horrible nights of my life.

And I wonder if, like Goose, I am simply not aware that, in spite of how horrible it is/was, I might have been dragged out from my own hiding place, for reasons I don’t yet understand.

the assignment

keep it together

writing prompt

keep it together

a chune

“Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic

“I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, but I was not offended. I knew I had to rise above it all, or drown in my own shit.”

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credits: the tower by Leonora Carrington
Mecca by Susan Straight
“Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic

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Dear diary, the tarot deck is not really gone—it is in someone’s lungs. Many peoples’ lungs, actually. They breathe in my vaporized wool blazer and J’s Sunn Model T tube amp. I breathed in their wedding photos and antidepressants and homework and shoes. We’re all in it together. I have experienced so much grace and kindness this week. I don’t think I will ever be able to let someone say that LA is all surface and fluff. XS

To everyone who’s asked what they can do to help, please know that just your asking means a lot. This is a fundraiser for J on behalf of his friends at the fabrication shop where he works when he isn’t working long-ass hours as a grip. Any money you put there will help us out, and is much appreciated. Also, please consider donating to the Pasadena Humane Society. Lots of our animal friends are also out of a home and in need of all the help they can get.

Thank you for reading. It’s nice to have you here. <3