wildfires and curses
life rx 9 sept 24
the five of pentacles, and an excerpt from Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero:
“Talk of the damage the storms caused at Malibu is brought up and someone mentions that the entire house next to theirs collapsed. ‘Just like that. One minute it was there. The next—whoosh ... Just like that.’ Blair’s mother nods her head as she listens to the director who’s telling her this and her lips are trembling and she keeps glancing over at Jared. I'm about to go over and ask her where Blair is, but some people, a couple of actors and actresses and a director and some studio executives enter, and Blair’s mother walks over to them. They’ve just come from the Golden Globe Awards. One of the actresses sweeps into the room and hugs the costume designer and whispers to him loudly, ‘Marty just lost, get him a whiskey neat, fast, and get me a vodka collins before I collapse, will you, darling?’”
the aleatory
I am sitting here stunned by how apt this card and excerpt are today because to the east, in the San Bernardino Mountains, there’s a wildfire burning about five miles away from our A-frame. The fire started in Highland, at the base of the mountains, and I noted it. I worried a little, but I tried to put it out of my mind. Then it grew. I noted it. I started haunting the mountain community facebook group for updates. Then, Saturday nigh at 10:30, our neighbor called and said they were getting the hell out of there, and did I want her to knock on the door and notify our Airbnb guest that things were getting serious?
All day, I had been wondering in the back of my head what to do about the guest. I didn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily. I also didn’t want to give her the impression that I personally was responsible for or able to control the fire. But at that point, I had been trying to send her messages—nothing. I tried to call her—nothing. I knew that her account worked because I had answered some questions when she checked in, but her phone number seemed to be some weird international VOIP thing that wouldn’t even ring through.
J, ever reasonable, pointed out that our guest was an adult, responsible for herself, capable of checking her messages, capable of having a phone number that works, and that I had done everything I could to ensure that she was informed of the situation.
We searched her name and discovered that she’s an influencer with thousands upon thousands of Instagram followers. She had posted an Instagram story from the loft, looking out at the valley below, and it was so incredibly strange to see a place we knew inside a stranger’s curated reality. She also posted a picture of ducks swimming in Lake Arrowhead, cropped so you almost couldn’t see the ash falling from the sky.
There’s something about that image of ash falling on ducks that I can’t get out of my mind. It has a hidden twin. Unlike most photographs I see on Instagram, I know the reality it was situated in. I know what was pushed out of the frame. The hidden part of the image gives it an instability which could be confused with depth. But like most images, it resists being made into a neat statement. Images are restless and circular—your eye roams them, they tumble on their hidden axes. They throw light as they spin, and if you threaded them together in one particular way, you could make some sort of argument, but as they are, they resist rhetoric, insisting only on themselves. Ecology of the human. The human in the landscape. The representational, selective landscape. The thousand minor trickles that make up the Santa Ana river, when it can find the energy to be a river.
One of the things that is so startling about wildfires in California is that they are inevitable. They have a season. They are a fact. They should not, therefore, be surprising. But they are.
The five of pentacles is a card of debts and curses. Humans in California live on a thin layer of debts and curses. Here, the blackest tar comes right out of the ground. The Klieg lights swivel in the sky. Please understand, I’m not saying this should all be different (although it probably should be).
the assignment
See yourself as an animal that somehow got into a building. See yourself as an animal that someone put into a T-shirt.
writing prompt
Write a curse for your favorite enemy. Halfway through, find a way to make it so beautiful that the rest of us will beg for such a curse.
a chune
“Wristwatch” by MJ Lenderman
I first listened to this album while mall-walking the Shops at Santa Anita on Saturday because I love my Rose Bowl but it was 108 or something crazy like that. Well, it turns out that a mostly deserted mall is a really, really great place to become acquainted. It takes no particular genius to see beauty in things that are beautiful. That’s for pussies. That’s intro-level beauty. And therefore is more a balm to the person seeing it than any contribution to World Beauty. But to see beauty in a teddy bear nodding out in Dollar General in a shopping center next to a Chinese restaurant with the fattest goldfish in the tank out front, or a woman tenderly steaming a satin halter top on a plus-size mannequin at Victoria’s Secret, that is a contribution. There is beauty to be seen in everything. It is truly an indiscriminate creature. Some writers, songwriters, have a talent for making it visible to others, and MJ Lenderman seems to be one of those.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
“Wristwatch” by MJ Lenderman
Dear diary, in case it wasn’t clear, please do not feel bad for me or my A-frame—it’s a vacation rental, not a full-time residence, and as much as I truly do hope it doesn’t burn down, many, many people and animals are in much tougher straights than J and I, who are safely sweating our asses off in LA. But if you feel moved, you can donate to the animal shelters that are rescuing animals here. XS