01.25.25

my aunt and uncle evacuated from pacific palisades, from the house i never did manage to visit for one of their legendary halloween parties but did stop by in the fall when my dad and i made a susan-orlean-inspired pilgrimage to the los angeles central library, two weeks ago, and have been having a septuagenarian sleepover at dad's place in newport beach ever since. i know a little about unexpected time in someone else's space, given the week joe and i spent on the upper east side at my stepmother's apartment when the lower east side lost power during superstorm sandy, but we had the place to ourselves and the ability to hike home and visit our cats; there was no chance of that home blinking into nothing. i thought of how meticulously my aunt made up the guest bedroom for my one night in the palisades, complete with faceouts on her bookshelves on intrepid women, of the backyard mini-canyon my uncle named the valley of fear where joe and i once thought of having a wedding reception, then think of their creaking up dad's stairs to the bedroom where my stepsister once left a half-eaten postcoital lollipop stuck to the nightstand. my aunt's a retired judge and my uncle's a retired lawyer; as i imagined, they've been eavesdropping in the background as dad leads mediations via zoom. have they finished all of his partial bags of spicy potato chips? are they watching the senate vote on cabinet appointments? they are the lucky ones, of course, and friends of friends all over the city have no homes to revisit. fire has been a dirty word since long before i was a little girl; i remember a soccer teammate losing her home to the mudslides after the laguna fires, and practices during those same fires when we could see flames on a distant ridge and the smoke cover was so low you could kick a ball and lose track of it before it came to earth—what, exactly, were we thinking about how lungs worked in the mid-'90s? but that wouldn't be the apocalypse, everyone knew southern california would conclude with the big one. an eight point three, all the kids were familiar with that. the science piece i've now been writing for six months is in part about fire; yesterday my editor asked if one of my experts' pilot study fields had, er, burned up this month, and i asked if i should reinterview everyone to bring the piece up to date with the latest catastrophe cycle. no need, he said, and he's right, it's all evergreen. the internet reminded me this morning that executive orders can't actually defund anything, congress has the power of the purse, but i stil think about the president treating gavin newsom like volodymyr zelenskyy. what does outrage extinguish?

i completed the first round of training to begin observing and documenting protests here in the city—specifically, the way authorities overstep at protests. this is the phase in which i soak up savory terms and anecdotes illustrating those authorities' crookedness and cowardice; there was a similar phase as i first prepared to become an abortion clinic escort, and it's a comfortable time, one when i can relax into having allocated emotional resources constructively. the last big phase of my life was a very manual-labor-oriented one—cleaning cages and tending to individual birds, reorganizing and stocking bookshelves, ferrying indie films across town and handing out ballots. this one seems to be about holding space and bearing witness to minimize vulnerability—the antis outside the clinic toe the invisible lines outside its doors when we outnumber them, my subterranean study room is only open at the library when someone like me is supervising it, the videos i record and data i log via signal will perhaps become part of civil rights cases. this is all appropriate, i think, i am where i should be in my arc as a volunteer, but one does miss the, uh, more aerobic community service? hence all this compulsive running, maybe? i might skip the gym today—but one never knows, now does one now does one now does one.