May you live in uninteresting times 💔

Hi friends,

How are you? I sincerely hope you are safe and far away from the wildfires that have been ravaging Los Angeles. Frankly? I hope you are bored. My husband Ross, our cat Zadie, and I, and our friends in the city, are all safe, and so far, no one we know has lost their home, which feels like a miracle. I know that many people have, and I cannot even begin to wrap my brain around what that must mean for them. Some people have this idea that only wealthy people and celebrities live in Los Angeles, which is so stupid and wrong, I actually feel bad for them. It must be terrible to be such an idiot. Like any city, there are of course tons of working class people who live in Los Angeles, some whose families have been living in the same homes for generations, some for whom that was the only way they could afford to be here. There are a lot of people in that situation who just lost everything. I don’t know how you even begin to rebuild in that situation. Those people are not just going to go out and buy another multimillion-dollar mansion.

In addition, Altadena in particular is home to a large and thriving historic Black community, originally a sanctuary for Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, where they were able to own homes and build generational wealth. In fact, Altadena has one of the largest Black homeownership rates per capita in the state of California. It is heartbreaking to think about the magnitude of what’s been lost, the history that was destroyed and the ripple effects this will have for generations to come. You can support displaced Black families in Altadena and Pasadena by donating to this GoFundMe here.

The thing you need to know is that these fires are actually a really big deal for Los Angeles. Yes, we typically have several wildfires every year, but it’s pretty rare that they come this far down into residential neighborhoods and swallow up loads and loads of people’s homes and businesses. This is the scariest thing that’s happened in L.A. since I’ve been here, and I’ve lived in this city for nine years now. The protests in 2020 didn’t scare me, the hurricane last year didn’t scare me, the earthquakes don’t even scare me that much. These fires scare me.

I can tell you a bit about how things went down for me. The winds started getting really intense on Tuesday, and by nighttime, the two major fires were burning, the one in the Pacific Palisades and the one in Pasadena/Altadena, the Eaton fire. The Eaton fire is the one closest to my home in Highland Park, which is the next neighborhood over from Pasadena. I downloaded the Watch Duty app to track the fires, as recommended by a coworker, and was glued to it, watching the fire’s progress and seeing the areas under evacuation orders spread and spread. I started making this Thai sweet potato and carrot soup for dinner, which smelled delicious, but I never got to eat it, because the power went out. I have a gas stove, so I was able to finish cooking the soup in the dark, but I needed electricity to blend up the huge chunks of sweet potato and carrot in it, so I couldn’t eat it. I stress-ate some chips instead, then started to pack a bag, “just in case.”

During all of this, Ross was out of town on a work ski trip, so I was alone in the dark with the cat while the wind howled outside. He and I talked on the phone Tuesday night and I was freaking out (well, actually, we FaceTimed, but my side was in complete darkness). Ross evaluates wildfire risk all the time for his job in commercial property insurance, and he was positive that our neighborhood would not be placed under an evacuation order, but I was nervous. It’s not that I didn’t believe or trust him, I could just tell that this fire was not like other fires.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that even though our area was technically never put under an evacuation order, the air quality became so bad that it was dangerous for us to be there. I woke up on Wednesday morning after a pretty fitful night’s sleep to the entire apartment reeking of smoke despite all the windows being closed tightly. The air quality index only goes up to 500 (worst), and our neighborhood was well into the 400s. I went and got gas (with an N95 mask on) since our car was almost empty, then just sat in our parking garage in our car recirculating air so I could charge my phone a bit. While I did, I saw several of my neighbors pack up their cars and leave. I thought to myself, “What am I doing? I’m sitting here in the smokey darkness with my phone barely inching up percentage point by percentage point, watching everyone leave.” After texting frantically with Ross, my parents, my mother-in-law, and a friend on the west side, I decided to pack up myself and Zadie (no man left behind!!) and go stay with friends who live in Redondo Beach, far from the fires.

Words cannot express how grateful I am to my friends for taking me and Zadie in. They’re a married couple with an eight month-old baby, for crying out loud, and one of them is even allergic to cats, so Zadie had to take over their baby’s nursery. They fed me, and made me cocktails, and made me play board games and watch dumb TV like Impractical Jokers. I know it was not nothing for them to host me, but I genuinely didn’t know where else to go. Despite the imposition, they made it feel like we were all just having a sleepover together. Their adorable, smiley, bouncy baby was a great distraction, too, to be honest. I just am so grateful to have friends like them. They’re real ones.

Meanwhile, Ross flew back to Los Angeles on Wednesday evening, literally flying through high wind and billowing smoke to get here. He ended up staying with a different friend in Culver City–I thought it would be too much to add another adult to my friends’ place, and our buddy in Culver City has a cat-hating dog, so Zadie and I couldn’t go there. It was weird to not be with him during a crisis, but I drove up to Culver on Thursday night and we had a very surreal date night at Roberta’s.

One thing this whole experience has taught me is that I need to be way more prepared for emergencies in the future. I just kind of chucked things into a bag in the dark in a panic. I didn’t pack any moisturizer and hardly any toiletries besides toothpaste and deodorant, but I remembered my razor–god forbid I have hairy armpits in an emergency! I only brought one pair of pants, but somehow I remembered that I’d been meaning to give some books to my friend I was staying with, so I brought those. It was dumb, because I went in my car, so I really could have brought a lot more things than I did. I did remember to bring our marriage certificate and social security cards, so that’s something.

Of course, the whole time I was staying away from my home, different items I didn’t take with me that were utterly irreplaceable kept popping into my head: my wedding dress. A stack of photos from college. The vintage typewriter Ross got me for our paper anniversary. The painting of Zadie one of our friends made for us as a wedding gift. The stack of BUST Magazines with all my music writing in them. Books that friends had written funny notes in. All my journals from childhood. Birthday cards and love notes and DVDs with my student films on them. Art, so much art. A ring my mother-in-law gave me that was her grandmother’s. Oh my god, I just realized I even left my engagement ring here! (It’s a delicate antique so I don’t wear it daily.) WTF was I thinking?!?!

It’s not just “stuff,” and it can’t all be replaced. One of the tragedies of the Eaton fire was the destruction of the Bunny Museum, a collection of over 46,000 pieces of bunny-themed art and memorabilia in Altadena. A married couple started it after they began a tradition of giving each other new rabbit-themed gifts every day. It was one of those wonderful, weird little places in L.A. that makes the city so cool. That couple spent their entire lives collecting those pieces, and now they’re just gone. You can contribute to their GoFundMe here.

Obviously, people are grateful to have their lives, but that’s really the bare minimum, isn’t it? Shouldn’t people also have safe places to go home to, clean air to breathe, memories in the form of tangible objects, thriving local small businesses? All of those things have been destroyed in these fires. Even those of us who haven’t lost anything have been traumatized and stressed and displaced. Most of us have had trouble sleeping and eating, been on edge, and have struggled to process these horrific events in real-time. I am so, so grateful that my company has been super understanding and flexible this past week and allowed me to be a zombie who has barely accomplished anything, work-wise.

On Friday, we saw that our neighborhood’s air quality was much, much better (I think it was at like 90 on the air quality index, compared to 400-something when I left), and many evacuation orders for the Eaton fire had either been lifted or downgraded, so Ross and I decided to return with Zadie to our apartment. That poor cat. She does not enjoy the car. Both car rides, she barfed, but in the second one, she waited until we were three blocks away from home, which was pretty funny comedic timing, to be fair. Anyway, we are all reunited in our home now, which does not smell like smoke (or barf, for that matter). We had to throw out a bunch of food in our fridge and freezer due to our power being out for so long, but if that’s all we lost, I’m okay with that.

I saw someone post something along the lines of, “I’ve never loved the city as much as I do right now,” and I really feel that. People everywhere are helping each other. Organizations collecting donations have gotten so many that they’ve had to stop accepting them. Restaurants are offering free meals, no questions asked. The LACMA had free admission for everyone all weekend so they could find refuge in art. Vidiots and the Bob Baker Marionette Theater (two of my favorite places/organizations in my neighborhood) are holding a day of free programming for kids. It’s just incredible to see the outpouring of community support for each other in a place that is often labeled as being isolating and individualistic. That’s not the true nature of L.A. at all, it turns out.

I am incredibly grateful to the firefighters and first responders working tirelessly to fight these fires. I am also starkly aware that a non-zero number of those firefighters are made up of incarcerated people making something like $10 a day, which is just horrible. I was appalled when the measure that would have outlawed prison slavery in California did not pass last election. It’s not like it was worded confusingly or anything; it literally used the word “slavery.” We should all be against slavery in any form, people! That’s an easy vote! (You can donate to support incarcerated firefighters here, just write “firefighter fund” on your donation.)

This morning, I went to get coffee and saw a guy driving a car with a dream catcher hanging from his rearview mirror. That’s the kind of thing I totally would have made fun of in the past, because what dreams is that catching in your luxury SUV, my dude? I doubt very much you are sleeping in that car. And yet, I felt great fondness for him in that moment, and for all Angelenos. This entire city is so absurd and ridiculous, it probably shouldn’t exist, but it does, and that’s just magic. Our old apartment was around the corner from a motel that was often rented out to TV and film shoots, and one time we walked around the corner to get coffee and the motel’s pool was just filled with Santa Clauses. (It turned out to be for Fargo, season three.) That’s what I mean when I say the city is weird and surreal and magical all at once. It’s a wonderful, enchanting place to live.

I love my beautiful, burning but not broken city, home to dreamers and black sheep and bimbos and surfers and street artists and screenwriters and skateboarders and tattoo artists and hair stylists and plastic surgeons and tamale guys and coyotes and palm trees and beaches and mountains and canyons and, and, and. Fruit stands on corners with rainbow umbrellas and the most amazing Thai spots in strip malls and seeing celebrities at the grocery store and wearing color every day and sunshine in February and doing hard things you never thought you could do and Dodger games in the summer and going to the beach in the winter and outdoor malls that feel like Disneyland and breakfast burritos as big as babies and babies who’ve never seen snow and every day feels at least 1% like vacation and everyone is at least a little bit beautiful and everyone is at least a little bit crazy but nothing can break us because we were strong enough to get here so we’ll always be strong enough to stay, if we want to stay. And I want to stay, more than anything, I want to stay. I want to keep dreaming in my city of Angels.

Here are some more places you can donate to help. If you are able to donate in person in the Los Angeles area, Mutual Aid LA put together this incredible Google sheet of where and how to do that. That said, monetary donations are really impactful right now because so many places are overwhelmed with physical donations (yay!). I’m going to try to keep this short & sweet:

World Central Kitchen - Was on the ground distributing hot meals almost immediately, just such an amazing, effective organization (they are also on the ground in Gaza and many other places around the globe).

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank - Helping distribute food to those in need throughout L.A. County. Personally, we had to replace a ton of food in our fridge due to the power outage. We’re lucky to be able to afford to do that, but many people can’t.

Pasadena Humane - Has been incredible at helping rescue and support pets and pet owners impacted by the Eaton fire. (DO NOT look at their social media unless you want to cry.)

If you are able to donate to individual GoFundMes, that is awesome, too. I am just incredibly lucky in that I do not know anyone’s personally to share right now, but I will in the future if needed.

That’s all for now, I love you and hope you stay safe. ♥️ Feel free to leave me a comment here and let me know how you’re doing, and/or tell me your favorite joke, or a song that always makes you feel stronger. Or your favorite L.A. memory, if you have one.

Until next time—viva Los Angeles.

Love,

Liz

XOXO