This City Will Not Stop Burning

Dispatch from Los Angeles during the Jan 2025 fire

Ash is falling from the sky in snow’s image, an idol, and the wind is the hideous laughter the joker emits in the face of thieves, “All Along the Watchtower,” our great American standard, has its latest reprise in today. It’s not that seige has to be reasonable, composure just has to give and snap in the cosmos and the sound of a tree’s dismemberment covers the whole earth in a lint of the evil it allowed too long. It’s almost sublime, when you surrender to it. I’m typing from my Iphone in the dark, 4:44 A.M, power by me has been out for over eight hours and no one in Los Angeles is really sleeping, minds darting from the stench of a cookout gone wrong to the sacrifial flesh of the hills not far off in the distance, images of masked men walking out of flames with horses while a reporter places a microphone to their covered mouths, “how many did you leave back.”

Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler painted the Santa Ana winds with words but this feels different, like a new more sinister level of disastrous blows, like the wind itself is on fire; it feels like the wrath, a hurricane in blazes. Just last night, many tuned in to watch celebrties in beautiful gowns receive Golden Globes for mostly forgettable movies. Nothing will outact the landscape itself in Los Angeles. She ain’t no diva, the air is always grimacing at some it-girl or trending radio hitmaker; watch this, study this.

I have LED candles glimmering all over like glass eyes, the glow of a laptop, prayer candles, unlit, matches and a flashlight and a charger my sister brought me around midnight when the power seemed like it would stay down till morning, and this nagging feeling I should report something, while the energy is frenetic and looming with evacuation orders just missing the set hills by me for now. Should I consider accounts of the insurance companies dropping renters across Los Angeles en masse in recent weeks, the alleged tunnels under the Getty, now almost in flames, the alleged sins of the fathers, the children, now grown asking “have you seen my childhood” and reporting trafficking rings made up worshipped household names, the unwillingness of most minds to hold beauty, comfort, and horror together and understand none exist without the others. I’m naive on purpose about some things, but never about how dark Los Angeles is to be so perfect, so perfectly ruinous it emboldens us to export fictions and muses who the whole country really can’t wait to burn at the stake, a bible of allegorical fame.

I’ve lived here off and on all my life and I don’t think LA will ever be the same again. I know it won’t be, though we will pretend as soon as possible. The moment we can, and we’ll sell film the rights to that. Keep our pretenses in your hearts.

This corpse city of quartz will not stop burning.