Hell all around us

Funny how just on Friday, Pat O. and I were watching the helicopter sprinkling seeds over the bald area on the hills behind Griffith Park.

And today, that same helicopter is probably out dumping water on the fire somewhere in Southern California.

LA has really gone to hell in a fiery hand basket.

Malibu’s on fire.  Santa Clarita’s on fire.  Ontario’s on fire.  Lake Arrowhead and San Bernadino’s on fire.  Irvine/Tustin’s on fire.  San Diego’s on fire.  (Olaina is reporting in here, here and here.)  And bits of Santa Barbara is now on fire.

LA Times is keeping an up to date map on there.  I don’t know how appropriate it is to turn the usual Google markers into mini flames though.

All we could do in the office today was walking around, commenting on the ickiness of the air, spying on the movie shoot with a prop police helicopter on the helipad next door, and joking about how lucky we are to be either too poor to live in Malibu or too rich and stuck on city life to live in the suburbs like Santa Clarita.

“All that we have to worry about down here is a tsunami,” a Long Beach dweller said.

“Dude, but you’re like on high grounds of Long Beach,” I said.

“Oh yeah.  That’s right.”

A colleague emailed us via Blackberry to let us know she was evacuating from her home in Santa Clarita.  That is probably the closest we got to the action all day.

Oh, and the police brutality protest that marched down Fifth Street.  Seriously, folks.  What the hell are you doing?  With the whole fucking region is burning, do you really think anybody is really going to pay attention to you?  But I digress.

All we city folks experience of this fire is the ashes on our cars and the smokes in our noses.  Some have the traffic gridlock to throw on top.  Some has to sleep through these warm nights with all the windows shut and been woken up by those same windows rattling by the force of the winds.

Our cars are not in actual ashes or smokes are not actually rising from what we call home.  We are not sleeping in a stadium with only clothes on our backs and perhaps a few boxes of memories.  No windows to close or to complaint about rattling.

It’s a lot easier to swallow when you’re at a distance.

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