This year is not starting off well.
Just as a caveat, this post is probably going to be less about art and storytelling than my anxieties for the future.
Last night, I flew back from my childhood home in Boston. I had been looking forward to the warm Southern California winter, where I could go out in a sweatshirt and rarely needed more than that, compared to the bitter cold of sub-freezing temperatures.
Well, the cold doesn't seem so bad now.
While I was in the air, several enormous wildfires ignited around Los Angeles. Now, the part of the city I live in is pretty deep inside the urban sprawl, which tends not to be affected by these things. I don't know if that's just because the denser parts of the city are less likely to burn (there's certainly less grass and fewer trees) or if there's a kind of Dawinian element - the places where the city has been able to grow densest are the ones that don't tend to get wildfires.
Anyway, right now I'm most frightened for my uncle in Pasadena - he's not far from Caltech, and apparently just got an evacuation warning. He's very close to both the university and the Huntington Gardens - the Huntington is one of Southern California's great places of beauty, both as a botanical garden and a library that holds countless rare books.
As far as I know, at least before I went to bed last night, no one had actually been killed. I'm dearly hoping that this statistic remains true. But this does feel really bad. The Santa Ana winds, which blow in from the dry north, have been fueling these fires. Normally we don't have giant wildfires at this time of year, in the dead of winter.
Ever since the election, I'd been dreading this year, knowing that we're at serious risk of seeing our democracy and freedom curtailed by people who have shown disdain for these central principles. And then, we had terrorist attacks on New Year's, and now these fires.
I am certainly not suggesting these things are directly related, but it is just a compounding sense that things could get really bad. Remember in 2020 when the massive wildfire in Australia seemed like it was going to be the disaster of the year, and then we were hit with a (hopefully) once-in-a-century pandemic?
I usually have a friend pick me up from the airport - most often my roommate - but had to hire a ride last night. We actually talked mostly about screenwriting - how I had come out to Los Angeles originally to get into the film industry. He was a more recent transplant, talking about networking and such (I think he must have been a lot younger than me). Personally, I've sort of moved past the idea of really working in film - I love movies, and still see my vocation as that of a storyteller.
But whether it's the rightward shift of politics or the industry moving to other places to make movies, I feel worried about my adopted hometown - one that is only sort of adopted because this is where my parents grew up, and in many ways has always felt like just as much my hometown as Boston.
I genuinely love Los Angeles. Since moving here, no matter what struggles I've had, I can't imagine living somewhere else. I think one of my greatest fears, to be honest, is being forced at some point to move elsewhere.
I'd love to think that we're just getting all the crises out of the way early in the year, but I don't think it works that way.
The damage of these fires is going to be massive when the final toll is counted. I'm hoping it's just property rather than lives.
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