If Not New Now Then When?

timeline compression

It’s everything all at once, always and forever, things getting scrunched into what seems to be a smaller and smaller inhabitable space, but is it a trick of perspective or an objective measurement? The longer you live, the shorter the days become, proportionally. So maybe it’s just me. I didn’t really have a choice of timeline to inhabit (as far as I recall…maybe I was faced with a choice before I entered this timeline, and picked this one on purpose…or maybe I’m simply reviewing it right now from some far future vantage, in a kind of virtual recall entertainment system, because this might the sort of thing that would be entertaining in retrospect).

It seems incredible that the first fire started just over a week ago. Last Tuesday. It is Wednesday night now. Last Tuesday night, while the western edge of Los Angeles was burning toward the coast, I went east, and was there when east LA burst into flames. It all happened so quickly, and then so slowly, it seemed like it would never end, and in many ways it never will. The air is blue above my neighborhood again, and the mountains are visible, but the air above the smoldering neighborhoods is toxic with whatever the houses were made of or contained. People are in shock. Coffee shops and school zones that were bustling just last Monday (and even Tuesday morning) are still depopulated. I notice not so many cars waiting impatiently for me to get out of the crosswalk. I think the Pacific Coast Highway is still closed, and the cars on California Street were generally coming up from there—many of them from what is now the charred Pacific Palisades. I am afraid to look at those places—not that anyone is allowed in yet. I don’t really want to see the ruins of Altadena at first hand. It’s an unbearable thought. Last year a friendly realtor invited me to sit in a cafe in Altadena so she could introduce me to the charms of the neighborhood, since I was thinking about moving. It really was charming, and I could imagine living there although in the end I stayed put.

And last week—maybe as early as Wednesday—I saw a photo of the very cafe where we had met, just a ruin of charred timbers now. The whole block gone.

That photo was enough. I don’t really want to look any closer yet. Although I have been known to write horror, I am not that morbid.

The smoke squatted heavily on downtown Santa Monica at times. Came over from the mountains and sat here, while other parts of the city were weirdly clear. I went to Orange County on Thursday night and visited family and stayed in a hotel. It seemed an infinity away from the fires. It’s always like that judging from other disasters I’ve experienced. As soon as you get outside the epicenter, no one really has any idea of what the people inside it are going through. And the news lets go of it right away, fresher headlines dominate, and soon people outside the zone are surprised to hear that things are still not back to normal inside it. That all might be a bit different this time, because this is Los Angeles, which is brimming with publicists and pretty good about holding a spotlight. When my neighborhood on Kauai was cut off by landslides in 2018, we were basically trapped there for 14 months. Even other residents of the island didn’t seem to realize what was going on in our area…we might as well have been on a different island completely. When the covid pandemic hit, it was almost refreshing that you didn’t have to explain your bizarre situation to almost everyone else, because everyone was in it. We all got it.

Los Angeles has a huge population that gets it, and talks to itself, and talks about itself to the rest of the world. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that conversation continues.

Yesterday I went to volunteer at a local equine center which has been serving as a shelter for horses and other animals that had to be evacuated from threatened (and, now, destroyed) properties. There were so many volunteers that I had almost nothing individually to do. I’ve heard that many of the volunteer agencies are now turning people away, so many have come out to pitch in. I picked the horse place because I have owned horses and figured I’d be comfortable enough to do things that not all willing volunteers were up for—such as forking up horse shit. I’m planning to go back tomorrow in hopes of being a little more helpful.

And speaking of horses…I kind of miss hanging out with those big dummies.

And also speaking of horses, there’s one in this kinda amazing music video that Kali Fontecchio created to go with my song, “New Now.” We just posted this on YouTube this evening.

This is the second single from After the Pulse, and the first actual music video I’ve put out that I didn’t just cobble together with random clips and iMovie filters. I met Kali last year after being a fan of her music for a couple years, and asked if she wanted to pick a song from the album and do a full animated video. Look what she made! Just look at it!

The actual track comes out on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Tidal and all the rest starting on January 21st, but we put out the video a little early and, along with that, opened the floodgates for digital presales of the full album on Bandcamp.

The album comes out on February 7th, with a listening party the evening before.

So…it’s a weird time to be talking about this. But it’s a weird time in general.

A “new now” one might even say.