Special Ep Part 2 Los Angeles Fires: The Immaterial World
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Hey, it's Megan. I am recording this on Wednesday, January 15th. As many of you know, exactly a week ago, I spoke with you about the fires here in Los Angeles.

I lost my house in Altadena, along with thousands of other people throughout the Los Angeles area. I don't know if there's an official tally yet about homes lost. According to what I'm reading, the number of structures destroyed is about 12,000. Most of those are homes. I know that 25 people have died so far. I'm sure that number will go up.

Altadena, as I mentioned last time, is a rustic, unincorporated community north of Pasadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The population is around 42,000. In my last dispatch, I described Altadena in some detail. I talked about the people and the wildlife and just who lives here. So if you're interested in any of that, I suggest you go back and listen to that one first if you haven't already.

Anyway, since that dispatch, I have received such an outpouring of support that I'm just overwhelmed. It's been really incredible. And I wanted to do another message sooner, but the last seven days have been this just avalanche of tasks. I did not realize how much I relied on things being delivered to my door until I literally did not have a door.

For instance, I spent much of the last two days trying to track down medication.

I get it delivered in three months' supply from mail-order pharmacy. And of course, it was all delivered last week, a few days before the fire. And so as a result, the actual pharmacy no longer had current prescriptions on file. And when I finally got the doctor to call in new prescriptions, the insurance wouldn't pay for them because they had already paid for the last supply. The same thing is happening with my dog's medication and also his food.

which was delivered in bulk the day before the fires. Anyway, this is a hassle, but not an enormous deal. I'm not going to die without this medication, at least not immediately. My dog can eat other food, although it makes him kind of sick.

But this brings me back to the ways in which I realized that I'm just very lucky amid this whole thing. I'm just one person living solo in the world. I don't have small children or elderly parents. I'm healthy and I live perfectly.

pretty lightly despite having a dog that weighs more than I do. But I want to tell you what it was like the other day when I went up to the site of my house. And I don't know how to say this in anything but a cliche, but I've never seen anything like it.

With the exception of a few houses here and there, which are somehow still standing, the entire neighborhood is burned to the ground. Many of the houses were older, which means they had wood-burning fireplaces and chimneys. You can't have those in new construction anymore. Those are only in older houses. So when you drive around the neighborhood, the only things standing are chimneys.

It's just ash and rubble and chimney after chimney. Like you just drive around the neighborhoods and it's chimney, chimney, chimney, chimney. It's like that.

There are a lot of burned cars, and you can also see the charred remains of appliances, particularly washers and dryers. I saw a lot of those. Interestingly, kitchen appliances seem to have melted all the way down. In my house, even the bathtub kind of caved in on itself. But the washer and dryer and also the air conditioning unit was standing. It's blackened, but it was standing. Everything else is ashes.

every piece of furniture, kitchen stuff, bedding, all of my clothes, shoes, all of my books, old computers that I had stored away on high shelves, all the stuff I acquired over the years as my mother died and then later my father died.

For various reasons, a lot of the kinds of things that end up in your parents' attic sort of wound up in my possession, even though I didn't have a very big house. I was a fairly serious oboist in my youth, and my fairly serious oboe, which I hadn't played for a long time, but I held on to thinking I might get it refurbished someday, was

is now among those ashes. I had a lot of artwork that I really deeply valued, including a painting done by a friend who's a serious artist that I purchased 20 years ago when I bought my first house in LA. That was a 700 square foot house. That is gone. That painting would have risen significantly in value since then. But even if it had not, this would probably count as my most devastating loss.

The artist has probably lost several paintings in the homes of collectors all over the area. And I know she and her husband spent much of the last week evacuating paintings from various houses that were in danger. Maybe I'll explore that more in a future episode. For now, though...

I can say that when I play back the tape of my evacuation, and it feels strange to use that word to describe something that at the time felt like a precaution. Like I said before, I felt like I was being dramatic, as if it were an insult to all those people whose houses were really burning down. But when I think about that, there is a moment that stays in my mind and that on some level is at the heart of all this loss, all this material loss anyway.

As I was contemplating what to take with me in this non-evacuation evacuation, I was looking around my house and suddenly just frozen.

I packed what I needed for the night. I packed some dog food and an extra pair of pants for myself and an extra sweater and my toothbrush and my hairbrush. I had a partially eaten takeout, like, Poke Bowl in the refrigerator that I had planned on finishing for dinner. So I grabbed that plus a flashlight. And then I looked around my house, and I just drew a blank.

I looked at the books on the shelves, the sheets and the blankets on the bed, thought about the dishes and the cabinets, even the clothes in my closet. And I had a thought that I'm almost embarrassed to say out loud. I am embarrassed, not almost embarrassed, but I'll say it anyway. I had the thought that there was almost nothing in here that I couldn't order on Amazon tomorrow.

Most of it I did order on Amazon, or at least from some online retailer somewhere, including the dishes in the cabinet, the sheets, the towels, the clothes, the books.

And it just went on from there. My checkbook could be reordered from the bank. My passport, wherever that was, could be reissued by the passport office. The title to my car was surely on file somewhere in the central office of vehicle ownership or something.

Because I spend a lot of time thinking about my own death, as some of my readers know, my will and advanced healthcare directive were in clearly marked plastic folders in the back of my closet. So I did take those. And along the way, I grabbed a pair of pointy shoes that I happened to know had been discontinued by the designer. I knew this because I had recently gone online to see if I could buy a pair in a different color.

So I took those and I also took a handbag that a friend had made for me. I considered grabbing a beloved wool cable knit sweater that I was pretty sure couldn't be replaced, but it had just been cleaned and it was in the dry cleaner bag on a hanger and it seemed too cumbersome to carry into the car. I would like to think that if I had thought there was any sort of serious chance of the house burning down, I would have done things very differently.

Notably, I would have lifted that cherished painting off the wall and carefully wrapped it up and put it in the car. But I probably still would have done a calculation. I would have thought that the chances of damaging the painting and the house not burning down were far greater than the chances of the house burning down and saving the painting, damaged or not. I really don't know. It makes me sick to think about it, so I try not to think about it.

even though I do nothing but think about it. I try not to think about the dozens of other things I would have saved if I had known that they were hours away from incinerating. You'd think it wouldn't be so hard not to think about this stuff since it had been easy enough to forget about them in my day-to-day existence. You know, it's funny, over the last several months, I had been waging an increasingly bitter war against clutter.

I've always taken pride in my home. Creating beauty in domestic spaces is a core personal value. I love real estate. I love houses. I published a book years ago called Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House. But over the years, over recent years especially, I had allowed far more disposable stuff through the door than I ever should have.

I allowed it through the door after it arrived in boxes left in front of the door. And I just sort of lived like this. If I had the thought of getting a new pillowcase or a new pair of sandals or new workout clothes or coffee mugs or cooking supplies or a knockoff French-style beveled glass mirror or 12 rolls of toilet paper, it was all just a click away.

And it didn't look cheap. I mean, it was cheap, but it was fine. It got the job done. But part of the reason it did the job, and I didn't realize this until recently, was that it was built on the foundation of non-cheap things. The signature pieces of clothing that you cannot get online. The antiques I'd been carrying around with me since before Amazon was even invented.

by which I mean real things, permanent things, things I had to go somewhere to pick out and then carry home with me, often in a way that was uncomfortable or required someone to help me lift it. Things given to me as gifts by a human being who knew I would love them, not things suggested to me by an algorithm who knew my habits, the real things that can't be replaced.

And they were there all along, but I could not see them because they were buried under layers of disposable things. And that is really messed up. It's really messed up that even a week after all this destruction, I'm still getting notices from UPS saying, your package has been delivered. Delivered to where? I have no idea.

I joked to someone, and maybe this is one of those too soon jokes, that throughout these neighborhoods of burned down houses, those blocks and blocks of chimneys and nothing else, the Amazon boxes are still going to pile up on what used to be the front stoops. They won't really, of course. They can't. But they're in the ether somewhere, floating around in some holding zone in some warehouse.

And the stuff in those boxes is only a notch more real than the checkbook I can order, I can reorder, or all the paperwork that I choose to believe is safely tucked away in the digital cloud. And of all the things I've been thinking in this last week, like where's my medicine, where's my mail, this is what I've been thinking about the most.

We Americans, we modern people, we affluent people, think of ourselves as materialists. That's the rap on us. We are living in a material world. But I have realized in the last seven days that we are living in a post-material world. We are immaterialists.

In our disembodied states, and that is something you've heard me talk about a lot on this podcast, we have forgotten that not everything can be stored on the cloud or ordered online or replaced overnight for an expedited shipping charge. Or at least I had forgotten. I shouldn't use the collective we, bad habit. And that is why my most valuable material possessions currently are a pair of pointy shoes and a handmade handbag.

I have not let that bag out of my sight, and I don't think I will be anytime soon. Anyway, that's it for now. I want to thank you all again for your messages of support. Many of you have offered financial help, which is really hard for me to accept, especially since I just really feel like my situation is not as bad as a lot of other people's, although it's

pretty bad. But I have been told to take help and maybe down the road I'll be talking about the complexities of that. The best thing you can do really is become a paying subscriber to this podcast on Substack. You can go to theunspeakablepodcast.com that will take you right there. Become a paying subscriber. If you don't see the button on the homepage there, just go to any post and there will be a subscribe button right in front of your line of vision.

I'm going to do more of these dispatches, and I'm going to release them for free, at least for the time being. But there's lots of other stuff on there, including my own writing for paying subscribers. I'm also going to keep releasing regular podcast episodes. The Unspeakable marches on. There's a relatively new one up on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts, the Unspeakable podcast on YouTube is where you go to watch

You know, see the YouTube version of these. The regular episodes are on video as well as audio, even though these little dispatches are going to be on audio. In the meantime, thank you again for your support, for sort of thinking alongside me as I navigate this situation. I hope you are safe wherever you are. I hope you're able to find some sense of grounding or even peace in the world you inhabit today.

And I will be back very soon. Thanks for listening.