Special Episode Part 4 Los Angeles Fires: What Is A Catastrophe?
17:29 Share

Hi, everyone. It's Megan. This is my latest audio essay about the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires. As most of you know, I was living in Altadena when my house was lost on January 8th.

Anyway, today is February 13th. I finally have my voice mostly back after a solid week, at least, of laryngitis, like complete laryngitis. I could not talk at all. And at least two weeks of a terrible cold that seems to be going around.

Last week, because I couldn't talk, I broke down and posted a written essay, the horror. I actually had to write something instead of an audio essay, but I'm glad to be talking with you again.

As it happens, it is my birthday. And while I have never been a big birthday celebrator, I have to admit it feels a little extra uncelebratory today. Haha, fooled you. You thought I was going to say it feels extra celebratory because I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful for what I have. I am. I am. I am grateful, actually, you know, to be alive and healthy and getting to this age. You

it's better than the alternative, right? That's a cliche, but I guess people say for a reason. Anyway, I'm grateful to have a roof over my head, even if I've been shuffling between rooms. And again, I'm really thankful for the incredible generosity of so many of my friends and so many of you guys, my listeners and readers, even those of you who are complete strangers. But I can say that I

I've hit a bit of a wall lately because of all the different places I've stayed. My mail and my packages are all over the place, and I feel like I do nothing but drive around retrieving things from various addresses.

I have some leads on more permanent housing, but it's often the kind of thing where it seems like a pretty good situation, but it won't be available for six weeks or so. And I'd have to commit to it right away before someone else does. And in the meantime, what if something else comes up? And also in the meantime, what am I going to do?

Since I'm just one person, albeit with a pony-sized dog, it is easier for me than it is for a lot of people. For instance, families with kids in school, elderly relatives, that sort of thing. At the same time, I am just one person. I have the resources of one person, one self-employed person, and the strength of one person.

So anyway, it's all okay. I've got a roof over my head in the near term, which is great because today it is pouring rain. And that is great because this is Southern California and we always need rain. Anyway, what do I want to talk about today? Well, for starters, I had a piece in the New York Times on January 31st, an essay in the opinion section. It was about learning how to accept help and

And it was actually the editor's idea. I am, or I have been so bad at accepting help throughout my life that this subject would probably never have occurred to me on my own. In the piece, I talk about how my parents were so adamant about us not asking for help for anything that they thought trick-or-treating was tantamount to begging. Like, you don't ask for help, you don't ask for favors, you don't ask for anything. So...

really kind of did a number on us. But I'm glad I was pushed to write this piece because it forced me to really think about how a crisis, especially a spectacular sort of natural disaster like this, is kind of a ring of concentric circles.

And the people in the bullseye, the people directly affected, we might have it the hardest, technically speaking, but we also have it the simplest, at least emotionally. Like the loss is spelled out right in front of you. Not that the emotions aren't also complex, but they're fairly straightforward compared to someone who's adjacent to the crisis.

One thing I've noticed with these fires is that the people in the disaster area whose houses did not burn down are sometimes struggling the most. There's a lot of survivor's guilt, even among people who are still totally displaced, living in hotels or God knows where, because their houses, even though they're still standing, may not be safe to return to for a very long time.

And, you know, as I wrote in the piece, their grief can seem almost deeper in a way, sort of more existential. So, you know, those of us who lost our homes for a long time, you know, we were really cushioned by the shock of it. So others that did not have that kind of shock were sort of left staring into a different kind of abyss, you know, without all those distractions like in

insurance claims and just kind of cobbling things together. Those people were really forced to take a step back and survey the full catastrophe. So I've got an interesting little irony that I've been operating in lately, something I did not discuss in the New York Times, but I'm going to talk about a little bit now. And that is that I have a book coming out soon in a few months with catastrophe in the title. The book is called The Catastrophe Hour. It is not about these fires.

That would be pretty impressive if I could write an entire book about this and have it come out three months after the inciting incident. It's a collection of essays.

that have mostly been published someplace or the other over the last several years. Often they were behind paywalls, so they'll be new to a lot of people. But the book also contains three brand new, never-before-seen essays. And the title piece, The Catastrophe Hour, is one of those pieces, brand new pieces. And it is literally about the opposite of your house burning down in Los Angeles.

That piece is about trying for seven years to build a house in Los Angeles and running into so much red tape and fights with the zoning commission and all the other predictable stuff. And then COVID coming along and the price of lumber going to the stratosphere and getting to the point of having approved plans and permaculture.

permits ready to pull, but having to give up the whole thing because the price of building the house had more than doubled since the start of the project. I'm talking about myself trying to build a house. This is not a hypothetical situation. I know that sounds completely crazy that I would do such a thing, but I had my reasons and

This was not a fancy house, not going to be a fancy house. It was basically a big barn, not even a big barn, medium barn, small to medium barn, albeit on a hillside, you know, as barns are apt to be. And for reasons that maybe I'll talk to you about another time, I just thought this was a great idea. I, you know, the real estate market was such that

I did not want to get into a bidding war situation. I felt like it was impossible to buy anything unless you had all cash. And it really wasn't so crazy at the time. I thought that if I just bought a piece of land and worked with an architect friend and developed a very simple house, that this would be economically feasible. Yeah.

Needless to say, I had no business building this house. I'm a simple essayist. I'm an author. I am not a real estate developer. But you got to believe me when I say that I really, really wanted to. I love houses. I love real estate. I wrote a whole book called Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.

The idea of building a house before I die, it made me less afraid of death. And this essay, The Catastrophe Hour, also talks a lot about death. Actually, many of the essays in this book talk a lot about death. But this essay in particular, it talks about the kind of room I picture myself in at my moment of death, the angle of the light, the grain of the floorboards,

So at the time, giving up on this real estate project, I mean, I sold the whole thing, the plans, the permits, everything. I sold it about a year ago at a fairly significant loss financially. Anyway, that experience...

felt like a catastrophe. Giving up this project felt like an existential catastrophe, sort of layered on top of the broader catastrophe of aging, of living in this particular political and cultural moment. So I'm going to read you a little bit from the opening of the book.

This is not the Catastrophe Hour essay itself, but it is the introduction to the book. This is the opening. This is the first paragraph of the book. Here we go. For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I've been overcome by the feeling that my life is effectively over.

This is not a sense that the world is ending, which has been in vogue for quite some time now, and maybe for good reason. It's a personal foreboding, a distinct feeling of being at the end of my days.

My time, while technically not up, is disappearing in the rearview mirror. The fact that this feeling of ambient doom tends to coincide with the blue-tinged, pre-gloaming light of the late afternoon lends the whole thing a cosmic beauty as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. As such, I have dubbed this the Catastrophe Hour.

Okay, so I'm skipping to the end of the introduction now. Okay, the best known invocation of the word catastrophe might come from Zorba the Greek, the 1946 novel made into the 1964 film starring Anthony Quinn. Asked by a stranger...

if he's a married man, the exuberant, perennially exasperated protagonist replies, yes, I'm married, wife, children, house, the full catastrophe. That last phrase proved resonant enough to become the title of a novel and at least one self-help book, not to mention a John Cougar Mellencamp song.

But say you have no wife or are not a wife yourself. Say you have neither children nor a house. Is that a double catastrophe or a tragic absence of catastrophe? Is it obscene to claim catastrophe for private use? This is a word that describes wars and devastating floods and fires. Are the vicissitudes of any given life worthy of such, well, catastrophizing?

These essays are an attempt to answer or at least entertain that question. Okay, so this is me talking again. So this book is not about my house burning down, but that is where it gets a little weird. Okay, I am now going to read you just a little bit from the title essay itself. So this is the title essay, The Catastrophe Hour. I'm just going to pick up in the middle of it. It's a pretty long essay. This is kind of crazy. Okay, ready? Here we go.

I want to throw out about 90% of my possessions. The house I rent is in a little town on the outskirts of Los Angeles, about eight miles from the urban canyon where my undeveloped land sits.

Since receiving the dust-caked contents of the storage locker I emptied out nearly two years ago, it's only gotten more disorderly. Books lie flat on their sides in piles. Cooking utensils, pet supplies, and stacks of mail spill off the kitchen counters. Every time I take a trip out of town, I imagine what would happen to everything if I never came back. What if my plane crashes or I'm killed on the freeway on the way to the airport?

What are people going to do with the contents of my filing cabinets, the boxes of draft manuscripts for books that are both published and not published, the clothes worn and unworn? What will become of the stuff from my parents' cleanouts, the stuff I only kept because throwing it away felt wrong, family photos, my grandmother's jewelry, Christmas stockings, the Lennox wedding china my mother considered too nice to ever actually use?

It will be discarded by someone else. In the end, it hardly matters what you keep and don't keep. Every time you decide to hold on to something, you're mostly just kicking the can down the road. You're deciding to throw it away later or leave it for someone else to throw away or take to the goodwill where chances are a third party will throw it away. Lately, I can't open my dresser drawers or my medicine cabinet without imagining someone rifling through them because I have died.

It's a mortification just to contemplate. It's also a kind of marvel. A living organism can cease to exist in a thousand different ways, but inanimate objects live forever. In the blink of an eye, the contents of my bathroom alone could become a museum, a bottle of expired antibiotics, a travel case I bought 10 years ago and used once, the tweezers in my medicine cabinet. They could easily outlive me.

If I die in a car accident tomorrow, the bath towel I use today will be hanging where I left it. Life loses value over time. The older we get, the less tragic our deaths. Almost everything in our midst loses value. Food spoils. Materials break down. World records are beaten. Inflation sends the dollar to the cheap seats. Technology lives on the cliff's edge of obsolescence.

The world is held together by a web of disposable objects. The only thing that reliably holds its value is the land on which it sits. Even when humans ravage it, often because humans ravage it, land never forgets its worth. It levels up even as it erodes. In California, land almost ages in reverse.

Okay, ready for this? They say the only thing that would cool the housing market in LA is a catastrophe, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or fires that rolled down from the canyons en masse and engulfed the city streets. But I wasn't sure I believed that anymore. The pandemic was a catastrophe that drove up real estate everywhere, especially the kind of real estate that comes with yards and trees.

That's why the sleepy mountainside enclave in which I now paid rent had even higher home prices than the urban hipster neighborhoods I once inhabited. Not that I could afford to go back to those either. I am stuck in a catastrophe of my own making. Wow, what a drama queen. If only I had known. I don't know what I'm going to call the next book. The Catastrophe Year? The Year of Catastrophic Thinking?

Careful what you wish for, I guess. Anyway, I'm still digesting what all of this means, if anything. I can tell you that I wrote that essay at least a year ago. Probably, I don't know, probably a year ago, eight months to a year ago.

Anyway, I will keep doing these little audio dispatches for as long as you seem to be enjoying them. If there's anything you would like me to talk about in particular, please let me know in the comments. For those of you who have asked how to help me, I will sheepishly say there is a tip jar link at the top of the Substack page.

And it also includes links to donation sites in the Altadena area that I think are worthy of our help, including help for animals, pets, and wildlife in the area.

I will link to my New York Times piece on the sub stack, as well as where you can order The Catastrophe Hour, pre-order it. It's coming out on April 15th from a small independent publisher in the UK called Notting Hill Press. It's distributed by New York Review of Books Press. These are lovely small presses, independent presses. In other words, I don't really make any money unless you actually buy the book. So it would be great if you did.

Oh, also the regular podcast is back. I had some interviews in the cam that I had recorded in late December and early January. I'm still trying to piece together my podcasting equipment because I don't really have one place to stay because I'm floating around. I'm sort of putting off getting some real equipment, but I'm going to start recording new episodes soon.

If you are a paying subscriber, you will hear the whole thing of the episodes I'm releasing over the next couple of weeks. There's one with Chloe Valdry this week. Next week, there's going to be an interview with Andy Mills, sort of a podcasting legend and really interesting person. If you are a paying subscriber, you will hear the whole thing. If you are not, you will hear a portion, and then you're going to want to become a paying subscriber as

And if you are new to the podcast because you've discovered me because of the fires, welcome. I'm going to have stuff for you. I think we'll probably even have a hangout for paying subscribers very soon. Anyway, thank you for listening on this birthday, rainy day, 37 days after the fire dispatch. It feels like a year. Happy Valentine's Day tomorrow for all who celebrate. And I will see you next time.