The Fires Next Time
We're ALL going to die. But before then? Let's lose EVERYTHING that could have possibly made life worth living. A feelgood story.
“They have no idea how thin that Thin Blue line is,” says a former cop while he held up his hand, palm facing out. The hand now vibrating slowly, a tenuous bulwark against chaos and collapse? In his mind, yes.
“If I plant a bomb on San Antonio Avenue, then another on California Avenue and one more on Santa Cruz Avenue,” he wound up. “There’s no way the local police could handle even just that.” Of course in an unexpected MAGA world pivot he then blames this on DEI (yeah…I don’t know either and will spare us all trying to figure it out here) but the point remains: all of this shit we call civilization is hanging by the finest of threads.
But “all” is a large scale and one that you don’t have a true sense of until you wake up to a morning when/where the sun is blotted out by the angry orange of something you had only read about the night before. Northern Californian fires, viewable from outer space as they had been when they hit a few years ago, were still nothing like what’s hitting Los Angeles now.
And still the eerie quiet and the unusual placement of a darkness during the day time resonates. Added, as it is, on the total loss of a vantage point from which to absorb it all. This is the wavering palm moment when between pleas to evacuate, entire homes and homesteads were absorbed by conflagrations that, according to preliminary findings, were caused by high winds and downed power lines.
[PG&E], the state’s power provider, [and] the likeliest causal connection to it all, has sent around a perfectly enraging corporate plea for understanding wherein they claim that they will endeavor to do “better.”
Either that or the kind of “lightning” that’s causing insurance companies to want to stop underwriting policies in California for fire. That is, the insurance company bête noire, insurance fraudsters sitting at the nexus of opportunity and happenstance.
Regardless of who, which or what it is, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the state’s power provider, the likeliest causal connection to it all, has sent around a perfectly enraging corporate plea for understanding wherein they claim that they will endeavor to do “better.” Though it’s not been made clear — “better” than what? — because once you’ve been responsible for the over 8,000 fires in the last two years, it gets hard to imagine what a better here would look like.
It gets even harder to imagine what this better must be in the midst of a complete breakdown of the old laws that bound us to a consensus reality that everything was fine. Orange skies? Not fine. Grocers standing on the top of their grocery stores with rifles? Not fine. Cars careening into crowds? Not fine. Kids getting killed by kids with guns in significant numbers? Not fucking fine at all.
None of what it is that we’ve experienced in the last few decades has been any kind of fine. Things, in fact, have been so un-fine that a guess could be hazarded that we wouldn’t know fine at this point if it kidnapped us at gunpoint and waterboarded us.
Hunh…wait, what?!?!
Exactly. We’re knee (or knuckle if you’re an optimist) deep in shit that’s so crucial that it’s a wonder many/any of us can manage to even fake it.
The late philosopher René Girard posited that periodically we’d find ourselves in the midst of a sacrificial crisis, a point at which sacrifice not only fails to reconsolidate social peace but requires, at the outset, a target whose death and suffering is socially approved and is capable of restoring normalcy to our daily doings.
“We channel our aggressions away from internal divisions,” Girard said in an interview with Scott A. Walter in The Birth of Tragedy Magazine’s themed Power Issue, “and toward an external target.” Increasingly it seems we, and all of what we’ve wrought, are those external targets. And if that’s not exactly the case, well you could have fooled us since every hidden aspect of modern living seems to be predicated on our barely (in)visible desire for negation.
It’s kind of like getting hit by a train. Trains are not free range conveniences. People don’t get hit by trains in swimming pools, or classrooms, or on sidewalks. I could be wrong [though]…
The very real fires presently burning all of whatever had constituted Los Angeles, while not totally preventable, are not mysterious apparitions whose cause (and consequent cure) we can only guess at. And even if they are, their placement is no mystery.
It’s kind of like getting hit by a train. Trains are not free range conveniences. People don’t get hit by trains in swimming pools, or classrooms, or on sidewalks. I could be wrong, but as far as I know, most of the people hit, and subsequently killed, by trains had found themselves on train tracks. And we, now, are on those tracks.
So as comforting as the illusion of cohesion might be, and it’s certainly useful for getting us from moments that are not destructive to other moments that are not destructive, everything from the aforementioned thin blue line to the imminent collapse of all that surrounds it, leaves us on a delicate island of dreams.
Which is why it was so refreshing in this time of widespread despair and misery to hear from antisemite Mel Gibson. Not to be accused of not having a dog in this hunt Gibson, in the middle of an interview on the Joe Rogan show, said of his $14 million Malibu beach house (I don’t know if it’s actually a beach house but on account of the connection to Barbie, the doll not Klaus, let’s pretend so) “I’ve been relieved from the burden of my stuff because it’s all in cinders.”
Curiously, a fairly wise take on the transitory nature of matter. And from Gibson no less who then goes on to ruin everything by politicizing it and blaming it on Governor Newsom’s hair gel. But the first part is wisdom and just the briefest of intimations of what we all have waiting for us at the conclusion of the only party in town, this life, and its measures on the other side of the lines, blue or otherwise: nothing.
This is life’s final offer. And life would appreciate us paying for it now.
So if you’ve lost everything, by way of hearth and home, please accept our condolences, for this…and future events as yet unknown. They will come. Yes, they will. And ignoring them (or trying to), like I used to say when I was in the collections business, will not make them go away.
Sad but aggressively true. Godspeed you California, Godspeed.
And for an extremely limited time only…the last THREE Old Man Jiu Jitsu rashguards. They are XLs. After we sold all of the S’s, Serao found the XLs, so sorry for last weeks bit of misinformation. The price is $80. First come, first serve basis. Pay below if you are so inclined.
For WHATEVER reason, and we’re guessing at NOTHING here, PARIS is not forthcoming show-wise. So to prevent the inevitable post-facto queries regarding why we haven’t played Paris this year we’re letting it be known: there are at present NO SHOWS IN PARIS for APRIL. If you are French and this bothers you at all? Please feel free to email this man: Corrado Massari, corrado@sonicarts.net from www.sonicarts.net, Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, Weydingerstraße 14-16, 10178 Berlin
