Hands in the earth

Hands in the earth.

Feeling for healing, what my homeland must be reeling from. Giving some TLC to some stressed outside and inside plants. I drove home from the desert into an ominous brown cloud of smoke from the wildfires hanging over my hometown here in SoCal. The sky looks clear. The Air Quality Index says it’s safe, but there’s no telling what else might be in the air.

All of this was so bad. I don’t think I can add more than what has already been said, seen, shown…lost. I personally know of three families who lost everything in a single night. I knew, as the Palisades fire broke out while the wind forecast looked incredibly dire, that it was going to be a long and horrible night.

That will forever be known as the day LA burned. Like so many, my heart broke as I could only watch from afar. I could only check the Watch Duty app over and over again, post and send resources on social media. Since I live in a fire-prone area, I’ve been through this so many times myself. So I did everything I could to tell friends what I know from experience. To anticipate the evacuation orders. To be ready. To help those who need the most help as much as you can. I got maybe three hours of sleep that night.

What was no help at all was the barrage of misinformation coming not just from strangers online, but from people I know. One so-called friend who insisted this was the best time to rain down f-bombs and critiques of politicians at me, along with some bizarre rants and misinformation. This was echoing much of the lack of empathy people were seeing online, as if Angelenos somehow deserved this. No one deserved this.

Being from here and having lived through many fires, I can sense some of what is coming. The winds will persist, hopefully not causing any more catastrophe. The containment lines will hopefully hold. The fires will still burn, though much of LA will move on towards business as usual. It will take years for people to rebuild. We will hopefully get one good rain, but then comes the danger of landslides.

So many here need healing. But I have been seeing just how much this giant, sprawling city that’s more than one city has come together. People have opened their homes at a moment’s notice. People have opened their pantries, their hearts, their wallets to help. Donation centers are overrun with supplies. And still people want to help.

This is the real LA. The rest of the country labels us as a town of fakes and phonies, but this is who we really are. It is no shock to me just how much people have come together. There is still so much to do.

Hands in the earth. Feet on the ground.

Part of the cityscape

I’m spending the week housesitting in LA. After many years in the burbs, being back in the mix feels a bit like whiplash. It’s not like I’m never here. I grew up in SoCal, grew up in an around the TV industry. When I was 12, I took my first solo train ride on the Metrolink to Union Station in Downtown LA (I was meeting my stepdad, and parents allowed their kids to do stuff like that back then). And I lived in West Hollywood for several years. I’m always working events in and around this vast urban sprawl. And yet…LA feels rougher now. While driving in LA has always been an exercise in chaos, drivers now seem to be at least 20 percent worse. Running a few basic errands means navigating a maze of reckless or absent-minded drivers, parking in an overcrowded lot, then having to flag down store employees to retrieve basic items encased behind plexiglass. City-dwellers seemed to have never recovered a sense of spacial awareness. And there’s definitely a new crop of showbiz hopefuls, younger and having come of age during pandemic lockdowns. All while the entertainment industry is still reeling from two major strikes.

And we’re hosting the Olympics soon…

My Photos app brought up a collage of different cityscapes I’ve shot of LA over the years. From Griffith Observatory, Runyon Canyon, the Hollywood Hills. Some are smoggy and sun-soaked. Some are a glittery nighttime urban landscape. They all remind me of the millions of dreamers dreaming hard in those cramped streets and apartments. I’ve dreamed just as hard as all of them, and some of my dreams definitely needed more time to cook. And spend any amount of time here and you’ll see just how many broken dreams there are. Disappointments, rejections, many horror stories of people who now find they have nowhere else to go, much less dream of. There is a lot of a magic here, but there is also a lot of need.

I had another blog post I was going to publish. A despite knowing that very few people actually read these, I decided it was maybe a bit too cynical. Who knows, maybe I’ll post it eventually. But the gist of it was about the many people come here and eventually leave with those broken dreams. They return to wherever they left from, and offer one maxim to anyone who asks: “LA is garbage.”

Okay, sure. LA is garbage. It’s garbage to people who came here expecting everyone who was already here to make their dreams of fame, stardom, and wealth come true. LA is garbage if you only associates with fellow social climbers, star f***ers, and sleazebags trying to take advantage of you. LA is garbage if you never seeks to learn about the culture, climate, and history that was here long before you arrived. Not many people ask, but if someone were to ask me how they should go about moving to LA, my advice is often simply: Don’t move here. Seek out a medium-sized city where you can gain experience, training, social media followers before you even consider moving here. I’m one of the lucky ones in that my family and my entire support system is already here. But if you come here with nothing but a suitcase and dream, you’re just another car on the 405. And is that how you want to spend your youth?

Fine, it’s frustrating here. As my brother likes to put it, it’s the best place to live and the worst place to live. It seems always to be the best of times and the worst of times. Billionaires and the unhoused with literal TVs playing inside their roadside tents. Hellish heat and biblical level rain storms. “Free”ways that are no longer free. It sometimes takes some squinting to see what makes Los Angeles so great. Again, I’m one of the lucky ones who gets to see it when LA really gets it right. I saw my late stepdad work harder than anyone else in the television industry and be able to rise to about as far as one could go. I’m becoming a lot more like him, knowing these freeways and off-ramps like a map on my hand. Enmeshing myself across this town, and becoming part of the landscape like he did. Part of the cityscape.