The temperature in Los Angeles has started dropping and it finally got cold enough the night before last that the A/C never kicked on which means…

Hell yeah! So, last night, I grabbed my lighter, relit the hearth pilot light and then me and the kitties had a nice snuggle in front of our gas fireplace (which has all the ambiance of a fake log in front of toppled propane grill but hey, warm.)

Sadly, since it’s a gas fireplace, it doesn’t have that wonderful campfire smell one associates with fireplaces so, last winter, I bought some wood-scented incense to make the whole experience a bit more authentic and they do a pretty good job.

Anyway, this morning, I awoke to find the living room actually smelled like a fireplace! Which was odd because I hadn’t used the incense the night before. “Aww,” I thought, “everyone in the neighborhood must’ve used their real fireplaces last night! Who says LA can’t have a proper Christmas?”

Then I opened the blinds to find, towering over our place, a gigantic pillar of smoke coming from just northeast of us.

Oh, well THAT explains the smell. A massive brush fire.

No, not the 50,000 acre one. I know that started last night but that’s over in Ventura county.

The Rye Fire in Santa Clarita? Close, but no cigar. (Or anything else flammable, for the love of god!)

The Creek Fire near Sylmar? Yep, that’s the one!

The column of smoke looked like somebody was growing a thunderstorm. The pieces of ash – burnt remains of trees and homes – floated through the air like snowflakes, coated our pool like ice and made tiny piles on our patio furniture and hummingbird feeder.

Despite the horror of it all, it almost felt… festive.

So, c’mon kids! Santa (Ana) is on his way! Grab your stockings and let’s go hang them on the chimney!

Because, really, that’s all we’ve got left…

 

I had a weird thought this morning.

As I was stuck in traffic on my way to work – my mind still processing all the news I shared with you yesterday as well as trying to determine what the hell is wrong with the people in the surrounding cars (Just. MERGE.) – I caught a glimpse of my teeth in the rearview mirror. I’d been mouthing along to a song on the radio and I noticed that my top teeth were tapping my bottom teeth in perfect alignment.

“Would you look at that,” I thought. “My teeth are straight. Neat.”

I felt some pride for having nice teeth again and then, almost as an afterthought, I pitied those who didn’t have straight teeth and their sad, inferior genes.

Whoa, wait… WHAT?? Where did THAT come from?

I immediately felt ashamed for thinking such a negative thought and attributed it to several things: an early morning, a lack of sleep, no recovery time, an overabundance of bad news, a recent lovers’ quarrel, this d-bag in the Lexus (OH MY GOD, MERGE ALREADY).

The thing is, my teeth aren’t straight because I’m genetically superior. Far from it. Were I genetically superior, I wouldn’t have needed my wisdom teeth pulled. Seems pretty inferior to me to end up growing more teeth than I’ve got jaw real estate for. And even after getting those 2 teeth removed, the rest STILL ended up being crooked.

No, my teeth were straight because, as a child, my parents could afford to get me braces. They were straight for a long time. Then, around 6 or 7 years ago, they stopped being entirely straight. Through no fault of my own, my face continued to grow and change and my teeth just shifted along with it.

My teeth are now back to being straight because, this past year, I was finally in a position to afford getting Invisalign. I don’t want to discount the effort I put into saving for the procedure or my diligence in wearing the trays everyday but I could only do the “hard work” because I could afford to do it. Does having straighter teeth make me a better person? No. More confident, maybe, but not a better person. And was I bad person when my teeth weren’t straight? Of course not. So why would I think that of other people now?

The reason I’m writing about all this is because I’m starting to wonder if evolution has wired the brain in a way that, if enough things change, it resets to a new normal and then pretends that it was always that way. And perhaps, when that happens, the brain instinctively reclassifies people who were once equals as being “lesser” because they haven’t achieved what you have (regardless of how you achieved it or whether or not you’ve earned it).

Recently I’ve heard people with advantages being described as having been “born on third base”. So, using that analogy, when that person reaches home plate, maybe it’s natural for him to feel superior, to look down on those who haven’t done the same.

If you’ve accomplished something and you have similar thoughts but then you feel bad for having them and you feel empathy for those who didn’t have your advantages and that makes you want to help others run the bases, that makes you a good person.

But, if once you’ve made it home, your goal is to prevent the “inferior” others from even getting a chance play the game, well, that makes you a bad person.

And it probably means you work in governement right now.

Naturally, on the very same day that I shared that “in the immediate circle of my life, things are good”, the Universe decided to remind me who is in charge.

Just a few hours after yesterday’s post, I discovered that a coworker had died (yet nobody seems to know why) and that somebody very dear to me has apparently transitioned from “comically forgetful pothead” to “prepping for a role in Trainspotting”. Terrifying.

As if all that wasn’t enough, I had the joy of trying to process the above during a special event at work which went on far past when I like to be asleep and was full of ungrateful and increasingly drunk people. It was a rough evening followed by an even worse night of restless sleep as my brain tried to outdo itself with each successive nightmare.

And, thanks to frayed nerves and exhaustion, today didn’t go well either and is ending on a real sour note. (But hey, blogging.)

This thing with my dearest pothead – let’s call him “Trey” cause, you know, Phish – has really got me upset. A friend of Trey’s had contacted me out of the blue to drop the bombshell that our lovable stoner scamp has graduated to stronger and stronger drugs and to see if there was anything I could do about it.

But what TO do? I don’t live near Trey. If we talked about it, what do I say? I don’t even know if he’d listen, much less admit it (much, much less want to fix it). Should I get his parents involved? Will this save him or will it only make things worse? And what will it do to the parents? What actions make me the good friend and what actions make the bad friend? What if I can’t tell the difference?

I’ve spent the last year really working on accepting the things that I can’t change and then having the discipline to fix the things I can. I want to fix this – his life may depend upon it – but what if this is something I CAN’T change but don’t know it yet?

And even if I’m capable saving him, what do I do?

Where do I even start?