Emergency Preparedness, Election Threats and Other Fun Pastimes

Nervous tension everywhere. Whee.

I spend a lot of time trying to be sure I am prepared for predictable catastrophes. I have an earthquake kit. I have a fire kit. Nevertheless, I still haven’t figured out how to cope with the tension of the coming election.

Okay, there is some overlap between my earthquake kit and my fire kit. Maybe they are sharing the same box of bandaids. But I have no idea how to be prepared for the end of democracy or an official Nazi fascist takeover.

I’ll admit I’m also not necessarily prepared for being home alone during a health crisis. Though I worry about that less because, from time to time, I see an article, like this one, about how a three year old Husky jumped in to save his owner’s life after he suffered a massive heart attack. As you may know, I live with varying amounts of dogs, depending on when you ask me. So I liked to believe they might just rise to the occasion. Though I believe it less since a few years ago, when I decided to test their heroic mettle by doing ‘a dramatic recreation.’

The end result was the following video, which is titled ‘Le Crise’ (because I spoke my dialog in French with English subtitles) the better to insure it got entry into The Cannes Film Festival . Unfortunately, it turns out that its length (one minute and 39 seconds) was too short to make it eligible for The Palme D’or. And if you can’t at least TRY for The Palme D’or, what is the point of even entering, right?

On the bright side, now YOU (my substack reader) can enjoy this great avante garde film in the comfort of wherever it is that you presently find yourself without having to pay any airfare to France or unnecessary hotel fees.

The reason I have been thinking about preparing for various emergencies is that it is the beginning of fire season in Los Angeles. That, combined with the terrifying threats shooting out of the mouth of the addle-brained, personality-disordered former 45th president about Hitler and “the enemies from within” have made the vibes around November 5 so chilling it feels like they should just merge Election Day with Halloween this year since it is now the scariest day of the year.

It’s unfortunate that our national election is always in November because November in Southern California (where I live) already had as many never wracking details as it can handle. For instance, every fall we suffer thru something called The Santa Ana winds, which sometimes clock in at between 40 and 100 miles an hour. They blow in from the desert and are ominously warmer than whatever in-progress weather was previously scheduled.

When I first moved here, I thought they were spooky but also a little romantic. That was mostly because of a Steely Dan song called ‘Babylon Sisters that has the repeating lyric in the chorus “Here come those Santa Ana winds again.” But whatever innately sexy charisma the Santa Ana’s seemed to possess quickly drained once I began to associate them with the spread of uncontrollable fires. Plus, as a bonus, their combination of heat and speed turns out to be creatively inspiring to mentally unstable people who are hoping to launch a career in equal opportunity field of arson. They guarantee maximum success for minimum effort.

Fall in L.A. is the most dangerous season, but any careful reading of history (any history, any time period, any country) quickly confirms that life on earth has always been centered around coping with impossible messes. After all, we live on a planet that is rotating in outer space. (And whoever’s idea that was needs to have their head examined.)

When I first moved to Malibu, the pattern was a fire every 10 years. But little by little, climate change made the distance between those hiatuses more bite-sized. In 2018 we had two ‘fire events’ in the space of a month. The one they called The Woolsey Fire featured the unbeatable combination of four days of 80 mph winds while 25 other fires were burning in nearby areas. It was also the first one where policemen drove up and down my street, yelling to the citizenry through megaphones that we all needed to leave.

By then, I was already a seasoned catastrophe veteran who lived with a cardboard box full of important papers and insurance information that I never bothered to unpack the last time I had to evacuate. (Author’s note: back in those days, insurance companies used to cover homes in California. Yes! They did and they didn’t complain!) I saw no reason to bother unpacking that box knowing I would probably just have to pack it all up again, So it was given a permanent home in the closet near the front door.

Since I moved out here, I have had to evacuate the premises three different times.

In 1996, when a fireman came to my door urging me to leave, I quickly loaded my car with the few cherished items that could be successfully flattened to fit underneath the 4 dogs (who you met in the above video) who were sitting upright in the back seat. I got behind the wheel, drowning in adrenaline and a distracting amount of fear, and we headed north on Pacific Coast Highway to no place in particular. But my emotional state was a mere foot note to the meteoric ecstasy all four of my dogs were experiencing because of this unscheduled but welcome bonus ride in the car. “No, no,” I remember saying to them,”This is not a walk. Its an evacuation. Which I guess is a little like a walk except it has no cheery ending where we all come home, get in to bed and enjoy a cookie.” This, by the way, did little to dampen their ardor .

Later I learned that I was the only one on my block who had followed official fire department instructions and actually left the premises. And the reason for this was because I was the only woman on my block who lived by herself. Every other house in the area had a penis in residence who gave the orders to stay put so that the owner of said penis might fulfill his childhood dream of standing on the roof and protecting the homestead by wielding a very big hose.

 That was the first time it occurred to me that men have a very different relationship to fire than do women. At a dinner back then, when I raised this topic, every man at the table was able to recall, with a certain amount of grin-producing nostalgia, the time he set fire to some outbuilding, piece of land, or portion of his parent’s home. None of the women present could recall experiencing any of this kind of amusement. Arson, as it turns out, is almost entirely a man’s game.

Although arson is responsible for quite a few fires in Southern California, the Woolsey Fire of 2018, which destroyed 500 Malibu homes, was started by the aging faulty electrical equipment for which we residents pay an ever higher monthly fee to the always annoying pubic utility known as Southern California Edison.

Here is a piece I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 about being stuck in the line of unmoving traffic trying to escape from the Woolsey Fire on Pacific Coast Highway. It was moving at about 3 miles per hour.

Big plumes of smoke were visible in our rear view mirror. And a drive which usually took about 20 minutes took SIX PLUS HOURS with no possible bathroom breaks.

Fortunately a friend with an unoccupied rental property let us stay there for almost a month until we were allowed back into the neighborhood. For the first few weeks we had no idea whether we would ever again see our home standing in one piece.

But we lucked out. Our house was still standing. Others in our neighborhood were not so lucky. The only damage we suffered was that it smelled stinky from smoke saturation. Plus a few other contributing factors. For example, this photo, which may look like an aerial shot of Hurricane Milton, but is actually a snapshot of the mold that was growing on a tray of leftovers that remained in our disconnected refrigerator while we were gone.

It was a great relief to be back home. As I unpacked, I started examining what I had actually managed to stash in the car and was therefore bringing with me to what might have been the start of a brand new life. For example, I shoved this old pink vinyl box embossed with the words “My Treasures” into an empty corner of the packed trunk. I purchased it with my allowance when I was ten years old and was reluctant to see it melt into a pink puddle.

I hadn’t opened it in years. Inside was a soiled program for my sixth grade dance recital, folded in half and entitled “A Chance to Dance” And tucked into the fold was a stained piece of notebook paper on which I recorded instructions on how to do the dance we had performed that night. Apparently I was trying to guard against the unthinkable possibility that some time in the future, I might not remember how to recreate its magic. This was of such great concern to me that I even drew the moves to the dance in stick figures to support the text. I definitely couldn’t imagine living a life in which I wouldn’t be doing that dance again.

For those of you who want to play along at home, the instructions I wrote down were: “Stretch, stretch stretch;  Down, up, stand. Stretch, stretch, stretch, down, up, turn. With arms still up CLAP. Jazz arms position as you jazz walk to the back line’.

Which brings me back to now: The fall of 2024 when this past weekend, the Santa Ana winds were booked for a return engagement. So Southern California Edison decided to shut off all the power in my neighborhood for 24 hours as part of a program they call PSPS (Public Service Power Shutoff.) And they did this despite the fact that their weather prediction turned out to be completely wrong and there was NO wind at all. It was completely still outside. Barely a breeze, but that didn’t matter. They claimed that cutting off the power was part of the precautions they were taking to protect their customers from dangerous high winds. As I mentioned before, the catastrophic fire in 2018 that burned almost 500 Malibu homes to the ground, was, in fact, started by malfunctioning SCE equipment so they have a reason to be hypervigilant. But because we now live in a time where 2 +2 can add up to any number anyone would like and nothing seems to make sense, they went ahead and turned off all the power for 24 hours to protect us from wind that didn’t exist.

This seems so 2024 to me that I can hardly comment. After 8 years of listening to Trump and the Magas lying and saying they won the election and Jan 6 was a day of peace, it just seems par for the course. Why should SCE be expected to see if the weather forecast they were using had any application to life on planet earth? And on top of that, there was no possible way to report this to a human representative of Southern California Edison because the only interactive channels they offer on their website are prepared FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and/or robot voices presenting a numerical menu of unrelated and irrelevant choices. There is no way to tell a living human at SCE anything. Why should there be? Who says there’s a problem? What problem? There is no problem.

So, summing up: no fires, no winds. No reason to be protected and therefore have no power.  No way to register a comment or a complaint.  Which brings us back to the election.

I hope that this is not the future we are facing by electing the Nazi/Fascist/Imbecile to the presidency and watching him roll out Project 2025.

If for some reason you have not yet registered to vote, please correct that immediately. And as far as ways to to cope with the growing tension as this coming election gets closer and closer, may I suggest the following:

“Stretch, stretch stretch;  Down, up, stand. Stretch, stretch, stretch. Down, up, turn. Arms up CLAP. Then jazz walk to the back line’.

And vote Democrat.