Hell Angeles - Chapter 5
January 8th
There’s a moment I feel light. Not light-headed. Light. At 8:18 pm on January 8th I’m in my pajamas standing in the bathroom of a rental condo (my family is now in the fourth spot in two days, we will stay in this spot two weeks) and I’m on the phone with a friend who asks me if our house is standing. I say yes. My house is standing. There’s a pause. She can’t believe this. She tells me the fire is raging in Sullivan Canyon, still, and now threatening Mandeville Canyon. At the tippy top of my neighborhood on a street called San Onofre there’s a house exploding. “Look at the picture,” she says, as if I might need to see facts in evidence. I’ve finished brushing my teeth. About to floss. Moisturize. I’m a creature of habit and for two days I haven’t done anything normal. I’ve lived in the world of crisis and phone and crisis and TV and crisis and phone. This small bedtime routine feels good. Until she sends the “live” picture across where the flames are moving. The house on San Onofre is exploding. An orange fireball. A rocket about to launch for Mars.
Suddenly, I feel weightlessness.
Just minutes before, my head was storing all the human suffering attached to these last 36 hours. The chaos. Despair. The sadism of this wildfire.
Now nothing. A void.
The book I’ve read the most times in my life is by Milan Kundera. It’s called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He wrote it in 1984 exactly four years after he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. From the titles, you can understand the question he was wrestling with. Does it all pass? Does any of it mean anything?
Kundera was a Czech artist born in 1929 in a spot where Nazi and Soviet tanks would roll for the next sixty years. Every flavor of bloodshed, slavery, destruction, oppression and pathos he saw. Exiled to France, he wrote this story, Unbearable Lightness of Being, this melody, I’ve read so many times. It’s about a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. It has everything to do with his era and nothing to do with his era. It’s a simple story with a theme. Everything occurs but once. In a world where everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Its matter. We feel the “unbearable lightness of being” not only as it relates to our private actions but also in the public sphere.
Everything occurs but once.
This lightness; it’s the worst possible feeling but it’s also erotic.
Truths large and small mean nothing. Like the character in the book, you can torture yourself about the man you love who can’t give up other women. You can torture yourself about living in an America where nothing much works. Where something basic is missing. Where stopping a fire at 1,000 acres or 2,000 acres or 5,000 acres or 10,000 acres or before it even starts—before it even starts—is suddenly impossible. Where the bureaucratic riptide is so strong we will drown. Where the police tell the homeowners to turn around, you’re not permitted to watch your house burn, we’ll watch your house burn for you. Where events bring maximum pain, and where we’re told it is normal. Inevitable. Mass vandalism, the taking apart of your life every five years but please still pay your taxes. And vote. Please participate in a system that is swallowing you. Obliterating your wellbeing. You can wail and gnash your teeth and suffer over this torment—your powerlessness in the face of it all—or you can face truth.
It's a choice.
Excruciating torment.
Lightness…
What then shall we choose?
From Milan Kundera’s own mouth:
We need take no more note of it than of a war between to African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand perished in excruciating torment.
He goes on to describe our choice.
Weight. Light.
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
When then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
The house on San Onofre is leaping like a fireball towards heaven. KTLA-5, playing on mute in the dark living room of this rental house is reflecting light, fire onto the dark windows. The ridgeline over Los Angeles is aflame. A strip of light tearing open the darkness. The camera pans out over a sleeping city. A city that may burn.
It all passes.
Rome burned on July 18, 64 AD.
Only a lunatic could get upset now about the day Rome burned.
Samurai poet Mizuta Masahide wrote five hundred years ago:
My storehouse burnt down,
There is nothing to obstruct the moon-view.
The handcuffs are there to be taken off. Probably, the owner of that house on San Onofre is not watching. Drugged out somewhere. Unable to see or feel the lightness. His house is spilling down the canyon in chunks of flaming metal, sending coyotes and bobcats running into burning holes. The other homes are igniting, tumbling. The owner isn’t watching but he should watch. The part of his life that he spent there, all the grief, joy, anxiety, regret and shame, the secret satisfaction, that part of his life is gone. Vanished.
To know this in advance is to feel lightness.
Fire brings light.
It’s a movie we can turn on and off at will. Nice cinematography. Wild effects. No soundtrack yet but Philip Glass’s “Opening” would do. Robert McKee calls movies, film, the ultimate art form. Why? Because they are temporal. Kinetic. The picture moves through time. The story changes as the light changes. Oil paintings are still. Sculpture is still. Dance and music move, but movies capture everything. To watch a movie is to be alive and then dead. To feel our nature. Dust. Air. Birth and death and the emptiness on either side. Memories, chaos, cramped in the middle. Everything is here today. Tomorrow it will be gone. To feel this. To let it pass.
Absurd freedom.
9:10 pm I’m trying to come down from this light feeling, and I can’t. The rental house has polished concrete steps. I take off my socks to feel the cold concrete on my feet as I go up and down stairs. Trying to regain a sense of physicality. Weight. Angst. I try to watch the flames on TV with a sense of doom. I can’t feel anything.
Certainly, I can’t sleep in this state.
I need a pill.
Rarely, if ever, do I take pills. I have Flexeril, a muscle relaxant that works by blocking nerve impulses, pain sensations, sent to your brain. The expired prescription is in my dob kit from when I hurt my back a few years ago. I try to imagine all the bad things that could happen by taking an expired pill then I take it anyway. I crawl into bed. My head is a rock on the pillow. Leaden dreams carry me to morning.
12.48 am on January 9th while I sleep—a political argument rages on the chat thread.
Sam writes to the group:
California government is so incompetent, a 3rd world country could have done a better job! No foresight, no prevention, no mitigation plan, not even able to send a couple of drones to update the fire map regularly. Its’ a shame
100 pct emoji from four people. Crying face added.
Sean writes:
I think this goes in the not helpful pile.
Thumbs up from nine people who agree.
Victoria writes to us:
100 pct we can also thank our mayor for cutting funding for first responders etc.
Person named clapping hands writes:
Here we goooooooooo
Elizabeth cuts in (I’m glad I’m asleep)
Do you know where on Amalfi was burning? Our home is near there and we’re trying to get more information on the Riviera too.
Ashley writes:
We can all agree this is an apocalyptic disaster. It’s all done. Politics don’t help anymore. Family, neighbors, rebuilding.
Fifteen people like that comment. Heart. Thumbs up.
Clapping hands writes:
Not helpful / fucking stupid pile.
Laura asks about Amalfi burning:
Amalfi was burning, anyone know if it was contained? Any more info on this?
Note: it’s bananas, insane, that for the first time in 36 hours and thousands of chat thread messages my street is in full focus, the topic du jour of the conversation, and I’m missing all of it. I’m asleep.
Brandon writes:
Please take your political arguments to a different app.
Clapping hands writes:
they’re not even political. just wrong.
Note: I can’t always tell which side of the argument clapping hands is on.
Martin writes:
My folks are at 905 Napoli. Their Furbo is still operating. All is quiet on the street. No fire.
Heart emoji added.
Adam writes:
The only shit (emoji) pile is out local government-mayor ASS-shithead newsom & his smelt & the “last responders” that sat there with thumbs up their ass for hours (video proof) as our houses burned to the ground & after repeated 911 calls failed to rescue our elderly next door neighbor who perished. They will all surely BURN IN HELL for their negligence & so will all the morons who voted them into office
Thumbs up. One like.
Chantal-Patrice writes:
The two houses next to us burned. I’m on north Amalfi. I haven’t heard of any other homes burned.
Clapping hands writes:
respectfully, shut the fuck up.
Can someone contact the owner of this group and get them to kick out the MAGA fuckwits?
Heart emoji. Thumbs up emoji.
Elizabeth adds:
Stop, please stop! This group was created for people who are trying to find out actual information about the status of homes and neighborhoods in the Palisades plus perhaps evacuation information. Your rants do not belong here.
The owner of the chat starts removing people….
Adam is removed.
Hon is removed.
Oddly, I don’t recall Hon ever contributing to the chat.
Clapping hands must be a dem because he’s allowed to stay in the chat. He writes:
exactly. they need to go back to truth social and twitter
Ashley writes:
Any further political discussion will be reported from Block. Please this is to protect our families.
The chat owner explains his actions. He writes:
I started this chat for friends I know so we can help each other. All you stupid fucks that are making it political and are not willing to help, LEAVE THIS CHAT.
Heart. Thumbs up. Prayer. Halleluiah symbol.
Fourteen people heartily agree. If there’s one thing no one wants at this moment, it’s a political argument. Even though everyone jumping in to stop it is making a political argument. Except the people on Amalfi, who are tracking which homes on the street have burned or are currently burning.
Chantal-Price writes:
1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169
Someone adds a wide-eye emoji.
Clapping hands beseeches us:
please block them, they are poisonous and dangerous
The owner of the chat thread answers the call:
Next person to make a comment that is not helpful to others on this chat, I will remove. Take your shit to Next door
Alisa writes:
IF I MAY…suggest something. There are over 1,000 people on this thread. We are broken and we are hurting. I am mad as well but for now I need community members who will mourn with me and be supportive at this time. In turn, plan on offering support to my community. Any posts on this chat that are less than nurturing and helpful are only adding to the pain and trauma we are all feeling. I ask that you find another chat or that the admin please block such people.
Andrea writes:
This is devastating. Many of us lost everything. I for one failed to pack even one photo and our home is ash.
Quick note: in 2025 the average American stores 2,795 photos on their phone.[1] Smartphones capture 92.5% of all pictures, leaving just 7.5% to conventional cameras. 92 million selfies are taken daily. The average American takes out their smartphone to snap a photo six times a day. This, or some version of this data set, has existed since 2007 when the iPhone was invented. And yet Andrea, like so many others, are devastated by the photos they left behind. It’s odd to say the least, that we can carry this many photos in our pocket, but we’re tortured by the ones we don’t have. The ones buried in a box in a basement we swear we’re going to clean out.
Jiayrun adds a Halleluiah symbol.
Someone asks again about which homes on Amalfi are burning.
Chantal-Price writes:
1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169.
Dan jumps into the thread:
How far east is the fire?
Alisa writes:
Same here; the loss is overwhelming.
The owner of the chat thread is still fuming. He writes:
Send me privately any people you think should be removed and I will
Four people add heart emojis.
No one is removed from the chat.
Elizabeth brings up Amalfi again:
Amalfi? Sorry to ask again, but the overlapping threads are getting confusing. I don’t want to give anyone incorrect information.
Kris doesn’t care:
Does anyone have intel on Mandeville?
Chantal-Price is about to repeat, for the umpteenth time, which houses are burning on north Amalfi when Elizabeth scrolls back in the chat thread (there’s an idea!) and looks up the information that’s been posted so many times.
Elizabeth reposts:
1201 burned and 1179 and ½ of 1169
Then she adds:
Thank you.
1:15 am on January 9th everyone on this chat thread has been awake for two straight days and starting to act weird.
The chat thread owner can’t seem to cool off. He writes:
Back to the purpose of this chat. It was meant to help each other. I will do whatever it takes to build this town back up inch by inch. I am a general contractor. I develop and build apartment buildings but willing to help Anyone any way I can throughout the process of rebuilding. Feel free to reach out to me when the time is right and I will Do my best to help. We will build this town again.
Heart. Prayer. 33 people give a thumbs up.
Sean writes:
That definitely goes in the helpful pile.
Every time Sean writes, he adds an up-arrow emoji to his comment.
1:17 am, the earth shifts. James asks the fateful question that will consume the people on this chat thread from now until eternity:
How long do you think it will be until clean up and building can start?