The big news today, at least for me, is that the hills are still alive…and not, sadly, with the Sound of Music. They're alive in fire and it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better. I awoke this morn to headlines that said the "Station fire" (that's what they're calling the big one) doubled in size overnight to 85,000 acres.
I'm not personally threatened. I'm a good fifteen miles away from it and the inferno would have to burn through most of Hollywood to get to me. I don't think anyone I know is in its path, either. Still, it's just scary and sad. Every so often, the wind is such that I can see huge, ugly clouds of smoke to the north. It's hard not to think of those clouds as someone's life, perhaps literally, going up in flames.
It makes me angrier when I think of how, for example, various energy companies stole billions from this state in the last decade. I know there's no guarantee that that money, if it hadn't been looted the way it was, would have gone to help battle the fires and rebuild. But I'll bet you we could be doing more than we are or will.
That's really all I wanted to say. I need to get back to work, need to put it out of my mind for a while. I probably also need to stop checking the L.A. Times website and even looking out my window to the north. Sometimes, the way I stop thinking about things is to write about them here.