My father recommended I read Farewell, My Lovely when I was 15 or 16. After I’d done so, I asked him if Santa Monica (obviously Bay City) had really been the pit Chandler made it out to be back then. He told me I could count on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Santa_Monica%2C_California#1930s

I’ve lived in the Los Angeles Area for most of my 42 years, and it always irritates me a bit when news coverage of our annual brushfires makes the rest of the country think we’re burning like Nero’s Rome or Pepys’ London. Yes, it really sucks for some people who live out on the fringes of the greater metro area. But the rest of us who can’t afford to live in the canyons are safe enough, thank you very much.

Did his Southern California ever really exist? I don’t know and I hardly care.

I was so sad the day I realized I’d read all his books.

seriously man, only a writer would get romantic when the place is burning down.

Bring the Firefighters Home NOW!

*paid for by ANSWER (lies) and United for (Genocidal) Peace and Justice (for dictators)

Simi Valley here. I just went to the store at about 11:30pm tonight. Outside it smelled that funky smell like a campfire that had just been put out–a musty, wet ash kind of smell.

The sun today cast a strange beige color on everything, obviously due to the smoke. I could see the fires from my bedroom window last night; flames to the east of me on the hills in the pass above the 118, and a glow in the sky to the South. But tonight I do not see anything.

Ever since I first read it, I always think of…

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

—Joan Didion, “Santa Ana” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Driving north on the 405 at about 10:00 this morning one couldn’t help but be awed. The stopped traffic made sense for a change. That you smell it where you are is probably a good sign. Probably.