...er...

I work in a small rundown movie theater in an otherwise upscale mall nearby to where I live. The Flower Hill mall is the golden template, the platonic form that all other mini-malls aspire toward, yet cannot quite achieve. The Texas- sized Megamarts are the furthest removed from my mall, grotesquely overgrown from lack of contact with their source; the tasteful, petite little belgian chocolate bonbon that is Flower Hill.

Part of, yet slightly adjacent to this jewel in the sombrero, is my theater. A shoddy, rundown, faux-cozy roach motel, the place pretends toward a higher station by screening hipster favorites. Of course, this facade collapses faster than Larry King's marriages when a rat the size of a dachshund scurries across the foot of a much manicured soccer mom just as Richie Tenenbaum is confessing his incestuous infatuation to his sister Margot.
Needless to say, my shop is also BURLY AS FUCK, an attribute which I again became aware of this past Sunday.

Sunday, found me choking and sneezing through an eight hour swing shift at the concessions stand, selling popcorn to a nervous and smoke addled mini-multitude. To the east of us, wildfires were raging through Jamul in the south and Ramona to the north, moving ominously closer as we continued about our business starting movies, selling tickets, feeding biohazard green candies to children, and fielding complaints from rat-trodden guests, eyes reddened by the smoke.

As always the culprit was those fucking godawful Santa Ana winds. I once read somewhere that the Santa Anas are one of those "ill winds" that contain ions or something of a fishy nature which make people angry, allergic, and abusive. These fishy ions are also unapologetic firebugs apparently, because these pyromaniac winds (in conjunction with carelessness, and occasionally willful malice) have kicked up a gang of fires. Fucked up fires.
These fires were the most fucked up in ninety years, they ravaged homes, destroyed property, displaced hundreds of people, killed firefighters, turned livestock into horseburgers, laid waste to scrub land, killed endangered wildlife, fucked with people's respiration, wrecked peoples days, and forced me into close proximity with my mother for forty eight hours.
My mother is a wonderful person blah blah blah. But the further I begin to slink from the nest, the less contact I desire from this sainted wonderful christlike so and so, et cetera.

So, naturally, on Monday when she woke me at the crack of noon to tell me to get the hell up, it was with no small amount trepidation that I glanced at the news, glanced at my mother, and glanced futureward at the grim spectacle the next one to three days would no doubt be.
I spent the morning trying fruitlessly to read a morbidly apocalyptic book of conspiracy theory and wild assertions called "Behold a Pale Horse" by a paranoid ex-Naval Intelligence crank called William Cooper. Cooper may be right on the money for all I know, but on Monday I was too distracted by Local News's own eschatological ranting, to pay heed to insidious yet dry economic theory, purportedly penned by some Rothschild patriarch, and allegedly put in circulation by the Illuminati.

Yes, the news was depressing enough that morning, and as I sat sipping innumerable cups of tea and pensively watching fire and brimstone rain down upon saint and sinner alike, I wondered what the fuck was gonna happen.
Still and all, I guess, looking back, I wasn't all that worried, even when the fires began to creep into neighborhoods with all too familiar names. I was protected by a sort of disaster chauvinism, a product, no doubt, of my youth, which constantly reassures the innocent that disasters happen to other people who live far, far away in places with names like Azerbaijan, Myanmar, or Sandusky. And even when they happen to people who live in places with familiar names like Escondido, Chula Vista, and Scripps Ranch, I still somehow remain smugly confident that they won't happen to me.

Anyway, after several hours, the tea hitting my heart like intravenous cocaine, I doffed my polar fleece bathrobe, changed into some respectable clothing, and loaded my dog and some other shit into my Mom's car. The three of us headed south to La Jolla, an area seldom affected by firestorms. It's as if the flames are too poorly dressed to set foot in such an upscale neighborhood.
Work called, just as we were being forcefully evacuated, to say that they were shutting down the building, (like I said, BURLY AS FUCK) which was a relief because I had scant desire to sell popcorn to mischievous fire imps in the middle of a raging inferno surrounded by walls of flame and the sanity-destroying cackle of oblivion. To usher in madness, to sell tickets to the Angel of Death amongst the wail of the sick and dying, the lamentations of our women, the grotesque and gaping maw of encroaching chaos...

Seriously though, it wasn't that bad in our area, I really should point this out. I really do think the theater is pretty badass for staying open as late as it did, and opening back up as quickly as it did, but all the rest is exaggeration. I definitely will admit to feeling some guilt at writing this piece at all. My natural approach when cataloging any experience is to take a lighthearted tone, but overall the SD fires were really, truly godawful. The thing is, my family and I did, in fact, get evac'd. We were scared at times, but were for the most part unscathed. I don't want to seem like I'm attempting to mock the suffering felt by the people who were hurt by the fire, but I feel the need to write from my own experience of the thing, which was not, by any means, harrowing, nor tragic.
Wait a minute, who the fuck am I apologizing to? Nobody reads this thing!

Moving on. My mother and I each had one friend who completely lost his or her cool during this situation. For my mother, it was her friend Shamala, a frantic, flighty, east Indian mother hen who screamed my mother awake in the early morning to tell her, ostensibly via some payphone in some faraway hotel lobby, to GET OUT NOW. This hysterical woman claimed that there were bugle blowers on her street evacuating the whole neighborhood, an apparent hallucination I fear I'll never be able to explain. For their part, the friends that I have in her neighborhood reported no bugle blowing boy scouts raising the hue and cry, and remained posted up in their homes long after Shamala took flight, dragging along her passive husband and dazed and sheltered kids.
My Frantic Friend was John, a quirky, chainsmoking ectomorph. He left a solemnly melodramatic message on my voicemail, announcing that "SoCal is on fire" and wishing me luck. I later learned that he had hightailed it all the way up to Irvine to stay at his dad's house and check on the fire via Google Maps.
I'll say this for the seriousness of our situation, we were motivated to leave the house not because of any perceived threat to our bodies and souls, but because of hunger, in fact, and boredom. The grocery stores and restaurants in our area were closed as fuck, and the place resembled a ghost town in hue, aesthetic, and overall mouthfeel. So, as such, an our before our reverse 911 evac call came in, we made the aforementioned flight from chaos etc. and moved into the spacious and inviting near-coastal home of my aunt and uncle in the Cobb Salad and hipster coffee-shop capital of Christendom, La Jolla California.

I brought with me four books to choose from, having no desire to slog through the fear-crazed rantings of a UFOlogist militiaman searching for masonic conspiracies behind sofas and under desks. I selected Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick! at random and began reading as my mom settled down to watch reporters in SARS masks wax philosophical about the nature of tragedy. Kurt Vonnegut, of course, had much more interesting things to say on the subject and after awhile I fell into a sulk.

I'm not the sort of person who is typically affected by national tragedies. I definitely tend more toward a George Carlinish outlook on group suffering. I don't think I'm uncaring per se, it's just that I find it difficult to identify with the individual victims of these events. When many people suffer they are neccesarily depersonalized into an amorphus mass of wounded, who then promptly get turned into symbols, into "martyrs", "heroes" and other unfamiliar concepts. This shit is really trite, I know, I sound like a wannabe academic discoursing on the nature of mass media, but come on! When was the last time you felt any real sympathy for six o'clock martyrs and CNN heroes?
Anyway, despite the thick layer of cynical armor I seem to have cultivated around what I hope to be a caring heart, I still, at times felt genuine pangs of sympathy for these people. People from right near me. The atmosphere of nervous, anxiety tinged boredom and melancholy, the deserted streets, the ubiquitous yellow haze and smell of sad smoke mixed horribly with the jarring news bulletins and Vonnegut Tragicomedy. Events loomed large on screen, but in the here and now things were small and jittery. Selfishly perhaps, the whole situation seemed to bring my life into focus. It had become as intolerable a mix of fear and apathy and glum cheerlessness as the event itself seemed to me at the time, and I know that sounds ridiculously self interested but fuck off, I'm tired of backtracking. If you are a person reading this, just from now on assume I'm fully aware of each instance of pointlessness, corniness, pretentiousness, self serving shittyness, etc. in this piece. I'm writing it for the sake of writing it.

My mother and I adjourned to have dinner at a TGI Friday's nearby. The place was packed with hungry evacuees, none of whom seemed to have lost their homes. In fact, the majority seemed more focused on the football game being shown on the tv above the bar than on the news being broadcast on the tv near our table. One group displayed what appeared to me to be an immodest amount of enthusiasm over the game, drinking heavily and gorging themselves on deep fried this and buffalo style that. I wasn't particularly offended, though, seeing as how it wasn't my house on fucking fire. Also perhaps joy is a better coping strategy then abject sorrow or stark wild eyed terror, seems reasonable enough to me.

Eventually my mother, dog, and I returned home and received a call from an elderly couple who lived near us. They had no place to go when they got the evac notice, so we told them to come on by. They are a childless couple who have, however, nurtured a lifelong fondness for dogs. They tend to adopt golden retrievers from various rescue centers and raise them with such a zealous excess of love that the dogs quickly become rotund land monsters, trundling feebly along on arthritic legs when other dogs their age are playing grabass and touch football, experiencing their first makeout sessions in the backs of their dad's Chevies, and going off to college. The couple at present had one such dog, and a younger dog with an amphetamine-fast metabolism. This dog was as ectomorphic as my friend John and replete with zest. He was also runty, stupid as shit, and always and everywhere frantically attempting to mount my own dog, who at the moment was passively curled up on the couch, warming my feet.

This pup was cursed with the unfortunate name "Genius", not that he seemed to mind. As soon as my neighbors showed up he rushed in, and as usual attempted clumsily to copulate with a bored looking Jack( who is easily twice his size) while Jack in turn attempted to mount Berry, the couple's other dog, who is fat, passive, and as disinterested in Jack as he is in Genius. The bisexual dog orgy raged around us as my Mom helped settle my neighbors in, and I tried unsuccessfully to continue reading.
My huge dog would periodically come over and lick my face, which would, of course, make genius feel slighted and he'd vie for Jack's attention through me. After a while I was covered in hair and drool, and what with this and the shitty ions, and the ash and smoke in the air, and the dust in the old house, I began sneezing my balls off. With dog grease on my hands, sneeze tears blurring my vision, and snot trailing from my Rudolph red, I set down my book and wandered cautiously outside for a cigarette. The smoke in the air made everything smell like India, where they routinely burn trash as a means to dispose of it. I tried to read by flashlight, but this balancing act was difficult, and so once again my attempts to broaden my outlook through literature were stymied by fate.

Eventually we bedded down. I finished my book (Finally!) and started another
off the butt of the first one. Eventually I got sick of reading (Tom Robbins this time) and tried to get some rest. I have trouble sleeping, so this didn't work well, but after tossing and turning for years under the stifling covers, I managed furtively to masturbate and fell into a thin sleep.

I was woken by light, noise, and the sound of my mom walking loudly around. She had predictably begun to irritate me, but I, of course, didn't hold it against her. I fondly remembered the time before I had my driver's license when I was perfectly content kicking it with my mom all day. This wasn't exactly a childhood memory either. I didn't get my license 'till the middle of my eighteenth year, and though I spent nights with friends doing coke, getting wasted, and all types of sordid things besides, during the day I was content to visit bookstores with her, accompany her on errands, and and afterwards grab lunch together.

Oh well. I headed into the living room where I found my neighbors had peaced out, fucked off and kicked rocks in the direction of our newly de-evacuated homes. My mother and I stopped back by our house too, and eventually met my neighbors again for lunch back in La Jolla.

Eventually we packed up our shit, and without much hugging, crying, boohooing, or shoulder clapping, promptly de-evacuated back to our respective homes. We have not since re-evacuated, re-de-evacuated, or any other prefix mumbo jumbo, though I've heard this has happened to some.
My mother and I settled back in, and I began to call friends, more out of loneliness than concern, though I certainly pretended to the latter. I knew most were probably right as rain, but I hadn't seen anyone in a while and I was bored and frustrated. Eventually I left the house to hunt for an open grocery store, and met up with my friend Irish to swap stories and attempt to pull myself out of the jittery funk I'd been in for the last two days.

Irish was a loud, fast-talking streetpunk from a lower middle-class suburb in Oceanside who wore a spray painted leather jacket and spouted one liners constantly. Now and then he would loudly ascend his soapbox and high horse simultaneously to deliver an angry sermon on some non sequitur at the worst possible moment socially. Recently though he'd suffered a serious blow to the dome when he fell from his skateboard at speeds in excess of forty miles an hour. Helmetless, it's amazing he lived, but live he did. He now sports a massive gash in the shape of a question mark on the side of his head and face, and is occasionally given to ramble. While all this was happening Irish would periodically put in with a phonecall and begin to rant about the fire from his grandmother's house in Del Mar. He gave the impression of some half-crazed shutin author, mumbling gleefully about the chaos around him. I picked him up and took him along to search for sustenance.

I purchased a tin of smoked oysters, a carton of some inedible cheese substance, a box of Triscuits and a pack of Pall Malls from an open Albertsons. The two of us then headed to Filiberto's Taco Shop in Encinitas, which of course, even at two AM, freshly after a mandatory evac, and within range of a pitched battle between man and the fiery forces of nature, was still open for business in defiance of God, and, no doubt, in standard violation of city health ordinance. I slopped down a messy burrito and the two of us drove aimlessly, drifting into maudlin conversation. After this past summer most of my good friends had gone off to bigger and better things, and Irish's weird behavior was beginning to alienate more and more of the people around him. I could tell that for him, like myself, the loneliness of the fire had thrown this all into harsh relief. We parted on a depressive note, and I drove home listening to low firebabble on the talk stations.

Today of course things continued as usual. At work I projected projections of "Darjeeling Limited" and "Across the Universe" and "Into the Wild" at another vacant hipster audience. Scratch that. A Thronging Hipster Multitude, perhaps escaping from the passionlessness of the last few days the same as me. Tomorrow I have to do it again, this time rising at Christ o'clock in the morning because our morning projectionist has food poisoning. C'est la vie.

If you've read this whole thing, you've probably found it a bit stale, a bit lame, a bit pointless and self indulgent. I did mostly write this for myself (except for all of the self conscious backpedaling, that was purely for the benefit of you assholes). I don't know if anybody will read this thing, but here it is; long winded, meandering, idiosyncratic, corny, self-serving, and trite as it may be. Here, for your perusal, is the story of the epic SD wildfires of twenty aught seven as they occurred to one random Indian kid from the suburbs.