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Did you see the Trump confirmation hearings? No, but I spent three hours talking to my insurance adjuster and going through my notes to see if they made sense.
Isn’t too bad about David Lynch dying? Did he? I hadn’t heard, I was too busy trying to figure out if my kids will ever go to school again.
Are you going to watch the Oscars? Only if I can do it while I fold the two pairs of pants I still own.
The things I cared about, paid attention to, and spent my time understanding and enjoying before the fire are not things I have paid attention to or enjoyed since the fire. The world I spent every day in – dropping the kids off at school, answering emails, writing stories, pitching projects, and settling down at night to watch SVU or The Agency – doesn’t exist at the moment. Like most Americans, I lived in a mostly ordinary world, with a few extraordinary things happening once in a while: marriage, having kids, getting called a pedophile by Steve Bannon. Not anymore.
That’s not to say it won’t be back to that one day. That’s the end goal of the insurance calls and the planning and lists: getting back to normal in a house full of stuff and laughter and friends is what we’re working toward. But it’s years away. The fires haven’t even been put out yet, and there’s no telling when the debris will be removed. And mentally, emotionally, that place might never exist again. We went out to grab lunch and make phone calls, just to be outside and around people. In the middle of eating, a fire truck went by, with its siren blaring. We looked around frantically to see if we needed to make a run for it, while everyone else just kept eating. They were in the ordinary world. We were not.
Right now, the victims of the LA fire are making their way through an existence that has little in common with almost everyone else. It’s an itinerant, uncertain, exhausting, defeated existence. And there’s no end in sight, at least not short term.
It’s hard to describe the haze that’s engulfed us. It’s lethargy and constant motion. It’s fear and uncertainty and jokes that will mean nothing to anyone else. You own almost nothing, but can’t find where anything is. It’s hard to care about any aspect of life that’s not either wrapping up our old life, trying to figure out the new one, or surviving the limbo between the two. I haven’t watched a second of the Trump confirmation hearings, and can’t remember anything I might have come across on social media from them – but I have etched in my mind the woman screaming into her cell phone on the first morning we were in our hotel “I HOPE SOMEONE ROBS YOU!” at some poor slob.
We live in twilight, neither light nor dark, neither here nor there. We’re nowhere. We’re also literally everywhere – a diaspora of families who want to get back home, but don’t know what that means. It means things happen and you don’t know anything about them. I’m a news junkie, and I have no idea what’s happening in the rest of the world. I’m a football fan with only a vague idea of who won the NFL playoff games this weekend. And I’ve been writing about and tracking Donald Trump’s enmeshment with the conspiracy theory world for a decade, yet have only a vague idea that his second inauguration is Monday. It’s a huge, world-changing event. For me, it’s another sunrise and sunset in a litany of days that have blurred together into a blob of numbers on a calendar.
Honestly, at the moment, Trump’s return to power doesn’t mean that much to me. I know that’s a horrible, selfish, and privileged thing to say. But the immediate needs of the moment, the need for clean pants and more coffee and cancelling the trash company and moving money around and getting some idea of what the future is going to look like all outweigh Trump’s intention of pulling the country toward authoritarianism.
And the concerns I do have about Trump 2.0 are impossible to disentangle from our house burning down. Will his tariffs make construction materials more expensive? Will federal money somehow stop flowing to California? Will the ridiculous and doomed “DOGE” scheme gut FEMA, and screw over low-income and under-insured Californians who have already been screwed up and down?
Trump is the ordinary world.
For a few days after a disaster, most people outside the blast radius take a few steps outside the ordinary world into the chaos. They sent money to friends and relatives, obsessively read stories about what happened, check in with the victims they know, and if nothing else, send their thoughts and prayers. That’s certainly been our experience.
In the hotel we’ve been staying at, in the small coastal town where we’ve settled, we’ve received an outpouring of sympathy. A few other LA evacuees were here, and everyone seemed to know someone who lost their home. I haven’t been shy about telling people we’re from Altadena, and yes, we lost our house – not to gather sympathy but because saying it out loud makes it more real, bears witness to the loss. People have responded with true and real sadness. Strangers have told me they’ll pray for me. I got free gelato at a sandwich place.
It won’t last. The ordinary world is just too alluring, too easy. It’s comforting to be in the ordinary world, because the ordinary world doesn’t demand you live in a twilight existence of lists and phone calls and circular forms that lead back to themselves just to get your property taxes reassessed. You just get to live your life, have a routine, and go home.
So people move on, they forget. Hell, I’ve forgotten. I wrote multiple pieces about the plague of hurricanes that hit the southeast before the election, and now I can barely remember their names. The ordinary world was right there to step back into, and it’s not like it was my house that was flooding. Evacuees are already leaving the hotel. I asked someone in the elevator on my way to or from getting round #3 of coffee if they had escaped from LA. Nah, dude was just here for a conference.
Conferences are the ordinary world. And that’s okay. I miss the ordinary world. I miss conferences. I envy those who get to go on with their lives, going to hockey games and watching TV. They have houses and stuff in them. Even Altadena residents who have their houses can’t go home, and have no community to go back to. I don’t expect everyone outside our world to share the pain and loss we’re feeling. Why would anyone want that burden if they weren’t chosen for it? I sure wouldn’t.
But my family and my community were chosen for it, so we deal with it. We deal with the stress and exhaustion, because we have to. And most of you don’t. The ordinary world isn’t going to be our world for a long time. We live in twilight, barely aware of what’s going on outside our bubble. But we will learn to survive.
Altadena will rebuild.
Mike Rothschild 
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