Hopping the cemetery fence with a champagne bottle
I need the money I need to work
Our largest state is on fire again and although we do talk about this ongoing reality fairly regularly we also somehow don’t talk about it anywhere nearly enough (?) Imagine the biggest house in your town was always on fire and it burned all the time and it burned so often that you eventually accepted that there was a house down the street that was always going to be on fire. We have to address Fire House the mayor would say and then they would get it under control for a while until they didn’t and the mayor would have to come on TV again. Goddamnit he’d say. You would get used to the smoke after a while I guess. It’s probably not going to get me you’d think then you’d go run your errands and the mayor would get in trouble for fucking one of his aides.
Sometimes people talk about the east coast bias in media and I usually say ah come on with that but can you imagine if New York and Boston were under threat of burning down and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee and the sky was dimmed with smoke for weeks? I feel like there wouldn’t be a single other story on the news but I just saw a story about a hero troop dog that chased Bin Laden 2 up a tree or whatever and its name is classified I guess because they are worried that ISIS might retaliate against the dog’s family? They won’t stop talking about this fucking dog on TV and sometimes I think I live inside of a Jacob’s Ladder nightmare and I’m still in the jungle in Vietnam and this is all a cruel illusion.
Earlier this year lawmakers in California introduced a bill that would help inmate firefighters get work in the field once they’ve been released and the reason for that is because we have inmate firefighters and when they get out they can’t get hired to do the job they’ve been training for.
“According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the state typically has about 3,000 inmate volunteer firefighters,” the Sacramento Bee reported last year around the last time the fires in California were so bad that even people on the east coast like me had to know about them. “They stay in conservation camps, and can often work for up to 24 hours straight containing California’s wildfires on 15-person hand crews. This year, they made up nearly one-fifth of the force fighting the wildfire that raged across California.”
I gather that fighting fires is a desirable job for a lot of them due to you get to go outside which is a much better alternative to living in a box even if the entire outside is on fire.
The inmates work on projects to prevent fires happening and some other things for which they are paid $2 a day and then when there is an active fire they are paid an additional $1 an hour for fighting the fire. Using inmate labor like this apparently saves the state $100 million a year.
Sometimes I try to think about how to most succinctly explain what Hell World is in a sentence like what is the singular demonstrative Hell World story. I’ve said before it was the time that Richard Sackler was granted a patent for a drug that could ease opiate addiction and other times I think it’s the thing about people begging not to be taken on an ambulance when they’re hurt because they can’t afford it. Maybe it’s when you see a cheery story in the local news about a girl scout selling lemonade to help pay for her mommy’s leukemia. But this fire thing is a pretty good contender. Inmates being paid slave wages to battle the ravages of climate change then being denied the opportunity to work in that field once they’re released is pretty close to the ideal.
Back in 2014 lawyers from then Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office argued that letting non-violent prisoners in California’s severely overcrowded prisons out early for good behavior would be a bad idea among other things because it would reduce the supply of prison labor to fight fires and other shit. Later on Harris said she didn’t know about it and said she was shocked to hear it and then they agreed to shut the fuck up when it came to making that particular argument but probably only because they got caught.
Whenever people get caught fucking up and they apologize a lot of people say nah you’re just sorry you got caught and maybe that is true in a lot of cases but you can be sorry the entire time you’re doing something bad and then also be additionally sorry once you’ve gotten caught. There are a lot of different types of sorries.
Speaking of which I’m sorry for asking again but please help support this newsletter by purchasing a subscription.
Fifteen years ago this past Sunday on the same night Donald Trump was getting lustily booed in D.C. the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in eighty six years which as you can probably imagine was a big deal for people who have the same geography-based neuroses as me. Naturally people were sharing remembrances of the night on Twitter and most of them were joyous but one stood out to me in particular in the way that sometimes I’ll see a sentence that is accidental poetry and it sort of knocks me over and I can’t stop thinking about it.
What were you doing that night one Red Sox account asked and a random account replied.
“Watched at a friend's house and then called my mom, who absolutely loved the Red Sox her entire life,” he wrote.
“Best part was driving home past a cemetery and seeing someone hopping the fence with a champagne bottle.”
Ah what the fuck it took me like ten years but I think I finally just got The Menzingers.
I don’t entirely understand why I could never get into The Menzingers before today I guess I always dismissed them as being for twenty year old punks imagining what it’s gonna be like to be forty year old punks someday or else maybe forty year old punks remembering what it was like to be twenty year old punks but now that I think about that equation for five seconds that summarizes the trajectory of my life exactly so fuck me.
They told me you guys gave around $3,000 to the charity I wrote about the other day called Alice’s Kids so nice job buddy. That was thanks in no small part to this guy so thanks to him also and you should take his advice and subscribe if you haven’t already.
I went on the radio program This Is Hell to talk about Hell World.
Here read this poem by Anne Carson.
I was thinking about my dead father yesterday and I thought I should probably call my living stepfather and living mother but I didn’t. Another thing I thought about was that my dead father got divorced three times and I wondered if he was the type to cry and beg for them to come back or if he was the type to accept his fate silently and stoically and I was hoping it was the latter for some reason because being a man fucks up your brain real bad. I realized I could call one of his living ex-wives and ask but I didn’t do that.
I just went to pull a book off the shelf and I grabbed that Anne Carson book Men In the Off Hours that that poem above comes from. We keep our books in the room where we put the step ladder and winter boots and coats we aren’t ready for yet and dusty guitars and old framed pictures leaned up against each other on the floor that don’t belong on the walls any more and stacks of old dead laptops we don’t know how to dispose of with all our old disappointments locked behind passwords we don’t remember. Whenever I pull down a book of poems by a dude to share on here there’s always a moment where I have to pause and think ah wait did it turn out this guy was a fascist or a pervert or both and instead of looking into it’s safer just to go with one by a woman. Not that they can’t be fascists and perverts too but it’s just playing the odds.
Ok wait maybe this is a better summary of Hell World. A Los Angeles Times reporter touring through some of the wealthy areas under evacuation because of the fires found immigrant housekeepers showing up to clean the homes of the rich families they worked for some of whom hadn’t even bothered telling them they didn’t need to come in on account of the local apocalypse.
The streets were mostly empty throughout the neighborhood — except for the workers who tend the gardens, clean the hilltop homes and care for the children in one of the city’s most affluent communities.
An officer from the Los Angeles Police Department, who asked that his name not be used, said he had told at least 10 determined workers in the neighborhood to leave.
“For the most part it was evacuated. I’m driving around and I see people working,” he said. When he asked what they were doing, the laborers told him again and again: “I have to finish.”
Read the whole piece it’s extraordinary but here’s a bit more of it:
Along the way I ran into Ana Martinez, 38, who had also showed up to her housecleaning job just as the residents were evacuating. They told her they wouldn’t need her Monday. Before she left, her boss gave her a mask.
As I paused to write, I spotted a man cutting grass in front of a nearby home as residents fled the neighborhood in their cars.
Chon Ortiz, 50, knew about the fire. He was stuck in traffic on his way into the neighborhood. The owners did not ask him to work, but he had three homes along this route.
“If they say I have to evacuate, I will,” he said in Spanish. “But I need to work.”
Another gardener, Teofilo López, 72, raked the leaves outside an evacuated home at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Kenter Avenue. He’s worked at this house for 40 years. Originally from the Mexican state of Jalisco, he said he argued with authorities over whether he could bring his truck in.
He ended up parking and walking to the house as authorities were busy blocking off the nearby road. He turned on the sprinklers, adjusting them to keep the grass well-watered. I asked him if he was scared with all the ash and smoke, and he threw up his hands.
“What can I do?” he said. “I need the money, I need to work.”
What does it make you feel when you read that? For me it makes me think about the old cliche about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic but I feel like that doesn’t hold up as well as it used to in the era of Hell World because that scenario implies stubborn obliviousness more than anything else. That is of course a part of our approach to climate change but it simply doesn’t rise to the level of malice and cruel indifference implied in the updated version described here so going forward I propose it should be something else something maybe like mowing the lawn of the mansion on fire.