Meanwhile on the other side of the country, the grass which gives this state its nickname has dried crisp and turned golden. It shimmers brittle in the wind and heat with the rusty bramble and brown shrubs that were so green last spring--of course, only where threads of the ecosystem remain. The rest is a garden, constantly watered; the sudden phish-swish of sprinklers cranking up at night must cause heart palpitations in the brush rabbits that hop around on coastal golf courses.

Hungry masked raccoons had invaded the Dumpsters the other night when I got home from work, and they hesitated just a moment, made sure that I was not a cop and returned to their loot. Their paw prints, fossilized, remain along the dusty trail up here along the ridge, where only six months ago everything seemed under water and oozed with life; not that California dies once a year. It just becomes combustible. The flames both cull the old and create the new, but we call it a natural disaster when uncontained wildfires breech civilization and consume homes along the edge of where the world, beaten and battered, has some semblance of its old identity. Over in the heart of Napoleon's territorial giveaway, similar ethics apply; the natural world, so hidden beneath the unnatural, gains no friends by making an appearance. If we have fires out here this year (and we should, given the amount of rain last winter and how much non-human life the waters brought to fruition), our complaint will also be that due to the vagaries of nature, humans suffer all too much.

The mayor says "likely, thousands" referring to the death toll from Katrina in New Orleans. This is no "American Tsunami," and it's distressing to hear that phrase because the rest of the country (heck, the world) knew about the hurricane a day or so before it hit, and heard repeated warnings that it was necessary to leave. I think assumptions about stubborness on the victims' part are moot. Poverty, mental and physical illness probably contributed more to these people being trapped than their own recalcitrance. What do you do in the event that you don't have a car and when you're all alone in a city that has neglected you for decades? You can only climb onto the rooftop for so long before the water goes over it. The hurricane lasted a few hours and picked off a few dozen here and there, but it is the broken levees, designed by men in suits to hold back the inevitable, that have done in these victims. Civil engineering arrogance did nothing to stop the Mississippi floods 15 years ago, or to hold together the Bay Bridge in 1989 or the I-5/14 L.A. interchange in '94 or the incessant coastal mudslides of Southern California. We expect nature to submit to our whims when we build cities in places they have no business being (even Las Vegas, like preserved glass in the dry heat, can only last until the next Ice Age). Mostly, New Orleans has filled like the sink it is; its foolhardy pipes have backed up with sharks and sewage in the mix and its basin has overflown. Intransigent nature eventually trumps human stubborness, even if it takes 300 years.

What can ya do? Katrina's everything Lionel Barrymore described. But not quite. A couple months ago I mumbled some hurricane hummenah with the suggestion that interest in such catastrophes wanes (that word again) over summer. Well, not when one as cataclysmic as this comes along! Hoo-boy, we got us a category 5 coming right at ...wait, make that a category 4, category 2... shucks, it's getting smaller, and with it, all the excitement. Besides, all those people drove out of town. Dangummit, where's the high death count (apparently numbers are relative)? All that NPR and CNN, (well, Yahoo! News) wasted on nothin'. Meanwhile I'd like to know why they keep NOLA there in the first place. Shouldn't they hang their heads in shame?

Guess 300 years ago the French didn't think much about sea levels and such. They built their little slave port on that ugly ol' swamp as a gateway to the browner Americas and to ease trade with the West Indies. Not unprecedented. Where would Amsterdam be without drainage and reclaimed wetlands? "Reclamation," after all, implies that it belonged to the people in the first place, and engineers and city planners are just official repo men. All land belongs to us, and a hurricane is just another of nature's brutal tactics to wrestle it out of our hands, like a nighttime mugger going for our money. The city needed, economically, to remain even after it burned down, and so the occupying Spanish rebuilt it all pretty like. How can you sell kidnapped Africans without a place to do business? Need to carry the cargo on ships, gotta dock them ships somewhere nearby. Might as well have a lot of shiny hotels and entertainment so the buyers will feel generous at the auction. And after that, well, after a Civil War made the whole big-money reason irrelevant, there was no turning back. The town had so much old world charm.

The readership of this waning experiment remains sporadic and disinterested: quick clicks from random searches, a faithful sister, occasional hits from a curious windy-city grad student who picked it up in the Crooked Corners Library, a pair who write their own exquisite blog in Greece and one bored co-worker. My own mother only thinks to read it after we talk on the phone, and my so-called best friend the psychic can't get into it--"too tricky," she says, which is fine. Why would she bother to read what she already knows via smoother supernatural channels? We foraging creatures on the move have very little time to waste. And after all, our friends and family have only low-interest stock in our aesthetic forays, knowing full well that a true investment would not pay off, much. I suspect most human relationships hinge on convenience of geographic or genetic happenstance despite the advances we have made in communication and transportation. Out of sight, out of mind, they say, and in this busy 21st century, techie doodads and clogged roadways limit loyalty to coincidental meetings or the stubborn effort of social holdouts like myself as much as deserts and broken telegraph wires did 150 years ago.

Following the line of that tangent, last night, opting against reruns or getting too far into a new book after having just finished Gore Vidal's illuminating Burr, I shoved myself out the door and into the car in order to drive the five miles canyon-wise to town...("to town" in this place where everything is a town sounds anachronistic, doesn't it, like foghorns or the bellow of tule elk). Town, of course, stops short of the water, and that was my true goal: to face out into the dark swell and contemplate absence. But some odd unknown barge of floodlights sat offshore and fine-lined my shadow, as if I had come onto a cabaret stage to sing. Nothing doing. Instead I walked away from salt and sand back up to the street, where someone I know, ancillary to someone else I know better, was checking his cell phone messages in the doorway of a restaurant.

Aaron, more than a little inebriated, said that he was in search of a cheeseburger, which he believed would make him less drunk so he could drive to LA. The restaurant was inconveniently closed, however, so he lured me another block, bought some Cheetos at a liquor store and ate them on our way back to the club where our mutual friend Jason lurked somewhere inside. I shared with Aaron the regret that I hadn't heard from Jason for a long time, since before I headed south into suburbia, and that all emails and phone calls, spaced far apart, had not received a reply. "Stay here," Aaron said, patting me on the back and wiping his cheese doodle fingers on my linen shirt. "I'll go get him." Half an hour later, the friend I've known for eight years finally wandered out, so far gone that he wouldn't recognize his own reflection, much less someone he hasn't seen for 20 months. So I tugged him over and kept our reaquaintance lecture free, discerned from his wide pupils and angry voice that his soapy life had endured predictable lumps as of late. Aaron scolded Jason for dwelling, but our friend shook his head and said, "Erik hasn't heard it."

Well, that's a shame.

The withdrawal of settlers from the rural Midwest proceeds and has sparked a number of controversial plans for the altered landscape. Should we hand it over to the descendents of early inhabitants, who might encourage bison herds to regroup at a legendary scale? I dunno. The tribal hunters and gatherers of yesteryear exterminated their share of good eats, mowing down mastadons and giant sloths like pheasants in October. How about establishing a new habitat for threatened animals whose own continent may no longer be able to support them? Better than your average drive-around zoo, I suppose, but kinda sad and dangerous. Just because we got all grabby in the nature pot early on doesn't mean we can make up for it by being randomly bulimic.

The introduction of (hu)man(s) to any environment has consequences readily observable by anthropologists and, these days, anyone with a TV. The construction of homes on an "uninhabited" strip of Mediterranean real estate not only brought about decades of war, but the population decline of many desert species. Homo homo sapiens started out intrinsic to the natural world, but once we spread out over the continents, other mammals and their non-furry allies lost territory left and right.

What remains behind, when properly abandoned, can probably with encouragement make a comeback. But it takes a lot of dollars, detail and progressive politics to return an ecosystem to the epoch of yore. Still, if it can be done in the Golden State, there's hope.

The diminutive elf causes mischief, misdirecting with its magic. It can be heroic, as Legolas in "The Lord of the Rings," and is often misunderstood, like Hermey the dentist, pal of Rudolph.

When a California Hummer dealership and some of its patrons found their trucks slightly molten as if by hail of anger in 2003, a news anchor(woman) led the story with the blurb "Domestic terrorism in the Southland!" Since the event had happened some time at night and only cameras witnessed the aggression, the report stood out as egregious hyperbole. Molotov cocktails differ from rolls of toilet paper, indeed, but not a single person suffered loss of life or limb.

Eventually, as expected, ELF was also, aptly, blamed. An acronym formed not out of irony, ELF finds itself on watchlists and in GOP spam equated with Osama, the Saudi, et al.

Should our lexicon co-opt "terrorism" (an attempt to elicit change by use of fear and the application of indiscriminate harm) to describe the boneheaded acts of petty vandals with a message? Of course the men and women who commit crimes in the name of their cause deserve contempt and maybe even airplay as shoddy anarchist amateurs wo go about things the wrong way. But as our society begins to equate Muslims with terrorism, as it does, it could also begin to equate environmentalism with the same misapplied word. And, as if to underscore the absence of logic that permeates our current ill-mannered war on terror, the damage done to the climate by voracious Hummers and their offroad cousins is labeled not as an act of stupidity or ignorance, greed or selfishness (or of terrorism), but of red-blooded American choice--of citizens celebrating freedom and their basic right to buy.

It's tiring, even deadening to hear the same words over and over again ("threatened," "endangered," "facing extinction") and not resent the stubborn stupidity of those who pretend deafness in order to go on breeding and imposing on the globe their gross superstition. Stewards of the earth, kicked out of the garden, resent the place from where they came. And twin to this selfish grudge is greed; that's why fishermen "with no other option" enjoy anti-conservationist notoriety--the Simon Peters of ecological ignorance (if only they would follow Jesus away from their boats). If God created the earth, they seem to believe, he made it for them to exploit. One current creationist conspiracy underway in the Galapagos pits disciple against evolution. Do men who worship fish intend to crush Darwin by eliminating the source of his epiphany? It isn't just geriatric tortoises that lose their beach property. The legendary uniqueness of the archipelago must fight two millenia of holier-than-thou fruitful excess, not to mention corrupt officials--the direct descendents of Catholicism's founders--with a sovereign entitlement to invade and pillage as usual. Is it something in the genes, passed down from generation to generation? I suppose not.

The fog doesn't sink low enough to comingle with degenerates. It hovers just above our heads as if to impede us from some blessed heaven that is, after all, imaginary. Beneath this bleak blockade of weather we forget the lie of eternal bliss above the grey, the hopeful myth that good behavior somehow manifests a reward of peace. Down here on the potholed pavement of an abandoned hotel, somewhere near the ocean shore, even parking has its dangers. The orange refinery casts cataclysmic light across the black ribbon of railroad tracks and complements the neo-gothic mise en scene. I hear the whistle and gathering gallop of a passing train, but see nothing. I feel that I have witnessed the appropriate wail of a ghost.

In the meantime a reunion of sorts takes place in one desperate corner of this darkened seaside dump. I "know" people here, but not well enough. Some I know more than others. Some, it seems, know each other. Some I wish I didn't know. Some I wish I knew, but have never met, and would probably regret knowing if I did. I feign oblivious enchantment with these vain, unsavory characters, the derivative cast of an 18th-century novel, complete with morose political and romantic intrigue. Yet they have corrupted and devolved, maintaining all the sensuality and sophistication of flies that need swatting. Is this self-contempt? Or simply cold observation and a hallucinogenic longing for the low clouds to open up and let me rise? Since I know that such glories do not happen, I linger in this seedy paradox and only dream of paradise.

There's a lot of junk off the freeway near quaint Granada Hills, where middle class housewives hate to wake up knowing that while they were dreaming of the next American Idol, LA's garbage depository doubled in size. They would have this trash heaped somewhere else, while mindlessly, I suspect, contributing to it every time they get the chance. Vaguely enlightened by asthma and cancer, Los Angeles recycles roughly 60 percent of its throw-outables and strives, mostly by lack of storage space, to push that number higher. The low-grade century-long real estate explosion that hisses and bubbles in fits and starts continues, and developers could fill those canyons with condos if the acreage wasn't already slated for last year's computer and yesterday's Evian bottle. Perhaps decades from now when all is paved and parked, the land's extra layer of human refuse will prove a techie benefaction. Companies that profit in 2005 from divvying up the ecosystem can later reap funds for stitching it back together. Buy stock in these high-tech companies and then wait. Your investment will pay off.

Behind the crunch of wine-and-cheese galleries, art shows ad nauseum, and the summer festivals that clog the only eastbound route out of town with headlights and anglo seniors, a forgotten artifact known as the Pacific stretches grey and white into a misty haze. It might be dark except for the Edison-induced eternal daylight of the coast, and the waves, I gather, would be black without a moon.

During sunny hours the beach serves as playground to chimp descendents and their detractors. Volleyball and surfing, a little swimming, people sunning lizardesque. Snorklers and their mechanized SCUBA cousins raise their goggled heads beside submerged rocks, then dive back under, while children casually risk giant waves and death while their mommies tap dance with them over the cramped tide pools, cautiously approaching anything pink, unworried about the undertow that at any moment could suck them out into the hungry abyss.

But this is night, lit haphazardly with white beams that protect porches and balconies from that which lurks. Confused birds swoop across the water and glean the surface. Cargo pallets and fishing wire tangle at the water's edge. Couples make out on square black blankets until the waves crash over them and contribute to their love life a natural mixture of salt, sand and kelp.

I stand alone, why not, watching all this and wondering if there is a fish, by instinct used to darkness, struck as I am by the electric lights where his environment ends and another begins, where the wall of the continent blocks egress like so many shuttle buses and elderly fans of manmade art.

And one day I would like to live so remotely from civilization that the moon blocks my view of it. It would make it very difficult to order out, so all nutrition, circulation, elimination, sanitization would have to be integrated into a system of recycling pumps and technological doodads. Or if people would just SHUT UP then maybe I could live a little closer. But in space, it is very quiet. I could live there in a pod, tube-fed, tube-bled, watching the stars shine and the earth rise as it gets less green and more brown, more blue and less white. Can you imagine being launched away from everything, to have your troubles reduced to a spec in the distance, where all you had to do to wipe that spec from view is hit the left thrusters and turn around? Gaze at Mars and Jupiter for a while, dodge asteroids with your robomatic magnetic field bumpers? And when no longer interested in the firmament or the disintegrating organic matter/energy on the surface of the Earth (all that creepy crawly crud on our planet's crust which is so erroneous and random anyway), let the soft drift of elliptical orbit lull you into a deep sleep? Nothing would matter after that.

what reigns supreme

There are low-grade rumblin's that the new SPOTUS nominee has no regard for environmental law. Of course no regard and ill regard are two different things. One is the witness who stands still and allows the crime to go on without interfering; the other is the criminal, usually directed by some hidden oversight committee of mafia-like bosses in it for the money. For now, and for possibly a long time coming, the three branches ("branches," for lack of a better word) of the federal government ain't got nature's back. So we can hope the ecological, biological and geological victims of this betrayal figure out some way to delay the inescapable. Conservation is, after all, just a way of staving off a manmade crescendo of the timeless cycle. Arguments that we humans, as part of this world, have a right to influence our natural surroundings on our own terms play into this inevitability. We may discount the harm we cause to our own species because Darwin's law of survival of the fittest clears up such ethical messes. What is "bad," anyway, except a naysayer's definition of good? Certainly we can do no more damage than the sun exploding, and who are we to say we're more important than that?

Well, it's 96 degrees, but the Weather Channel says it "feels like 97." This seemingly meaningless difference has a huge psychological impact on people eager to suffer more. But one degree is also the stuff of controversy. Precision is everything in nature, and the slightest fluctuation can have aeonic results that scientists can't live long enough to study. Comics and pundits argue the consequences, but a drop in the bucket can cause the bucket to overflow. Personally I would hate to have any involvement in unwanted flooding.

A fine line of variability extends to all matter and energy. A slight twist of the genetic string, for example, tricked our brains into forming a frontal lobe; and because of this sudden humanity we developed the ability to peel away these gradations like onion skins, to explore how the tiniest bump in the road can cause cataclysm or delight. In fact, there may be no missing link between man and beast, just a shift in the code, and though in a larger sense we can't map the future, we can see the signs and collect some evidence. Tusks disappear from elephants, frogs stop singing, plankton fades from the sea. And of course we have humans who, by some mutation or interference in their personal growth, don't relate or act in the least bit related to the rest of us.

The high curbs remain, stamped with the year of their creation: 1927. A walk up the path behind my former apartment is actually a concrete hike along this four-score-old street, and on a lark I sometimes go back to the old 'hood just for nostalgic aerobic exercise.

Although from all the lights and mailboxes you might not know it, the peaks of the Santa Monica mountains--three or four miles west of where the range ends--still hover above the city. When Rudolf Schindler built his home in the beanfields west of Hollywood, one could trek up those cliffs without having to sidestep hip-hop Hummers or even ah-ooga Model T's. 85 years later, homes fill in the canyon like a flock of resting pigeons. Besides the vertiginous weedy cliffs (sometimes reinforced and covered in a Dada/Christo fusion of plastic and wire to lessen mudslides), nothing remains to resemble pre-development history except the precipitous angle at which these fault-induced hills give a northern boundary to the L.A. basin. At the La Brea Tar Pits, a museum's mural shows the very same outline unmarred, without stilts to prop up stars' balconies and the ruthlessly eclectic architecture. The silent film era captured the last images of wild (and early 20th century) Los Angeles before the city crawled into every nook and cranny. Though the residents change, and the land may shift and move an inch or two every millennium, the iconic horizon remains the same.

The air compacts, and the high heat squeezes the light. The distant ridges look as sharp as cut metal, as if visible through the pinhole of my fist. But this impressive, oppressive temperature that reveals the horizon beyond the usual smog deceives; "good photo days" come at the onset of 100-degree months or when the sky is scrubbed clean by the winter rain afterward. Now approaches the half year of asthma attacks and crud: our ordinary air, a mix of noxious particulates and detritus (soot, really), that collects like a black coat of paint on bookshelves and the carpet and on plants--on everything in Los Angeles County. Shaken from there by a random fault-slip of life, I now live where at least the dust is white and somewhat manageable. It's worse in the Inland Empire and into San Bernardino where the mustard haze wears out lungs like the padded feet of a geriatric bobcat. Out there, smog is the envy of every first-rate illusionist, the way it makes the mountains disappear.

From my brother, word of cleaning up the farm after a storm in Iowa. I hadn't heard about any inclemency there, since the middle part of the country gets little play against the cyclones and earthquakes at the nation's edges, much less when in competition with that whole mass transit/mass murder thingy across the pond.

I vaguely recall such phenomena from my disippating youth (fading into a twinkling blur like the bright trail of a comet, the imposing combustible part being the future). Thunderstorms were those things that we knew were coming, but about which we hesitated. Do we go into the basement? How does the sky look? What does the weather man say?

(Back then it was "the weather man," and we didn't have cable, and usually the power went out so you couldn't watch the storm approach on the news; you had to listen to the battery-operated radio in a box encased in red leather with a metal retractable antenna that you had to point in different directions to pick up whatever signals were out there.)

The crash and grumble of the grumpy sky sometimes came along at the darkest hours, when we watched the ceiling, flat on our backs, still as bunnies in the brush. A flicker of lightning became an all-encompasing white strobe and the resultant slam of clouds overhead made the house jump and our hearts with it. Thunder can be that loud, lightning that fierce. It would split trees in the woods, the ones we'd just climbed the day before. We didn't have toys out there for the wind to scatter, for the rain to ruin. Our world was our playground, and hearing it endure this spanking welled up merciless fear in our dreams.

Spiraling over there on the edge of the map, the white whirl of a massive storm Blutos its way across the Caribbean. The scramble to shore up fragile manmade structures seems familiar, and by October such extensive evacuations have the word "rerun" printed next to them in the TV listings.

Yet early on, the public gathers for this annual event and fondly watches the hurricanes bloom. Something compels us to observe and even celebrate meteorological disasters in all their guilty, visceral glory. What dot on our charted DNA focuses this fascination? What biological routes line up our gaze?

Perhaps facing someone else's strife may help us glance indirectly at our own abyss whenever it comes along. Granted, I make this claim by way of an impromptu hypothesis. Could our common chemical root structure drive us anthroprogenically to seek a united bond through The Weather Channel? Sorry about the big words.

Humanity regroups--reassembling as a single entity--during catastrophe. We seek this out, this prior oneness, whenever blood spills unexpectedly. When we throw the punches, when we drop the bombs, we anticipate the damage, and we pay less attention to the suffering of our complex organism. But when a slight against our fellow man seems unjustified or comes as a shock, we can't help but participate by proxy. I'm not sure if it's just to enjoy the alluring aesthetic spectacle of nature. We may actually care.

London and the nature of kabooms

I've little to add directly to that particular subject which will be served up like brain pudding the next few days by our media and nearly every other blog on the net. Trifling punditry and thinly veiled get-back-ism and finger-pointography will spice up this inelegant meal. But that doesn't mean I can't briefly juggle philosophical idears, if anyone cares to read them.

A series of conflicts, like waves of light, bends and refracts throughout our existence; without reflection we have no view, and the more shattered the glass, the more views we have. I weave through my days subtly, as some do, with an attempt to limit the scale of such disasters personally, but I can't avoid them. No one can avoid bad things happening to them, and societies resemble organisms in that they, too, must suffer in order to exist.

History, from geological to political to deeply human, involves a series of large and small moments that, while cataclysmic or tranformative, compel us forward like the series of explosions in the engine of a rocket. We want a world at peace, but we must fight to get there. We would like to live freely, but we must make laws to do so. Despite our attempts to ease our lives, we have no pure defense.

London is a big town and has seen far worse disasters; the plague, the blitzkrieg, '60s fashion. Three dozen people get blown up in Iraq every day. It appears stuck in a quagmire, so we sort of ignore the flailing limbs of its semi-sinking "democracy." It's only when the booms catch us off guard (after all, we expect ka-splosions in the Middle East), that we open our eyes.

Good is the nothingness between the bad things that happen. Sadly, it's how we react that matters, and we usually manage to make things worse. When you are drowning in quicksand, if you take it easy and put your feet up, you might float. Screaming and flailing around will only make you sink. So relax.

The canyon's acoustics, put to the test, triggered car alarms and cat ears, and all around the darkened hills a red glow flickered for half an hour. Every few miles a crowd had gathered; I imagined from past experience men and women and lookalike children in t-shirts decaled with the stars and stripes (and sometimes the words, "we will not forget!" stenciled across the back). I could not see the commotion, just hear it, as if a war were happening in a border country; and I, at peace with my spider collection on the balcony, stood and listened. At nine-thirty the cacophony intensified for about a minute, and the very tip of the fireworks--like the glistening shock of wavy hair atop a giant's head--became visible over the hillsides. Then it was all smoke. And the crickets, for a short while silenced, smoothed out their wings and began, haltingly, to sing again.

"Guide to California"

Rolling hills of roofing tiles, pink and salmon,
with darker shades of older growth,
with squares of deck and “drives” for parking,
thrive along clear concrete channels, lush and thick,
awaiting rain that falls as often as a holiday.

Nearby, a fecund stand of glass and steel
stretches toward the sun;
these ever-reaching monuments give shade
and offer habitat to countless, heedless life;
they teem, busy with the business of existence.

And in amongst the rushes, if one is patient
and inclined to natural observation,
one may sight a rare delight:
evidence of a sea-to-mountain tapestry
reduced to remnants of its former range.

What’s left are ragged patches of this golden quilt.
Its stitches long exposed and routed,
few seams of wildlife, primordial, remain:
the buggy haze above a spray of shimmering grass,
an aged oak who has long outlived his children.