thursday’s journal entry

last week on Thursday I had writing workshop at Woodbine. i was in charge of the agenda & theme so I decided on fire. writing on, about, and in consideration of fire. it felt topical for a million reasons and painful for a million more. but what is good writing if not topical and painful?

so I guess you could say I’ve been thinking a lot about fire. fires ended and began and started out of nowhere in January and frankly, it was hard to keep track of who started what and when and why and whose job it would be to put them all out in the end.

last night as I was falling asleep after spending the evening watching Rachel Kirkconnell on Call Her Daddy talk about her insanely public (& blindsiding) breakup with former bachelor Matt James, I got a news notification that a passenger flight collided with an army helicopter and crashed.

today on my way to work at 7 am, I received an updated headline that said there were likely no survivors in the crash. The story flashed on my screen as I listened to NPR’s A Martinez talk about the impact of a proposed freezing of trillions of federal funds.

It certainly feels like the world is on fire.

surreal. sobering. scary af.

I have no answers, and I doubt anyone came to this newsletter expecting any. i do have reflections and frustrations and a deep desire to commiserate with anyone interested.

I feel like a 13-year-old girl in a seventh-grade classroom when some annoying boy is poking me and poking me and poking me and the only thing I’m allowed to do is ignore him. After all, everyone keeps telling me that “if I just ignore him he’ll get bored and stop.” and everyone knows that if you are the girl who blows up at the boy in the middle of math class and disrupts the whole thing, you are the one who gets in trouble because you should have known better and you shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously.

that’s what this feels like to me. a whole bunch of boys who were ugly in high school who are poking and poking and poking under the shield of their whiteness and male-ness and their billions of greedy, dirty money to get them out of any blame that might come their way. so they can poke and prod and whisper nasty things in your ears all they want. and it’s these boys who know that once we blow up, once we start screaming, they can tell the whole world some dangerous lie, and everyone will believe them.

the worst part is it’s not 7th grade anymore. And these boys, who experience no real consequences, are now our “leaders” (who’s leaders??) and the richest people on earth. These boys can do the things they said they would with no repercussions. so all those things you heard whispered are no longer whispers intended to get a rise, but instead, they are things that are happening just to prove to us that they can happen. Just to remind us that without their wealth, their maleness, their whiteness, there is nothing we can do but watch our world light up in flames around us.

or at least that’s how I feel.

that everyone i know is hurting.

that everyone i know is anxious and scared and sick to their stomach.

and I just feel really small.

like I’m holding a hose or a fire extinguisher but I’m nowhere near the flame. it’s behind me. and every time I turn it disappears until someone else screams. but by the time I look, it’s changed course.

It’s blazing elsewhere and everywhere and I don’t know where to aim.

I’d like to have more to say on the matter. to deliver a long list of all the ways i’m finding peace or engaging with my community. i can do that a different week, but this week i just feel like it’s all burning around me, and I’m praying it gets nowhere near anyone i love. but as is typical with prayer, there is some denial involved.

the flame, it’s already singe-ing our heels.

The Santa Ana’s