I slept in late today, not that it matters much. Recently John Oliver described the experience of living during the pandemic as “time soup.” The days blend together and I often find myself asking myself, “What day is it?”
Wildfires continue to rage across California—two of them close enough to give a pallid ashiness to the air.
It seems like each year the wildfires get worse. Last year there was a wildfire in Fullerton that got big enough to get an official name on the news.
I’m pretty sure this is related to climate change, an existential crisis that my country seems woefully ill-equipped to deal with.
Toward the beginning of the pandemic I listened to a book called Spillover, which explains how zoonotic viruses (like COVID-19) are a result of human encroachment (through agriculture or settlement) into natural habitats. Orange County Vector Control has recently been spraying pesticides to kill mosquitoes—some of which carry West Nile virus. This is also, I’m afraid, another result of climate change which is a result of humans, like me, using resources. I type these words on a computer that runs on electricity, and I know that electricity in my particular area of the world comes largely from burning things like natural gas.
What to do? Maybe solar panels.
I got a new audiobook today called Assembling California by John McPhee. Listening to audiobooks is a good way to still learn things while relieving the strain on my eyes from reading. I have an insatiable hunger for knowledge about California history. I’m slowly plodding away at writing a local history, but I need the bigger context. California history, like all history, is vaster and deeper and weirder than we can imagine.
Assembling California is about geology, and I learn that for the vast majority of Earth’s history, California did not even exist. I don’t mean the political entity. I mean, like, physically. For much of Earth’s history, the land that would become California was part of the ocean floor. Even the mountains aren’t that old, geologically speaking—just a few million years, a drop in the bucket of deep time.
For some reason, I find this comforting.
