Diary of a day in Los Angeles

It's not over 'til something burns

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

7:00 a.m.

Emily and Andy are still young, so they sleep all day and are active all night. I’m hoping they grow out of this and begin to sleep at night so they don’t disrupt my sleep anymore.

I get up at seven to feed them, fumbling with the can of wet food, squinting without my glasses or contacts.

This’ll shut them up for a while, I think as I shuffle back under the covers for more snoozing.

10:00 a.m.

I never miss my bi-weekly haircut appointment.

In the queer community they joke that a gay man feels at his most powerful immediately following a fresh fade, and it’s true. I love my barber Drew, a Mexican-American LA native who’s younger than me but somehow feels more mature and sage.

He and some of the other barbers are discussing credit scores, mortgage rates, and home ownership. That world is foreign to me. My pulse quickens. He asks me how I’m doing and I mention that I’m stressed about money.

Felix texts me. Can I do a delivery?

His shop The Juicy Leaf is nearby, so it doesn’t make sense to go all the way home. I pop into Lemon Poppy Kitchen for a cortado and blueberry scone.

“The arrangement will be ready around 1:30,” he says in a voice note.

“I’m going for a hike,” I text.

11:30 a.m.

Glendale’s Verdugo Woodlands is leafy and rich. Flavorless mcmansions, fifties ranches, and older Tudors speckle the hillside streets.

Music isn’t right for my hike, so instead I choose an audiobook suggested by Mel Robbins: The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo. The looped handle on my water bottle is broken, so I carry it like a baby all the way to the top.

12:30 p.m.

The Beaudry Loop is harder than I anticipated. My phone says I’ve already passed 8,000 steps and 600 calories. At the Tongva Peak there are radio towers, and only the blinding sunshine and whipping cool gusts greet me. At 2,656 feet, you can see the Burbank Airport, Downtown LA, and far off in the distance, Rancho Palos Verdes.

2:30 p.m.

At home I fix lunch, reply to some emails, and cold plunge in the pool.

4:00 p.m.

I lie down to nap in the afternoon, one of my lifelong guilty pleasures. Golden rays stream through the window panes and a cool breeze whispers sweetly.

7:30 p.m.

After dinner I put on a light jacket and head out on foot toward my favorite ice cream spot. I’ll justify the ice cream by walking, I tell myself. A cone with pistachio and dulce de leche it is.

The evening is cold and quiet, not quite alive or bustling. The city’s hunkered down, the last wisps of winter a little too brisk.

9:00 p.m.

I sit at my computer, which is perched on a stand on my dining table so I can browse online and watch TV. I turn on Mrs. Doubtfire, cackling through all the scenes I remember well and also the ones I forgot about. Robin Williams was a genius.

11:00 p.m.

Emily and Andy love the laser pointer. I like to reward them with food after a heart-pounding session of chasing the red dot, and feeding them just before bed helps make them sleepy.

11:30 p.m.

In the wee hours, I light candles, draw Tarot cards, and journal.

What went well today? I write.

Eyelids are heavy. The cats are calm.

The lights grow dim and I’m ready to be horizontal.

12:00 a.m.

In the dark, I arrange my pillows.

Just as I begin to tumble backward from my eyes as sleep approaches, my ears perk up. I hear sirens in the distance.

Hmm.

Usually a single siren isn’t much to get excited about. But this sounds like several, and I hear air horns blasting—not the usual protocol for low-priority calls.

I sit up.

Before I can process their rapidly increasing volume, I look to the right, through the shade on my bedroom window.

A bright orange glow widens my pupils. Big flames.

Holy fuck!!

Sirens converge on my street from several directions as I scramble to get dressed and grab my keys and phone as I walk into the 50-degree night.

My shirt is inside out.

Down the block, a crowd is already forming. I start filming.

I’m a lifelong firebuff—an enthusiast and spectator of fires, fire departments, and fire trucks—and these kinds of moments are rare. This is my YouTube channel.

At first I think the source of the fire is a nearly finished apartment building on the corner, the former site of a vacant bungalow that had burned before being demolished.

But it’s not those, it’s a 3-story apartment building under construction several lots south. Only the wood frame has been erected, and now it’s utterly ablaze.

Visceral 30-foot flames crack as they leap into the sky. The site is one big campfire, full of fuel. Embers are picked up by the wind and carried west, igniting at least two palm trees on the next street. They burn themselves out before anyone notices.

At this point most of the neighborhood is awake and either watching or trying to move their cars out of harm’s way. My arm aches as I capture the action in landscape mode.

Fairly quickly, LAFD dispatches over twenty companies and ten chiefs to the scene and deploys at least four aerial ladders to neighboring building roofs to ventilate and protect them from the main fire. The shell of a building where the fire began is beyond saving, but exposure protection is the next best thing.

Even from across the street, I can feel the heat of the fire.

Its roar, along with the whoosh of water streams and idling of fire engines, creates a din that’s eerily calm.

It's surreal to be staring at a burning building, camera in hand, wondering how long it takes a fire to be extinguished.

I decide to walk around the block to see which units are on scene.

The urban search and rescue squad called USAR88 has come to Filipinotown all the way from Sherman Oaks, about fifteen miles.

The surrounding houses have to evacuate, so there are elderly Filipino women with walkers in a driveway.

Fire engines have filled the streets in every direction for at least two blocks.

I run into my neighbor Kay and we stand together to watch more.

The building is still smoldering. Small spot fires lick siding and eaves on either side of the main fire site.

Shivering and growing weary of filming, I decide to head back. The climax of the scene has passed, and I’ve seen everything.

Back in my bedroom I can still see the flickering red and yellow lights and bright white floodlights of the scene.

My t-shirt is smoky. The cats are wide awake. I’m wired.

Several of my neighbors texted while I was out filming—the tenants’ group chat is buzzy. Fires are endemic to Los Angeles, not only because of climate, but because rubbish fires and vacant building fires are often started by unhoused people looking for shelter and warmth.

With so many people living on the streets and in cars or RVs, somehow fire has become an everyday occurrence. In dumpsters, in trash bins. I once saw the aftermath of a Miata that had burnt to a crisp on a freeway overpass, its sad little hull slunk even lower to the ground than normal.

Fire’s normalness feels like an analogy for living in Los Angeles.

Continuous destruction and rebirth. A base level chaos and tension that often boils over. A sprawled development pattern enabled by combustion engines. A desert climate on the ocean. Mountains jutting.

Quotidien normalcy and crazy carnage all in a day.

A city on edge, and on the edge. Duality embodied.