Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.

Now, since this is coming out a week after the fires were perhaps at their worst (it’s difficult to tell from my position writing this a week ago), I’m sure things have largely settled down to how they used to be on Bluesky (or at least as much as they can with the impending Trump inauguration). I bet there’s still plenty of talk of what happened (and is still happening) since you don’t see a major city ravaged by fire and then move on with life but, right now, it is impossible to get a view of Bluesky on my phone or on my computer that doesn’t include some information about the LA fires. I’ve been spending a lot less time there as a result since there’s only so much disaster I can take before it starts to wear me down, but it’s been striking to watch not only how the affected communities have come together to help each other but how many people have reached across the internet to lend what aid they can. We’ve got direct aid via GoFundMes, pledge drives as people raise money for aid organizations, tons of support and education about the various firefighters (I’ve learned a LOT about the effective slave labor that is inmate fire fighting squads) and the places they hale from, and even people setting up shop to start hunting down landlord price gougers who are likely going to start hiking up rents in the aftermath of this disaster. Turns out that it is illegal (in California, at least) to increase rent by more then ten percent and just about anyone can report that stuff when it they find evidence of it (which is fairly easy to do since most rental listing sites also list the previous rent and when it was changed). It really is great to see people band together to do what they can to help each other during a disaster like this one.

Still, even with all of this unfolding, I can’t help but feel a little guilty about watching all of this from afar. Especially because I keep finding myself thinking that at least the place I live is relatively free of that kind of risk. There’s plenty of other risks and I’m sure it is only a matter of time until yearly massive wildfires become commonplace, so the thought isn’t exactly something I should take comfort in, but it the incredibly disaster-filled start of 2025 has me tempted to find whatever mental and emotional shelter I can grasp. It’s not like things are going to get better from here, broadly speaking. I might wind up looking back at this part of early 2025 and wistfully thinking of how relatively calm it was. The time warping effects of 2020 are hard to forget and while I’ve had plenty of other incredibly long days, weeks, and months since then, I can’t help remembering just how long the last two weeks of March 2020 were. Time might be distending as I watch a highly-populated area burn to the ground as so many of the artists I follow online find themselves forced from their homes and can only hope that this will be a temporary situation rather than a permanent one, but at least every day is still passing, albeit in a way that feels much long when looking back on them. 2020 was not unique, after all, and it’s a bit scary to think about how this year could easily wind up being just as distended as 2020 was.

Regardless of all else, this is an awful situation for a lot of people and I hope they can get their lives back together again without needing to deal with skyrocketing rent [this is already happening as of editing this the day before it goes up, which sucks] or any similar problems heaped onto what is probably already more problems than anyone should have to deal with. I wish there was more that I could do, but I’ve already contributed what I can afford and while I’m physically doing a lot better than I was even a week ago, I still don’t have the energy to spend my evenings hunting for rental listings that increased more than ten percent in the wake of the fires [though plenty of people seem to already be on top of that]. Maybe this weekend (last weekend), if I recover from this week and today’s labors faster than I expect to, I’ll have the energy to get up to some price-gouging-hunting [I did not: last week kicked my ass]. That and setting up my apartment for the impending cold spikes that have appeared in the forecast. The mild portion of the winter appears to be over and now, instead of just getting incredibly cold, we’re going to start flip-flopping between “normal” low temperatures (in the positive and negative single Fahrenheit digits) and unseasonable warm ones (got a few days coming up after our cold spike that will be above freezing). At least my apartment won’t be destroyed by the cold, thanks to the infrastructure we’ve got in place and I can always turn the heat up a bit more if I need it. It feels so wild, sometimes, to think about a part of the world dealing with wildfires in the mid-sixties (temperature) while I’m sitting on my couch, wrapped in blankets as I wonder about whether or not I’ll need to turn up my heater in order to keep up with the sinking temperature.