Well, what is this burning? I wish you could see what I have just seen. The firestorm has little to no likelihood of reaching Hillcrest, my part of the San Diego world, but its effect is still everywhere. I went out around the corner to make a deposit at the bank, and instead met a scraggly looking group of forlorn customers who didn't know what to make of there being no deposit envelopes. One ATM out of service. The bank closed. No banking today.
So we all sort of disbanded and walked around the bank, and realized, well this also means no Starbucks. No Moo Time Creamery. Instead, it seemed like the end of the world, the opening landscape of some Ray Bradbury novel where everyday novelties like mochas or cash withdrawals had no place. A gentleman passed by me with what was either a space-age or Fisher Price gas mask. Another gentleman had a colorful scarf wrapped around his face, like the Liberace of train bandits. I stood there on the corner, an isolated figure in a black bucket hat that would have otherwise been a ridiculous accessory for a sunny day.
Without thinking, I waved my right arm in a motion to sweep away the little ash particles around me. I wondered for a second why I didn't wear my sunglasses out, so that I wouldn't have to squint, but then I thought about just how bleak the world would look to me then. Already, it was a strange haze of colors -- ashen, gray, orange. Monochrome with a warm splash. The streets were dusty and deserted.
I walked into a stationer's store, one that had always been around the corner and which I had never thought of patronizing. Nobody was inside except the two owners who stood idly under the white lights, chatting. For a moment I was distracted from the weirdness because I was delighted by the amount of stationery around me. There's something about stationery where you just want to buy all of it. It's not practical nor necessary; and your Palm Pilot, cell phone, and laptop have long replaced the need for smooth pens and crisp paper. There was something about my childhood that I saw in all of those products, and I had fantastic notions of putting them to use at home.
I left the store and thought about how it would somehow be oddly comforting to be eating an ice-cream bar while walking around all of this ashen nonsense. I went to the 7-11 and got a Good Humor Oreo Bar. I traversed back, through what was actually a diffused cloud of incinerated remnants. I wondered if the black flakes on my ice cream wrapper were Oreo cookie crumbs or instead a little bit of a burnt home, wild brush, maybe even somebody's memory, now in the form of nought.
posted by Lucy Sloan @ 3:51 PM
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