good bad days
I keep taking walks with my friends and painstakingly laying it out: the opportunities that have disappeared, the industries that are crumbling, the deep and abiding uncertainty I feel about my future. I was supposed to teach a class for Catapult this year, but then their billionaire owner decided to pivot to... The Perception Box? And then BuzzFeed News shut down and replaced us all with AI. It's not just me. It feels like half of LA is on strike right now: the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, of course, but hotel workers, too. The AMPTP says they're going to starve people out of their homes but I already know someone who's had to leave the city because the writers' strike made her unable to pay her rent. She wasn't mad about it, or at least, not mad at the writers.
And yet. It has been beautiful, these last few months here. We had heavy rain all winter, and the canyons are lush with life: yellow mustard, lavender borage, the sweet soft leaves of sage. Lizards dart across the path, black-eyed and quick. Ducks glide down the center of the arroyo. I watched a coyote drink from a little river the other day, its fur glistening in the light.
I was in the Catskills a few months ago with a group of women. I was walking on a trail that ran alongside the Delaware River. I had gotten sweaty climbing a hill and taken my shirt off, baring my shoulders, my stomach to the cool spring air. The girl I was talking to lives on the east coast, and she asked if it felt as apocalyptic as it looked out west. The fires and all.
The world is ending! The world as we know it is ending! Climate change is already warping everything past the point of recognition. There is no coming back from what we've done.
"No," I said. "No, I mean, sometimes, but mostly it's like this: the good days are so good that it's hard to believe anything will ever really go wrong."
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I had the privilege of interviewing Donovan X Ramsey about his new book, WHEN CRACK WAS KING: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF A MISUNDERSTOOD ERA, for The LA Times. Read our chat, but really, read the book.
And I'm going to be teaching for a place not-owned by a billionaire, about what sex can do for non-romance novels, and how to write it.