this is all too much.

a note on the grief of the week + lists, links, recs

poppy’s tree. i’d be so sad to lose her.

Dear ones, 

On the second day of the LA fires, P and I traipse through the frozen snow, our breath in the still Ohio air like smoke. We are talking about collapse, and all the things people like us say in the face of it— things about colonialism, about capitalism, about preparedness. On our path, we see squirrels run from their tree trunk cubbies, we see deer and hear blue jays. I think of how the real estate losses reported by the media do not include the nests and dens and burrows. We arrive at the spot by the lake we visit in memory of the baby we lost, and I touch the branches that shadow over her, imagine them as ash. When we are home, I weep into my sturdy boycat’s fur. (I cannot think too long about the pets). I have a number of friends in LA, all of whom are safe insofar as they are alive, but I know they will be altered by this loss. (I keep remembering that poem on the art of losing being easy; I usually like it, but this week it makes me angry.) Someone posts images of California juxtaposed to bomb-fires in Palestine, and I want to scream under the weight of it. This is obvious to say but I will say it: this is all too much.

This whole week (even before the fires), I couldn’t stop thinking about a story I heard about Muhammad Ali. There was an eviction in Chicago, police were throwing someone’s furniture and belongings onto the curb. Just trashing an apartment, a home. A group of protestors gathered; Bernardine Dohrn, a law student at the time (and future member of the Weather Underground) was among them. She felt someone behind her, a large looming presence; he asked her to hold his jacket. Ali pushed through the crowd, toward the furniture, picked up the kitchen table, and marched it right back into the apartment. The crowd followed suit. The eviction was stopped. 

Radicals are broken records with the things we say about how we can’t rely on the state, about how we have to take care of each other. We keep saying we have to take things into our own hands, break the law, stop the evictions, learn to medic, pack a go-bag, insist on anti-capitalist & anti-colonial environmental strategies rather than hollow nonprofit and Green New Deal bandaids. (These things don’t work!) And anyway, we all sound crazy until we don’t. 

In disasters, we all pick up the furniture, you know? In her 2009 book, Rebecca Solnit argues against the philosophy of Social Darwinism through countless examples of how people take care of each other in the aftermath of horrific weather events, and other mass tragedies. She writes: “If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.” In 2025, though, most systems fail everyday, not just in times of distress. They are always failing the most marginalized communities (they were built to entrench them), and now they are failing social tiers beyond the most abject. ‘We are free to live and act another way’ everyday.

I want to hold onto the hope of that, but I am sad this week like everyone is. I feel extra layers of grief for the way that LA is familiar to me; it was, if I’m honest, my first place-based-love outside of Ohio. (I had considered going this month, for my first time, to celebrate my 40th birthday and connect with friends and see the place I daydreamed about living for most of my childhood. I decided against it, largely because of medical issues and being unsure if I’d have to use my break for another surgery. But I am feeling the haunting of that plan.) So I am grieving it in this particular way, and I like what Sarah Kendzior says in this essay, how “people rag on television, but it holds whole relationships together,” and that of course we feel some sense of shared memories with the landscape. 

Y’all know me by now, you know my deal: b/millionaires should not exist, but I believe that magical storytelling should. I am grieving the non-celebrities far more than those who have enough in a bank account to rebuild a home tomorrow, I am grieving the plants and animals and air. But I think it’s silly to ignore that many of us probably feel some extra connection to this city. (And there are plenty of people who make movies happen who are not rich celebrities. “Hollywood is a working-class union town,” my friend M, who lived there/worked in the industry for decades, always says.)

Okay, this is messy, I’ll stop here. Before the (most recent) horrors, I had begun collecting my roundup of Reading/Watching/Listening. I have some fun things to share below: my brief review of A Complete Unknown, a new-to-me folk punk band, some end-of-year posts that you may have missed, and lots more. <3 

Oh, one more thing: Kelly Hayes is always such a grounding voice in moments of higher-than–usual despair, and this newsletter offers hearty wisdom as well as many mutual aid links where you can share some dollars to support folks in LA. And here’s a list of GoFundMes supporting displaced Black families.

I love you. Let’s pick up the furniture. 

love & solidarity, 

raechel 

Reading.