in our California, nothing is promised

not even the ground beneath our feet

Here come those Santa Ana winds again.

—Steely Dan, “Babylon Sisters,” 1980

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

— Joan Didion, 1965

I love it. I do. But I come from a catastrophe of a state. You never learn to live with it, but you do learn to live with it. If you know what I mean. And if you know what I mean, you know that when those notorious Santa Ana winds get to whipping those flames, it’s over. “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination,” wrote Joan Didion. “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”

If it’s not a fire, the earth is quaking. Like so…