The very Un-Divine Comedy

This last couple of days have been really really hard on me personally. Thirty-eight years ago, on Friday February 13 1987 Jeanette and I closed escrow on our house, called Hop Sing’s Honeymoon House by my old crew at Arroyo Restorations because Carl Curtis the owner of the original ranch had added onto the original bunk house and gave it to his Chinese cook when the cook got married. We moved in on Valentines Day 1987. Valentine’s Day in the Honeymoon house. I filled it, broke as we were just buying a house, with tulips from Jacob Maarse who had a mind-blowing selection every year for decades. We began our long honeymoon in the honeymoon house on Valentines Day. The loss of that house makes Valentines Day really difficult.

It is the knowing that the house, the garden, the studio, the antiques, my notes of interviews with families of each of the prior owners of the house, all my parents and grandparents and great grandparents things and all the things we collected are gone forever and that rebuilding will be controlled by heartless brain dead zombie code Nazis who care not about anything but their brain dead regulations.

Already the promises of politicians are being discovered to be false and the news cameras are not noting the untruthfulness. All happy upbeat non real human-interest stories to rub a few pounds of salt into the wounds. Endless rounds of Lawyers pretending to be community champions. Meetings meetings meetings. No forward movement for the community.

We hear stories of FEMA the Army Corps years later levying hundreds of thousands of dollars in Paradise for lot clearing. No one will say if its true or not. No one will definitively say what the exact deal with the lot clearance is. it’s all squishy. That has to be because we are being lied to in a land grab. Did I say that out loud? How dare I.

Yes, Clearly from the video evidence, Edison’s towers arcing caused the fire. But Edison was under contract to both the PUC and the Board of Supervisors to do brush clearance under their towers. They have not done that clearance in 30 years. Government negligently ignored this failure. No lawyer wants to touch government.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District refused to allow the Forest Service proscriptive burn permits for decades, The Board of Supervisors said and did nothing. They had members on the SCAQMD. They allowed the public health and safety to be threatened for decades and except for Mike Antonovich they said and did nothing. No lawyer wants to sue them.

The Fire Department found that 40% of Altadena’s fire hydrants were not up to standard. The Board of Supervisors did nothing. The County had Foamex machines. They deployed them to Mount Wilson and JPL but did not protect our homes with them.

The firefighters stood by in their Nomex turn out coats, respirators and fire helmets and never even picked up a garden hose to help residents fighting the fire with garden hoses. They looked on or directed traffic as our town and our honeymoon house burned to the ground. But everywhere people are celebrating our heroic firefighters.

This Valentines Day feels like I’m stuck in a bad movie of people living in a propagandized nation where they are being fleeced by everyone. It’s a nightmare I can not awake from because so far it seems to be the only reality. I took Jeanette to our favorite diner for breakfast this morning. My mothers care giver had a last minute thing to deal with and I had to cancel our dinner reservations. Somehow after five years of constant hits and the loss of everything, we just shrug. Just another damn thing. Without then Honeymoon house it seems like life has become a very undivine comedy.