Have a Wonderful Crisis

This week in the apocalypse.❤️‍🔥

This week.

This week has felt like being locked inside a bathroom stall while some angry goon bangs on the door from the other side. HURRY UP, IT’S TIME. HURRY UP.

Meanwhile, I’m rushing to get decent before the world crashes in.

Is it really time? Is it?

2025 is charging forward. Los Angeles in flames. Trump taking office. More news about terrible things done by powerful people. Laundry and dishes and deadlines piling up as I scroll and scroll and do not feel better for it.

I’m speechless at all the loss, all the heaps of ash and heartache.

And whether you’re the thick of it or not, you’re still scrolling, watching multiple apocalypses unfold in real time.

“It looks like the setting of a video game,” my husband says, turning his screen towards me. A drone flies through the burnt-out city. Charred palm fronds and twisted metal frames reach into the sky, skeletal and ashy. They’re like the opposite of search lights—do not come here, they say. Do not come find this place.

My husband suggests, if our neighborhood ever starts to burn, that we throw our belongings into the street.

“See the street? It’s not burned. Everything else is burned, but not the streets,” he points at the images and it’s true—there are strands of gray, unburnt asphalt woven through the charred landscape, like webbing strung between houses and buildings that no longer exist.

All connected, all razed to the ground.

I used to live in Southern California. It’s been almost three decades since I did, but I had the most beautiful childhood there—simple, uncomplicated, sunny. Of course, a lot of it wasn’t the place. I had parents who loved me, food on the table, and bikes to ride around the neighborhood with my sisters. But there was also a beach to visit. A park, a library, a church. I haven’t seen them in years, and I know they haven’t burned, but I know how I’d feel if they did.

Speechless. Gutted, devoured from the inside.

Grateful, too, but still so, so hollowed out.

The Altadena Community Church

Coping is tricky, I think. You learn it best by doing, by seeing how well you can contain those waves of pain that ripple out from the center of the wound.

Not contain as in bottling up, not that. Contain, as in keeping the pain soft and liquid enough to be poured into the right spaces. Contain, as in keeping it from barreling down the hill like an avalanche.

I find I want desperately to direct all this hurt somewhere. I want it steered towards the cause, to turn the flames like a controlled burn towards those cowards in power who see so much suffering and then, like convicts on the run, absent themselves from any meaningful action. Those cowards who choose now, when the world is licked by flames, to come together and what—

ban a video app?

Eat cake at Mar-a-Lago?

Climb ladders?

And where will those ladders lead, once the bottom rungs have been burnt away? I’m breathless with rage. They’re raising glasses, toasting to their victories. It’s all so hollow and false.

But there are still gifts, even now. There always are. I’m trying to remember to hold them tight, now and always.

Recently in my scrolling, I found this, a Christmas card addressed to an Uncle Tim, from Levi, who is clearly still learning to spell. I think it says “wonderful,” if you can’t decipher it:

(image from reddit u/Segrare)

I think it’s OK in this moment to slip between worlds—to feel both the joy and the devastation—and to wish that all the suffering could be undone in one swift motion, like pulling the stitches from a seam.

Maybe it will happen.

I hope it does.

Until then—have a wonderful crisis,

❤️‍🔥Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian❤️‍🔥