Scary

So, as you may have heard by now, the year-long drought and unusually severe Santa Ana winds currently rampaging across Southern California have created a series of wildfires running from just north of here all the down to the border, and they're only getting worse. Here's what it looked like from a satellite just a few hours ago. From space! That's really freaky. (For those of you unsure of the scale here, those islands vaguely visible in the middle of the photo are the Channel Islands and the large body of water in the lower right corner is the Gulf of California -- here's the approximate equivalent on Google Maps.)

I'm perfectly safe here in the city, although weather.com sent me an alert this morning telling me that fire-related particulates were making the air quality even worse than usual, and that not only should I not exercise outside today at all, in fact I should stay inside as much as possible, and run my (non-existent) air conditioner in order to filter the air. But I'm worried for friends, like Former Neighbor Girl, who is sitting at home with car packed waiting for the Malibu fires to head her way and force her (et famille) to evacuate, or my new friend J-F, who on Thursday told me we'd head sometime soon to his beautiful house in the mountains to the east, a house that as I type may be engulfed in flames (nearby houses already gone), and Joce, who may be headed my way from northern San Diego to crash in my place with two kids and cat and dog, because closer friends are also possibly going to be forced from their homes at any second. I wish there was something I could do, other than read about symbolic capital and the political field (I'm prepping for class tomorrow). Nothing like Mother Nature to remind you just how pathetically small and helpless you really are in the overall scheme of things...