It's impossible to overstate how dramatic the fires in northern California have been. Weeks, cumulative months of unbreathable air. Not like, 'smog'. Air that will permanently damage you. You can't see down the street. The sky is blood red. And within those weeks, days where it's coming from somewhere so close that you need to prepare for evacuation.
We've obviously had many fires before, increasing in intensity to this point, but this year was the first that I recall having to keep our windows shut for weeks in a row, during 100-degree weather. I can't stress how depressing that is. For me, I've been doing fairly well, mentally, during this nearly year-long pandemic (did we mention the pandemic in which every level of government failed us spectacularly yet?), but there is something uniquely horrible about the compounding that with the sticky, ripe, damp heat of a tightly-sealed housing unit explicitly built to rely on airflow during hot weather.
That's something most people don't seem to realize when they wonder, "well why don't you just have AC?" Housing in California accounts for the (normally beautiful) regional climate with high ceilings and lots of windows, in the same way housing in the midwest does by necessitating basements for hurricanes and tornadoes. Beside the fact that the fires and pandemic are awful crises, most of us aren't living in places designed to be converted into hermetically-sealed cubes.
This is to say nothing of what it must be like to go through one of the worst years in US history, in one of the most intensely-affected regions in the country, on the year of your child's birth. Can't fuckin imagine.
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