The Rain
*Editor’s Note: This entry is rendered as it was written in real time on Decenber 28, 2020.
It finally started raining last night.
This year has been a blur of heat and ash in California.
If memory serves, I don’t think we’ve seen any rain since early in May.
I could almost believe in a god, any of the gods, right now.
The front door is open. I’m listening to the soft tapping of gentle, falling rain outside. It’s lovely. Last night toward the witching hour, the clouds quietly opened up, thunder-less. For fifteen or twenty minutes, it dumped buckets, the kind of deluge that sounds like hail yet isn’t, the type of heavy rain we rarely get in Southern California.
A stark image just crossed my mind; all the dead microscopic viral matter and the residual particulate ash from Californian megafires washing away into the gutters.
I’m woolgathering.
I envision a hodgepodge of hopes, dreams, washing away into those storm drains, mud and grime, misery and heartbreak, floodwaters reaching the doorsteps of empty shuttered storefronts with their ‘For Lease’ signs, soaked, discarded piles of PPE and light blue scrubs, whetting the wheels of sweat-stained gurneys in outside parking lot tents.
I’m hardly the first guy who rolls in the flower fields of wordplay when it comes to finding poetry in the face of disasters. Unoriginal or not, it’s an edge I walk on occasion.
I’m incorporative today.
It’s the end of a year to end all years.
I walk outside.
The steady rain dampens my hoodie sweatshirt.
It is cold.
It feels good.
It feels great.
Now I’m standing curbside on my front sidewalk, looking down at the rising tides of rainwater runoff surging down the avenue, toward drains leading to the Pacific Ocean. The waters are murky brown, filled with soggy leaves. A few mud-caked, three-ply disposable masks float by.
I think of the marked increase in plastic pollution because of Covid, with all the N95 masks and one-time use gloves and nasal swabs, how that Texas-sized island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean is going to get a lot bigger.
Future folk, I do not envy you, in that coming era, presuming you get the chance, of cleaning up generations of neglect and disregard and nonchalance. Same as you might be looking back upon us here in the past, with pity or condemnation. I doubt odds are even on that.
But today, I just want to enjoy the rain.
Back east, there’s massive amounts of snowfall happening. That’s alien to us SoCal folks. We don’t get snow on the coast but once in a very rare blue moon. Big Bear, I’m sure, is powdering well today. I’m equally sure too many Angelenos are heading up to snowboard and ski. I used to snowboard on occasion. Whiteboy merit! Though a bad left ankle prone to rolling made those occasions a thing of the past.
Big Bear Mountain, the local snowboard mecca here in SoCal, is open with Covid restrictions in play, masks at all times, appropriate social distancing measures. Ski resorts, what with their humid, indoor heating systems and their crowded lines at the ski lifts, would seem to be places to avoid during a pandemic. About 7-10 inches of powder dropped last night, definitely enough to attract a good portion of Angeleno skiing enthusiasts, Covid be damned.
In Los Angeles, health professionals dread what’s coming: a New Year’s Eve explosion of Covid denial. Catering and event hosting websites show a clear pattern of continued bookings, their patrons spitting in the face of coronavirus surges rolling across the LA basin. Secret Hollywood Hills and Bel Air mansion parties abound, with the usual trimmings afforded to people of privilege, including strippers, pop-up bars and weed dispensary services, party bus and shuttle transportation, celebrity chef cuisine offerings, and private fireworks displays. Many physicians are getting requests for last minute Covid tests prior to New Year’s Eve outings. Many of them are refusing to enable such behavior.
SoCal is at a breaking point, still deep within the Covid red zone tier, along with the San Joaquin Valley. Still zero percent ICU bed capacity.
NoCal is faring much better. San Francisco and Sacramento have far greater fractions of stability and health care capabilities. It seems their populaces have taken Newsom’s restrictions more seriously than their southern neighbors. The Los Angeles Times reports San Francisco has lowered its hospitalizations from 1,500 to only 300, their ICU capacity has stabilized around 10% over the Christmas week holiday, and they’ve currently got about 100 ICU beds available, in a city hosting about 900,000 people, whereas Los Angeles has half that many beds available for a county of over 10 million people. In short order, this simply means me and my fellow Southern Californians reside in what’s often been posed by outsiders and existentialists alike as one of the most entitled and self-serving regions in the entire country, perhaps the world.
The Times also reported we suffered 442 fatalities yesterday.
A new single day record.
Someone’s dying of Covid every three minutes.
The 2020 trifecta of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s is going to kill a lot of Southern Californians.
Los Angeles is nearly at the 10,000 mark of Covid-related deaths.
In the midst of the worst health crisis the southland has ever faced, a man named Sean Feucht, an evangelical right-wing pastor, failed Republican congressional candidate, and NoCal Christian activist, is planning what he’s calling a ‘massive outreach’ to the denizens of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Feucht was recently tongue-in-cheek tagged by Rolling Stone magazine as “Jesus Christ, Superspreader,” a play on the infamous Broadway production, for his whistle stop touring across the country.
His organization hosts hymnal style ‘Let Us Worship’ concerts. Patrons are largely unmasked, shoulder-to-shoulder, improperly socially distanced, singing their blessed little hearts out in protest of Covid-19 restrictions. Feucht claims lockdowns, masks, and quarantines are Christian persecution. Skid Row has largely been left to their own devices in this later era of the pandemic, after initial attempts at emergency housing winded down. Hand washing stations were set up across downtown, masks were given out by social workers, but it’s still SoCal’s most vulnerable community. Their numbers have increased exponentially these last ten months.
Letting Feucht and his unmasked flock of hundreds who follow him on tour set up a sing-a-long concert smack dab in the middle of their homestead is, as Pastor Steph ‘Cue’ Jn-Marie of Skid Row’s Church Without Walls puts it, “like setting off a bomb of biological warfare.”
Cue is a resolute man of God. I’ve crossed paths with him a couple of times on the streets of Skid Row. He’s a tireless social justice advocate who hosts services on the corner of 5th and Wall Street right there in the thick of the homeless capitol of the United States. In the face of the city’s lack of enforcement in preventing this gathering, Cue’s organizing what he’s calling a resistance blockade, asking supporters to join him in creating a vehicular jam at every access point and street around Skid Row so that Feucht’s tour busses and entourages can’t readily enter the area.
Feucht’s a consummate grifter whiteboy, cloaking himself in conservative Christian rhetoric, a standard guise to whip up photo ops, converts, and most of all his personal coffers. He has no real interest in protecting the people he’s claiming to defend. Few evangelicals do, in my experience. It’s no coincidence he fired up his national tour to coincide with appearances in cities who’ve been hosting Black Lives Matter protests. Before the unrest of this year, he was content to contain his sermonizing to his hometown of Redding, a little redneck ‘burg just a hop, skip, and a jump north of Chico, where I went to undergrad studies. I’ve spent time in Redding. It’s what you’d expect from red state eastern California, lots of Republicans and SoCal expats and central valley retirees who’d love a return to those illusory good old days. A guy like Feucht no doubt would do well there, and so he has, using the opportunism of 2020 to expand his umbrella and branch out from the sticks of northeast California and into CNN headlines.
He’s scheduled a second stop the following day at the Echo Park enclave of un-housed American citizens, a hub that’s vastly expanded since my most recent visit. The last time I saw Echo Park’s town center encampment, there was probably a dozen or so long-term residents camped around the park’s lake. Now there’s better than a hundred shanties and tents. It’s said to be the second biggest tent city in LA County after downtown’s Skid Row.
Feucht is certainly going only to garner media attention rather than actually intending to spread the good Word. Even in normal times, I’d lobby for his ministry to be shut down and ignored, what with its blatant whiteboy propaganda drives. During a pandemic, congregations like his should be outlawed outright. It’s ridiculous people like Cue have to bother with setting up blockades to prevent opportunists from taking advantage of already wildly disadvantaged populations, instead of focusing on volunteer services like distributing food and PPE gear.
Once again, the Christian right rears its head in denial, touting their own freedoms while trampling on others’ freedoms. The greater portions of the unhoused are used to such hypocrisy. I continue to be…un-used to it. After all these years of exposure and quiet philanthropy, the unceasing issue of homelessness fires me up like little else. I don’t know if that makes me more sensitive and thus more susceptible to human clusterfuckery, or if I’m becoming crankier about changing that American condition in my old age.
It won’t be solved in my lifetime.
It is, in many ways, the most visually arresting component of the semi-apocalypse at hand, and that’s probably part of it for me same as it must be for you. We’re constantly reminded of it every single day, those of us who don’t live in rural America. It can’t be demoted to passive sociological discourse like racial strife. It can’t be downplayed and reinterpreted like historical ideologies of class warfare. It’s not invisible like a deadly virus. It’s right fucking there in our faces for all of us to see, whether we want to or not. It makes no sense to tolerate this level of inhumanity in a country with the kind of resources we possess. Zero sense.
The rain is soothing.
Cleansing.
I wish it could wash away our fears, our prides, our conceits.
This morning, I caught a blurb from a feed concerning San Francisco’s aptly named Corona Heights, where another monolith has appeared. It’s got the same relative height and triangular structure as the metal ones, but it’s constructed from large rectangles of gingerbread, held together with actual frosted icing and decorated with gumdrop rivets. What a fantastically hopeful fuck you to 2020. Local officials are content to let it stay until, in their words, ‘the cookie crumbles.’ Cute.
We could use more cute right now.
A paper surgical mask glides down the street to the gutter. It feels like a teachable moment, an image-based memory that might signify a cessation of this era-defining event. Normally I’d scoop up floating refuse passing right in front of me, really. But…you know. The bug, it lingers, and I haven’t gotten my vaccine yet. Sure, it’s probably safe enough to do so, what with the water-logging and all, and I abhor the idea of my non-action contributing to that Pacific plastic island, but I can’t falter this near the finish line by inadvertently absorbing some asymptomatic someone’s bio-matter residue.
It’s irksome, noting the continued littering phenomenon of discarded masks, which I’ve seen everywhere I’ve been these last ten months, including among the boulders of the sun dappled wilds in Joshua Tree, lodged in burnt trees on the fire-blackened slopes of Big Sur, and scattered across the tabloid boulevards of Hollywood.
Now the rain is a torrential downpour.
Ahh.
It’s wonderful. Sparkling. Fresh. Crisp. Clean.
Honestly, if you’d been breathing in the smoke and the ash and the dry heat and the quarantine stagnancy of SoCal all these months, you’d know how goddamn fresh this is.
Whoops. My Monday morning scheduled waste collection containers are floating away. Gotta go get ‘em. It’s a good excuse to play in the rain. Maybe I’ll pull a Gene Kelly and sing a little bit. Some Van Halen? Rush? The Police? What’s a good darkest-before-the-dawn sort of diddy? I could follow whiteboy creed and bust out some verses from Zeppelin’s The Rain Song, or even Guns n’ Roses’ November Rain. I’m leaning toward Peter Gabriel’s Red Rain, though that song is kind of a weird little hymn from the prog rock star, stemming from odd dreams he had about drinking wine in swimming pools and bottles shaped like humans smashing on rocks. It’s a haunting melody. It’s a little morose. I don’t want to spoil the mood this long overdue rain has put me in. Lifted spirits are a precious commodity these days.
I have it. Albert Hammond’s ’73 song…It Never Rains in Southern California. Yeah, it’s definitely a whiteboy deep cut, you ain’t kidding.
‘Scuse me, gotta go collect some drifting trashcans…
…back from corralling the wayward utility buckets.
Nope, Hammond didn’t win out.
Can you guess what whiteboy earworm took over the proceedings?
That’s right! Toto’s Africa.
If you didn’t see that coming, you’re probably not white enough.
If you don’t know how Toto’s seminal soft rock track relates to rain, you’re definitely not white enough.
*Compiled from December 28, 2020