Tim Barrus New York Times

Try being out here on a motorcycle. Flying ash hits your face like a hot slap. We are heading out of this.

America is a smoking nightmare.

Pharaoh rules from Washington, DC. The divine intermediary between god and the rest of us common folk. We could use him now with his broom to sweep the forest floor. His broom would be instantly incinerated. The tyrant paces in his palace while his kingdom self-destructs. Don’t panic. Panic.

There is no Moses. There is no Red Sea. There is no cure. It is too late for all of that. Some of us will survive. Many of us will not. The air is nuclear doom. The water poison. The Republican priests with empty upturned hands. How will we get through this. How will we get through anything.

The real question. Is survival enough. Survival by the skin of your teeth. Again. It might have to be enough. You might be lucky to survive at all.

We cannot blame pharaoh for everything even when original sin is a power to enslave our images of ourselves, to see reality through a lens that is anything but real.

To build his pyramids so he might live forever.

How is it that we cannot seek a common version of storming the palace walls.

Rome burned, too. Many times.

Our thinkers and our writers and our systems and our fealty to the tenant’s sworn loyalty to a lord hold our feet to the fire. Our fidelity is misplaced.

Storming the palace walls is unthinkable. Until the day arrives that the palace is scorched blacker than the color the sun has come to be.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/opinion/fire-coronavirus-west-california.html#commentsContainer&permid=109068811:109068811