Cristina Black

2025 seems to be the year people finally stopped saying “two thousand” for the year so that’s one cool thing.

Protecting your personal peace is a form of resistance.

Please take care of yourselves and those around you. This is the time we need it most, when everyone else has forgotten.

The worst feeling, one that we’ll have to sit in this silence with, is one that we’ve faced a lot of times recently in America—the realization that we’re in a new era now, and the old one isn’t coming back.

But we’re still in crisis here. In fact, it’s just beginning to sink in, how bad the situation is, how expensive, how tragic, and how long it will take to recover. The blame game and the civic battles will continue for some time, just on a local level.

This phase is a strange mix of relief and shock you’ve probably never felt before. All those takes, all that shit-talk, it’s over. The money that was pouring into those GoFundMe’s will slow to a trickle. The large-scale benefit concerts will be planned with far less frequency, if at all.

And by nothing, I mean silence. Everyone everywhere else is moving on now, if they haven’t already. There is a foot of snow in Florida and bishop begging for mercy in Washington. We’re old news.

Nothing.

Since the other shoe has dropped and we’re now in our Hurricane Rita era with the Hughes Fire, I thought I should prepare you for what comes next in a major disaster.

Picture your enemies as little children sleeping.

Here’s an image I use to help manage the deluge of takes with which we are constantly assaulted: the U.S. Stock Market.
Picture yourself in the rafters above the stock exchange floor, as the brokers run around piddling over individual trades. Stay peaceful, above this madness.

Here’s a snippet of a #disastersong I wrote about #losangeles called “No Such Place As Home.” #palisadesfire #lafires #prettysongsaboutdifficultthings