[...] Paradise is burning at the heart of the largest wildfires in California's long and storied history of fires. The thick smoke, which blankets the entire region for hundreds of miles, contains the particulate remains of Paradise. It occurs to me that in unison, millions of us are inhaling the sofas and ottomans of Paradise, the cars and gas stations of it, the trees and lawns, the clothes and detergent, the wedding pictures and divorce papers, the cadavers. [...]

ten-foot-tall, creosote-coated logs rigged with powerful light bulbs and metal shades

a fiction redolent with descriptions of an unnamed character lying by the side of the road

What a strange world. You're in a beat-up white van with your son, still a child but barely, driving by the place where your father was laid up so many years ago. And now you live near there, getting up at 4 a.m. to push a broom. Dinner for your family is sometimes eggs, or two frozen pizzas for ninety-nine cents a box. What do you have to show for your life? You're raising your kids in government housing. There are things you see in the neighborhood that you can't do anything about. You might as well be a ghost. [....]

[...] he'll ask how I'm doing. I don't ask how he's doing because I know how he's doing. He's doing homeless in Los Angeles for five years. He's doing sleeping in a box. Instead I ask if he needs anything - a blanket, food, money. There's always a pause before he tells me he's fine. I ask if he's sure and he assures me he's sure, and then me and this packaged voice in the dark wish each other goodnight.

And while I haven't always ignored it, I can usually tell what's in my head and what's outside of it, which voice in the dark is imagined and which is real, but why I'm in here and he's out there, I'm not sure I can tell. Why my box is bigger than his.

Looking back, I wonder whether that hum I detected was the roar of technology pullulating just to the south.