Kage Baker often quoted John Lennon. Well, actually, she quoted George more (him being her fave. She liked skinny guys) but John did tend to say clever stuff, and she admired that.

The one statement she quoted the most was Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.  This may be the wisest thing John ever said, too, in a lifetime where his clever brain was frequently out-run by his even-cleverer mouth …

Anyway, he was right and so was Kage, and I subscribe to this myself with heartfelt seriousness. Lately, life has been happening rather too much.

I’m still sleep-deprived, although the day of my deliverance – or at least my doctor’s appointment – is heaving ever closer. I shall be fascinated to see what can be accomplished if I can sleep regularly again.

In the meantime, though, Los Angeles has been undergoing a heat wave of monstrous proportions. It’s been triple-digit heat for the last week, and unfortunately I no longer do well in such continued temperatures. I think I’ve been flirting with vapour-lock or something. The last couple of days I’ve been fighting off heat sickness, and mostly losing; hard to remember the days when I ran around in the heat wearing three layers of wool and linen, subsisting happily on beer and iced chai …

And the fire season has started with a hollow boom and a cloud of smoke. Actually, the fire season is evidently now 365 days a year; we’re just in a new cycle of it today. Large portions of San Diego County are burning (at its height, the fire was 11 individual blazes); here in LA, we keep getting small fires on freeway verges and old houses, but have so far avoided an urban fire storm. We have the best Fire Departments in the world.

The fires have poured ash, smoke and other particulate matter into the sky, and we Angelenos are more or less advised not to breath outdoors. Of course, in those homes not hermetically sealed this is a moot point; we may be blessed with fans and air conditioning, but most of us are still breathing that air. This is bad, especially for children, the elderly, people with lung diseases, people with heart conditions … I am lucky that I only fall into two of the categories, but it still leaves one gasping.

Oh, and my tiny neighborhood under the eaves of Griffith Park was the startled recipient 2 days ago of an unexpected oil spill. A freaking OIL SPILL – from pipes no one knew were under the ground, under this community that is almost completely residential, thick with houses and schools and churches and parks … that has done nothing good for the air, either, as we can add crude vapourized hydrocarbons to the mix of coyote brush, burnt houses and generalized soot.

And, as the sun goes down weirdly orange and dim, I’ve received news that an old, beloved friend is on her last journey. Her departure into the West will leave a hole in my life you could put a world in …

Anyway: this is why I have not been writing, and why – even though the temperature is actually fit for human life today – I am not taking up my much-neglected writing just yet.

It’s hard to breathe. The world is on fire. One of the remaining sections of my heart is breaking.

But I’ll be back. Just … not tonight.