The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

First: I’m fine. We’re fine. The cats are fine. The wind is blowing the fire away from us; and it would have to jump a mall and some huge office buildings to get to us if it was heading this way. All of our friends–as far as we know–are fine. A lot of that has to with the fact that most of our friends live in the gay ghettos in the center of the city, where the fire would have to do some fancy footwork to get to. The in-laws live out in East County, but it looks like they’re out of danger. I’m worried about some of my professors, though. Several were evacuated, though they’ve been allowed to return. But one lives up in Escondido, which is in the middle of the Witch Fire.

Second: As you can imagine, it’s very weird here.

The sky was all purple. Actually, only at sunset. During the day, the sky is brown, or orange, or gray. It depends on when, and the wind conditions. I must say: The sunsets have been gorgeous, if creepy. On Monday, I was telling a friend that the sky looked a bit apocalyptic, and he scoffed at my choice of words. Then yesterday, he sent me an email that said, “Welcome to Day Three of our little apocalypse.” It’s kind of hard to avoid hyperbole when you look at maps of what has burned, what is burning, and where the mandatory evacuations are and you realize that it’s half of freaking San Diego County. And because of that, you’d think the sky would be much more dramatic. I tried to take pictures of the sky, but they really just look like pictures of bad smog days. From where we live, the sky is just a strange, irregular color; there aren’t any dramatic plumes or firenados. But we have the ash. When Rob and I opened our car doors last night, gray dust fell off the car and onto the asphalt. I had a deeply unpleasant 9/11 flashback.

There were people runnin’ everywhere. Except around here. Up here in La Jolla, which is only a mile and a half from the evacuation border, the streets are mostly empty, and so are the sidewalks. Occasionally someone goes to their car or to the laundry room. The Chancellor of UCSD told us the university was closed for the whole week because of the air quality, and we were told to stay inside, close the windows and turn on the air conditioners. Of course, we live in university housing that doesn’t have–or physically allow–air conditioning. I was on campus proper on Monday, and the only people around were small clumps of students, scarves or t-shirts or surgery masks covering their faces, trying to find an open fast food place. They were all closed; the kids had to suffer their dining halls. I took a picture of the parking lot at 3:30 pm on Monday: Empty. Even weirder was the picture I took while driving home. It was 6 pm and there were no cars on Genesee. Which is like there being no taxis in Times Square at 7:45 pm on a Friday night.

So sue me if I go 2 fast. No one’s around because UCSD has been shut down for the week. They’ve been sending out emails every morning announcing the next day’s closure. Then yesterday, they sent an email announcing that the school would be closed for the week. Apparently, the also send text messages through the emergency notification system, which they set up after Virginia Tech. I guess this is a good thing, but I’m not sure why they had to write the last one in text-speak. This is the message, verbatim:

classes r canceled 4 week. du 2 uncertnty of fores & extreme bad air. Res, dining halls, & studnt health centr open & opn 2 serve. resume norml class & work sched Mon, Oct. 29. chk ucsd.edu.

I didn’t make that up. I’m not that creative. The UCSD website also sent us to the two worst repositories of information available: The San Diego Union Tribune’s Fireblog and the San Diego County Emergency Homepage. The former is slightly more high tech than a drawing of smoke signals. The link to the Union-Tribune website on the blog simply takes you back to the Fireblog again. Try to go to the actual Union-Tribune website and nothing happens. I haven’t been able to get on since Sunday. And the latter? Only slightly better. It can handle the traffic to the main page, but all of the important information–maps on evacuation orders and so on–are on pdfs that you have to download. And it takes–and I’m not kidding–two-to-three minutes to download the pdfs. And the last one I downloaded, titled “Countywide Fire Map,” was a blank page with the County of San Diego letterhead.

So, instead, I’ve been refreshing the CBS local affiliate’s webpage every five minutes or so. It’s not bad, but their maps suck. Someone finally told them that the amazing Google Fire Map was out there, and they linked to it. Again, Google saves the world. And the best coverage of the fire? The New York Times. They’re more up-to-date, more comprehensive, and the least sentimental than any other outlet. Also, unlike CNN, half the stories on their homepage aren’t about Marie Osmond fainting of “Dance With the Stars” or how celebrities are coping with the fire. CNN just sucks.

But lest I be criticized for criticizing the County of San Diego, let me say this: Despite their lame website and lack of foresight concerning web traffic, the County has been astonishingly great about saving lives. Only five people have died. This is five too many, but almost half the county has been evacuated over the last three days, and it’s been done so efficiently and with very little pain. Of course, the evacuation centers have run out of every supply they could possibly need. Why Costco and Wal-Mart haven’t donated their entire stocks is beyond me. It would be tax deductible.

So tonight I’m gonna party like its 1999. Yesterday, Rob and I got a little stir crazy, and we left the house, despite being told to stay inside and stay off the highways. Rob dropped me off at Pete’s in Hillcrest (I don’t have my car yet, and it’s in Escondido, in the middle of the evacuation area!) and he went to hang out with Eduardo. Urban Mo’s–formerly known as Hamburger Mary’s–is next to Pete’s, and at 4 pm, it was a madhouse. 4 pm on a Tuesday. Pete’s was packed, too. (And by the way, so was Ralph’s in La Jolla. It was like people were stocking up for a blizzard. I wanted to tell them: “It’s a fire! You can’t take the food with you if you get evacuated! Especially not the 24-packs of Bud Lite!” I also wanted to tell the people covering their faces: “It only works if it’s a gas mask! The toxins go right through your t-shirts!”) By the time I left Pete’s to have dinner and drinks with my friend Whitney, Mo’s was out of control, like the Saturday of Pride. Whitney was thinking about having a cocktail party, but decided it would be in bad taste. That reminded me of sitting at Petit Abeille the morning after 9/11 and my friend Matthew asked, “At what point after this sort of disaster is it appropriate to ask someone on a date?” I think he waited until Friday. They got married, by the way. Anyway, I guess having a party would be in bad taste, but going to a bar and getting ripped is not.

Speaking of bad taste, the gallows humor has been slightly out of control. On Facebook, my friend Kelly dedicated Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to me. And I asked my friends “Who wants to see ‘The Things We Lost in the Fire’ with me?” I did that early on, before it really got bad. I deleted the question eventually. The undergrads were pretty bad. They started an event on Facebook called “Fire God 2007,” a pun on Sun God, the yearly get-drunk-and-stupid UCSD party. People were not amused. The event has since been deleted.

Some emails I’ve received:

wow this is just like snow day, except it’s…fire…

hello professor i was just wondering if there was school 2m because chancellor fox sent me an email saying there was no school today but my friend received an email stating that there was no school 2m the 23rd ty in advance

Wanted to check-in and make sure you were not on fire.

I guess this means watching goonies and heading to the bars in hillcrest!! Last time this happened we all had dinner parties in “honor” of pets and homes lost!

i am hosting a fire party at my house around 7pm if you are interrested!

i got drunk ad none of my friends that came over was evacuated! boy it’s amazing ican’t watch my fingers when i type now be cause i get dizzy!

Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb? So, Bush announced that this is now a “major” disaster, in the federal sense. FEMA is on its way. Lovely. That’s all we need. It will be fascinating to watch how they screw up here. A couple fellow grad students and I were discussing our predictions yesterday. Basically, there are two main fires in San Diego County. One is the Witch Fire, which is laying waste to the areas among the richest in the county. White doctors, lawyers, defense contractors, and the such. (There’s a good reason why, as CNN puts it, “Evacuees choose hotels over shelters.” Because a lot of them can.) The other fire is the Harris Fire, which is laying waste to a huge area near the US-Mexica border east of Chula Vista. Read: Poor brown people. Considering this is Bush’s FEMA, it’s pretty obvious which set of victims is going to helped out the most.