san diego is burning...

no, seriously, it is. well, the eastern portion. scripps ranch and mira mesa. crazy mad fires everywhere. ramona. the sky is orange. the freeways are closed. ash is falling everywhere. it's windy as fuck.

after the gig last night (which went pretty well i think, except for being shoved into a tiny loft with a railing exactly at the right place for slide discomfort), I drove over to Adam's in El Cajon, as he was having a party. Got pretty wasted. Ugh. I really don't want to ever be that tore up again. I talked to Chris Galaviz, which was weird. He tried to get me to go home with him, which was annoying. Anyway, it's strange (and kind of crappy for him) to be graduated from college a whole year before my freshman section leader. He's three years older. Oh well. It was nice to talk trombone for a while but I'm definitely done with random high school people for a while.

anyway, so i spent the night at Adam's and woke up the next morning to this. fire, everywhere. Getting home was a nightmare. I15 closed down at Balboa Ave, so I took that to 163, which closed two miles later at the 52. That whole corridor, from Miramar to RB, is just shut down. So I had to go to the 805 and hook up with the 5 (wow, we have a lot of damn freeways), at which point I cheated (otherwise I would have had to take 5 to 76 to 15, which is the freeway equivalent of making a U-turn in SD) and took Del Dios back to Escondido and then down. (Del Dios, for my non-SD readers, is a little strip of a road that winds around from the west, Del Mar, to the east, Escondido. In my area of the city, if you want to get to the coast you either have to go way south and then west, or north and then west. you can't just go west, because of the endangered natcatcher. long story. Del Dios is kind of a short cut, and it's very pretty. takes you past such historical sites as the Del Mar racetrack and the Heaven's Gate house) Anyway, it's all crazy and my mom's worried, she said she could see -SEE- flames from the grocery store. That's scary. If it gets any worse we might be told to evacuate, although I don't think we're in any real danger. The problem in the areas with the fire is the scrub, the dry brush and the big eucalyptus tress. Scripps Ranch is pretty much drowning in trees. Jessie's family lives there, so I'm concerned about them.

Brush fires are always a problem out here, and this one's pretty big. It's hard to contain because there are many small fires and the wind is out of control, so new ones keep starting. Lots of houses have already burned and more will go, for sure.

well, i'm going to go drink 823987 more glasses of water. and try not to barf.