#63: The Big Orange

A New York triptych.

Hello from frosty New York! Last night, as our cab crawled down FDR Drive, I glimpsed the moon and thought I was hallucinating: comically orange and titanic, its size seemed to succumb to Earth’s gravity, forcing it to squat just behind Queensboro Bridge. We weighed the likelihood of it being an elaborate, expensive ruse straight out of Despicable Me; a contemporary artist, perhaps, suspended a too-large orb by Rikers Island. I took probably the worst photo of my life in an attempt to capture its majesty.

See the orange blur?

Glitch in the matrix or not, the reddish moon reminded me of the fires in LA. The privilege of being removed from the devastation (by the width of the US; by small degrees of separation from people who’ve had to leave everything behind) isn’t lost on me, and I hope those of you based on the West Coast, along with your families and friends, are safe.

I had to share these beautiful words by

Arabelle Sicardi

on the prospect of evacuating her home. It’s her birthday this week and she’s doing a subscription sale, which hopefully won’t have to go towards evacuation. I urge you to support her wonderful writing if you can.

The logic of evacuation is a cruel one, but it offers clarity when you surrender to it. Not everyone gets to surrender at the same time and sometimes you never do, you stay, and you die, refusing to leave. After all: how do you abandon your life? The things that make up your day? You build a life around things, around big things, around small things. The bedframe you were glad you didn’t have to build, the birdbath you were glad you did, the potted plants you are so confused survive every day in your care. What do you take when you have to leave?

More links:

Personal Space

’s Rachel Davies compiled an evolving master doc of crowdfunding campaigns for people who’ve lost their homes; here is a directory of campaigns supporting displaced Black families; and here is a relief fund supporting immigrant workers affected by the fires.

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I told Ivan yesterday that this—New York, mid-January, below zero—is the coldest I’ve ever been, to which he replied, “but we’ve been in the mountains. We’ve been skiing.” This is a different genre of cold; in the gridded city the wind has nowhere to go but straight up and down, through the naked snowless trees and into your bones.