What. A. Week.

I am sitting in my house....

Not a terribly exciting way to begin a blog post, right? The editor in me is cringing at the words.  But I am leaving that as the beginning of this post simply because after this last week I am ever so grateful that I CAN say them. Especially in light of the fact that so many in my little city cannot.  Around 350 households cannot.

Waldo Canyon Fire. What an INSANE week. The editor in me wants to kill those caps too, but fuck it, I'm leaving them.  Unless you were here, experiencing all the crazy, there's not really a way for me to communicate it to you, and the fact that I am resorting to the interwebs equivalent of shrieking it to you really says it all.

So. Fire. Big fire. Evacuations. Homes lost. Lives lost. Peace of mind lost. And at the same time I want to cry for the sense of community found.  I have a deeply conflicted relationship with my little city -- so liberal yet so conservative, so many creative people, and yet such a small town mentality at times.  And I am sometimes known to speak badly of her, Colorado Springs, out of this sense of conflict. Love and hate.  That coin got flipped hard this week, and then I tossed the coin out. It's broken, that coin. Landed on the love side and stuck there.  My little city. Mine. With all its flaws and all the stupidity that I find so aggravating.  And I learned just how protective I am of it, as I cried, repeatedly, for this place and its people. My place, and my people. Loved deeply with all her flaws.

And I am so fortunate -- yes I was evacuated, but I don't think my home was ever in any real danger.  I came back yesterday to a fine sheen of ash over pretty much everything I own, and I cried again because while I have a few days of cleaning ahead of me, some people's homes are gone.  Gone.

I am so very fortunate.

I am especially fortunate to have so many people in my life who give a shit about me. Who called to see if they could do anything to help while I was evacuated.  Who gave me a place to stay while I was evacuated. Who got to my house before it got really bad, when I was too far away, and got my cat, and my son's car, and my just purchased case of wine and my really expensive scotch. (And on that note, I REALLY think the reason my whole neighborhood did not go up like so much tinder is that I had friends scavenge my very well stocked liquor cabinet, thereby removing much potential accellerant. You're welcome, Holland Park).

I gathered some shoplifts to share as part of this post, but frankly, they are all so damned poignant that they make me want to cry -- even my own pithy remark about having left duck in my freezer, which, I assumed, would take only a few hours to roast to perfection in the event that my house did go up, so planning a post house fire bbq seemed like a good idea.  Yeah, it's in bad taste, yeah it's too soon, and yeah I still think it's funny as shit, but I'm gonna leave the shoplifts until I have a better sense of humor about it all.  Which will probably be next week. I don't do sad well or for long periods of time.

I have some funny posts half written, and want to talk about the awesome event I had a small part of last night (Jene' Jackson's Nights of Wild, a curated event that grew out of her awesome book The Oat Project), and my thoughts on dropping the F-bomb while on stage, but I think I'm done for now.

All of you who play such an important role in my life -- and if you are wondering if I am referring to you, then you can assume I am -- I love you all. Thank you.  Just for, you know, being.