When I first moved to LA, I had no friends. After a while I met a punk rockish girl at Santa Monica College who turned me on to poetry, environmental issues and journalism. She was amazing. She lived in Malibu.

We started dating and I would drive all the way out to her place by County Line, just above Zuma. She still lived with her parents, who were so nice to me. They knew it was a long drive back to Inglewood where I lived and they suggested that I spend the night out there more than she did. 🙂 Even her brothers were great to me. It was a dream.

I tweeted to her today to tell her that I was thinking good thoughts about her sweet parents. She replied saying thank you, that they had evacuated safely. But she said the house was in the path of the fire and things didn’t look good for it.

Even though the dad was an engineer, his wife and kids were basically hippies. Beautiful, loving, throwbacks. Sometimes you think, oh it’s ok if a house burns down, they’ll get insurance to build a cool modern replacement, but if there was one family who wouldn’t want a modern anything it’s them. They would prefer that their quirky, humble, super-real home remain as is.

And that’s what I’m praying for tonight.

When I saw this Wally Skalij image from the LA Times of what appears to be some emus and a donkey at Zuma today, I thought, yep, that’s so Trancas. Funky, weird, and super chill.