Build Back With Dirt

But saying I told you so gives me no joy

As a native Midwesterner, California’s architecture always looked bizarre to me.

It looked too much like home. Except, in a desert.

I remember when I first escaped LA for Palm Springs, during those heady, early days of the Plague of 2020. I posted a bunch of confused captions underneath my implicitly querulous photos of the resort architecture, and in about ten seconds there appeared a comment from a guy who grew up in another podunk 30 miles from me, complaining that that faux-tropical-island roof was not only ridiculous in the desert, but it was designed to be optimal in zero of the climates currently operating on the face of the earth.

I thought that remark was emblematic of California architecture as a whole. I mean, I’m used to men worrying about roofs. Every roof I saw out there made my stomach hurt. Let’s not talk about the foundations. My cat got lost under the house for a while.

I have nothing against wood-frame construction, when it isn’t desert-”cured.” Cured as in how you cure firewood.

I grew up in a wood-frame house myself, built around the time most of the houses that are now on fire were built. My grandma’s house was a wood-frame farmhouse that was so old you couldn’t use the toilet in a thunderstorm; the ad hoc heating system let you spy on the adults from the second floor. The house survived her and is happily occupied by another family today. Wood-frame houses in the damp, cool, tree-clotted Midwest seem like a natural, durable outgrowth of the landscape, just like I imagine they do back East.

Which is kind of why they seemed incredibly wrong in the middle of the desert.

Then again, most Californians probably used to be Easterners, so I guess this is to be filed under “people never learn until they experience” rather than “who could have seen this coming?” Aside from the fact that they could surely see that most of the Native American dwellings were mainly adobe, the madding crowd moved out there AFTER every European medieval city AND Chicago had burned down for the sin of being built out of wood where there wasn’t sufficient water.

Chicago is literally touching the largest supply of freshwater imaginable, and after THEIR big fire in the 19th Century they went out of their way to build everything out of redbrick. The people who built the insane wooden sprawl of the California suburbs were surrounded by warnings from every cultural direction to which they had access. And they wonder why SNL kept doing more “Californians” sketches?

There’s so much wrong with Californian architecture and infrastructure. Why shag carpeting? Why shag carpeting ever, but why with all these bugs and scorpions around?

Why all these one-story houses? I get it, earthquakes, but now you have to drive everywhere. And OK, drivers, I get it, the rent is cheaper out past the whatever. But why do even people who live downtown think they need a car and have to drive it every time the gym is more than 500 feet from their front door?

It was weird enough that I got offered money for sex every time I went for a walk amongst the beautiful mountains, because that’s the only reason anyone in California would ever walk anywhere. Walking down the street? Street walker, QED! It was even weirder when my fiancé came to visit and went for a walk and they offered him money, too. He didn’t believe me, till it happened to him.

I almost wonder why he didn’t decide to stay.

They add superficial elements that scream “innovation,” but for some reason the geodesic dome, which would have done great in adobe, resists earthquakes, and is all-around awesome if you can deal with the leaks (add more dirt), never caught on. The only new forms of architecture in California that don’t just copy pueblo architecture are denigrated with names like “Dingbat.”

Most insidious of all, there is always somebody trying to dot more plant life around than there is water to keep it safe. Even rich environmentalists. ESPECIALLY rich environmentalists, who would never CONSIDER walking anywhere—my god, someone might think I’m part of the non environmentally conscious rabble! I need a pool, I need a lawn.”

I mean, I get it, I needed a pool; what else is escaping the Midwest for, besides curing your chronic vitamin D deficiency? But all that un-waterable vegetation is not only hideous (it’s the same color as sand, but SAND DOESN’T CATCH ON FIRE!!! Well, not until you really screw the pooch), it is such an obvious fire hazard I was scared to stand close to it.

Except if you avoided every neglected bit of infrastructure that might kill you, you would just have to sit and wait for The Big One in your wood-frame house. Everything in California feels WRONG, like, why is this part of civilization being so janky?, we should be able to do this, except we got lazy and let it be drawn in by AI, avant la lettre, I mean city planning. It’s a great advertisement for going back to letting cities grow up naturally, like the man-spider spinning his web of piles of caves.

It feels strange, living in snail-shaped Paris now, comparing the hideous planned French suburbs to the still-charming downtown whose basic layout was tried and tested by bored Roman colonists—and watching LA burn. Cause when I was in a studio in Koreatown in 2019, I watched Paris burn from LA!

Except, despite having one of the biggest buildings downtown go up like—well, like a whole forest of dried-out oak trees, which is what suffered the brunt of the Notre Dame fire—nothing else was touched. Maybe that’s because Paris didn’t recently gut its fire department right before; Netflix put out a whole series lionizing those guys so I won’t look for anything bad.

But I’m pretty sure the real reason is that Paris is mostly made of stone. Why is this? Because Paris has been around long enough, and been on fire enough, for someone to eventually look back at the Roman colonial foundations and go, “Oh, those guys built out of stone and this shit never burned. Maybe we ought to try that.” Of course, then they mined so much limestone out from under themselves that whole neighborhoods starting collapsing, but everything is a lesson in balance and adaptation.

Maybe California out to try that. Balance and adaptation. Because it feels like it’s about to topple at any moment. Whoops, seemed; now it did.

Then again, you get used to what you get used to; having grown up in Wisconsin, I thought “alcoholism” meant “if you actually die.” So maybe they thought their suicidal architecture wasn’t quite at “die” levels—I mean, they dealt with the earthquakes, didn’t they? Maybe they had been living in something sensible and stopped thinking about it until the “mid-mod” ranch fad hit the newly upwardly mobile Boomers. (Then again, maybe not all ghost towns were due to the gold bust.)

They went to the moon; was having a wooden house in the desert such a big deal, if it meant you had the cash left over for a swimming pool? So they nonchalantly built a kazillion acres of single-family kindling wood. You know, my family’s been here since 1960; there’s a possum but it ain’t burned down yet.

But for me, having gone, in the space of a harried plane ride, from a native of a damp and woody land to the moderately confused immigrant to the desert clime, I had an instant “that ain’t right” reaction to living in a fifty-plus-year-old woodframe out in Hawthorne.

Then again, my cognition was probably fast-forwarded by the drunken slumlord, the bedbug-ridden roommate, and the fact that, due to the actual possum neither of them knew was living in the house, I caught fucking TYPHUS within two weeks of moving in.

But also it did cross my mind, as I was going blind with fever on a mattress on the floor, writhing and watching the ants crawl by into the big hole in the wall before my optical nerve seemed to temporarily become severed, that I was living in a box of matchsticks.

But yeah, that’s California for ya. Aside from everyone being dumb enough to build wood-frame houses in a wind-swept desert dotted with scrubby mountains (Duh! Duh! DUH!!!!!!! Why do you think the Native Americans built with adobe? They didn’t notice the Joshua trees, but Bono did? Didn’t you NOTICE when you first tried to cross the desert and there was no water for ten days? Didja think, “Hey, there’s no no-fire juice here, let’s build our houses out of bonfire!”? Didja think that consciously? This is why the dumb Californian stereotype exists!)—Um, I forget the rest of the sentence. Did I tell you I lived in “Cali” for a while?

Oh yeah. Aside from using those fake fireplace logs to make themselves chimneys because they stack so nice, and their extremely questionable hygiene whatever their social class—actually the richer you are, up to a certain point, the more dirty and drunk—California was barely civilization before the plague, before the fires.

I never planned to move there. I never wanted to move there. I wound up running from the cold there in a panic, after a personal tragedy in a Chicago crime wave that made it difficult for me to be touched by anything, including a stiff breeze. Much like, as it turns out, half the frickin’ state. The reason that place is such a shit-show for everyone but the luckiest actors is because everyone who arrives every year is fleeing a horror movie. Yes, you still get kids who think they’ll make it big, but also you get everyone who winds up on the edge of the continent because the train doesn’t go any further.

Sure, it’s the cushiest place on Earth, for a chosen few. And that’s all the footage that makes it out on Instagram. Most of California ALREADY looked like a moon colony. Nobody at the rooftop hotels downtown—they’re already dodging poop bombs from starlets—is posting selfies featuring the massive mystery-rodent den that had been dug under the black-molded foundations of that Hellhole in Hawthorne where I went into a coma and just about died.

There are a few spots that still look like they do on TV, but they have to be carefully stage managed. In a tiny percentage of the immense square footage that is on fire, you could get literally anything on earth for nothing by snapping your fingers. I guess. Maybe.

But once you get anywhere close to the edges your pets start to disappear, there's always a fire, you can see the cracks in the buildings, the façade, the ground.

All that dried-up vegetation. You could always smell a fire somewhere, and it mingled with the smell of yellow shrubs till they were one and the same with the fishy, salty ocean air. Why do you want that dead shit everywhere? I turned down one precious apartment building that might have had me, because my window would have been facing a replica of an Illinois park. I am in the desert for a reason. I never want to see Illinois again as long as I live. Why would you rather look at that than the beautiful desert?

Maybe California laughed when the rednecks were burning, but nobody decent laughed then or is laughing now. The human suffering that is about to begin is going to change the world forever. There was already nowhere for normal people to go. So one by one, normal people are going to go mad.

At the very least, build back with clay next time.

I told Grok to “make it creepier” ONCE—OK, twice, but in a row—and now it won’t do anything else. Where did the ballgown come from? Who is that headless spaceman? And the giant-headed child? I have definitely opened a portal to Hell