So I’m hanging out in Coffee Bean in Montecito, down the hill from the burn. I’m talking to Bill, a retired professor of English. He lost his home in the Tea Fire a few days ago. I’m drinking apricot ceylon tea. It has an aftertaste that makes my mouth feel arid.

Bill says he’s a happy man. It’s not death, he says. He “learned about life and death and evil on Iwo,” when he was eighteen.” This fire, he implies, is not death or evil. I guess he must mean that it’s life. I have trouble accessing this level of stoicism, and offer my best, mostly-sincere, bright autumn day sympathies. He shrugs them off. What good is, “I am so sorry to hear that,” amidst the potsherds and ash? To face it is a difficult Job.

I sit with my laptop and look around: pretty girls, mauve walls, tile floors, Christmas decorations, packages of coffee and tea priced to make you proud you can afford it.

Wait … Christmas decorations? I shit you not, gentle reader.

That’s just not right. In the midst of all this life and death and evil, whatever you might imagine giving you defense or consolation in it, it is not by God Christmas time. Not yet. No sir.

Christmas comes after Thanksgiving, on any calendar you can find. Halloween, Thanksgiving, then Christmas. Add in any holidays – Hanukkah, for example – that you like, but don’t move Christmas up a month or change the order of things. It’s not offensive or sacrilegious so must as a pallid, insipid, dumbass way to enter the culture around you.

Take a step back, Jack. Let it be, is my point.