It's Snowing In LA! Oh wait... that's just ash...

"What's burning?" you ask. Oh, that's just Los Angeles.

Seriously.

You walk outside, and the smell of burning overrides your senses. You smell the smoke, clogging up your nostrils and making you pop an extra Zyrtex. You see it darkening the sky like a really bad smog day and creating crazy colors at sunset as the pollution bumps off the ozone. You see it in the flecks of ash that mock you cruelly like faux snowflakes as you open your car door.

It would be ironic if it weren't so terribly crazy and sad.

The air pollution was enough of a concern for me and my allergies to call off the weekly hike at Runyon. I suppose that was fine for me. I consider Runyon my weekly exercise in discovering how horribly out of shape I am, as I walk around the trail and discover sweaty demi-Gods racing up the hill next to their pooches, wrinkled frowns of concentration on their faces as they hold their weights or water bottles and careen past me for the second or third time. And they do it in their sweatshirts. SWEATSHIRTS. In 90 degree weather! What is WRONG with them?

Then again, nothing should surprise me anymore.

I'm living in a land of limitless scope: where ash takes the place of snow, where a dirt road in a hill less than a mile away from Hollywood Boulevard is considered a nature trail and roughing it, and where I look out of the window of my building at work one evening and discover the magnificant sight of red car lights blinking up and down Santa Monica Boulecard as the shouts of thousands of protestors making their way down the street float up to my ears on the twenty-sixth floor, campaigning for civil rights.

It turns into the kind of week where you forget what it was like to be normal.

And then you wonder why you would ever want to waste time trying to be normal, and concentrate instead of worrying about whether or not a hawk is going to sneak into your backyard to eat your chihuahua.