A Bird Pooped on My Foot

Every morning, I go out to the back yard of my rental house to throw the Tarot and do my daily writing. This morning, the last morning before the first anniversary of the fire, and after weeping over my granola, I went outside to see what the cards held. Not much, as it turned out. It was one of those gentle, no-duh Tarot spreads that are lovely, but I needed a fucking sign. How will I possibly greet tomorrow’s dawn?

Then, as I was putting the cards away, a bird shat upon my foot.

I immediately Googled, “What does a bird shitting on me mean?” and got two answers:

1. It is a symbol of great good luck

2. Birds have no sphincters and it was just a coincidence

I am going with #1.

2025 was not a lucky year, to say the least. Before it even began, we had elected a monster into the presidency, so I knew 2025 was going to be rough. But on January 6, when the fire started in the Palisades, I felt a terrible foreboding.

The morning of January 7th, I was at my desk, sorting through all of my dead mother’s papers, trying to assemble a narrative for a book I wanted to write about her. She was a novelist who had grown up partially on the Westside of Los Angeles. She, her father and her brother, all writers, had all had lived in the Pacific Palisades. It felt odd that as I was rereading her first novel, Girl of the Golden West, which largely takes place in the Palisades, that landscape was being consumed by fire.

That afternoon, I got a message on MyHeritage.com from a distant relative who was also assembling our family tree. She was writing about my grandfather, and found my own, partially constructed family tree, and she wanted to connect and collaborate. I wrote back and gave her my email address and phone number. She called me almost immediately.

By that time the Eaton fire had sparked and we could see smoke on the horizon. This was not the first fire we had seen burning in the mountains outside our living room window, but this fire felt different. The wind was too fierce, the earth too dry, the warnings too dire.

My sense of foreboding at that point was at 11, and I was down in my office, my ADHD-addled brain running on the fumes of that morning’s Adderall, trying to figure out if the danger I felt was real, and if so, what I should pack. I began grabbing file boxes of my mother’s papers, my girlhood diaries, photo albums and other irreplaceable flammable items, throwing them into whatever box I could find. I shoved the boxes up the basement steps, toward my boyfriend who loaded them into the car.

I let the relative’s call go to voicemail, but she would not be ignored. She kept calling. Finally, I picked up and said, “Hi! I am so interested in talking with you, but there is a fire in our town right now and I’m packing.” Based in Connecticut, she didn’t quite grasp the situation or the danger. She wanted to talk about my family, about all the alcoholism and suicide that dotted our family tree. She wouldn’t let me get off the phone. Finally I said, “ I really cannot talk now. I am hanging up.”

“Okay,” she said, “but let me leave you with this: did you know your great grandfather was married to his first cousin?”

I hung up. Incest was not something I had the bandwidth for at that moment.

At that point I was so frantic, I was yelling at my partner to get the cat carriers out of the garage, but he was remaining calm. We hadn’t gotten any alerts from the Sheriff or fire department, and the WatchDuty map had our neighborhood swathed in green.

Meanwhile, I was literally spinning in panicked circles. “Why do don’t take a Xanax?” he gently suggested. At that point we still had lights, and the internet had only just gone down, which was not unusual. So I did. I stopped packing, nibbled off a dusty corner of a pill, and slipped into a daze, and then into sleep.

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I awoke to a dark house and the smell of smoke. The BF came into the bedroom with a flashlight and said, “Get up! It’s time to go!”

While I was zonked he had gotten the cat carriers out and had put one cat in. He told me to find the other cat while he got the car out of the garage—the electric door had to be manually opened. Summoning every ounce of calm I had, I called out, “Chippy!” By some miracle, our skittish kitten emerged from the dark of the house and let me put her in her carrier.

We drove through smoke and ash down Fair Oaks. We didn’t see any flames. There wasn’t enough visibility for that. There were also no sirens. No fire trucks. No Sheriff. Nothing but straggling, panicked neighbors beating it out of there. Two cars in front of us got into a fender bender and we watched incredulously as they pulled over to exchange insurance information in a swirl of smoke.

We made it down to Alhambra where a friend gave us refuge in his guest room.

I will stop the narrative there. We were alive—but material thing we ever owned and loved was in our rearview mirror, never to be seen again.

In the days that followed, my mind and eyes felt tuned to a new wavelength. The whole wold looked like Manga: overdrawn, cartoonish, brighly-hued and full of strange portent. It felt significant that the two places in L.A. I was most personally associated with had burned. The house my grandaddy built on Tellem Drive burned, the Palisades Highlands burned. The little rental house on Fiske Street my mother lived in in the ‘80s burned. The conversation with the relative haunted me, and it all felt connected. The mess of my family was somehow fused by the natural disaster that had erased all of our landmarks.

I made frantic notes in my phone. When we went to the Rock n’ Roll Ralphs in Hollywood for supplies, I found myself stunned by this aisle:

Los Angeles was choking on toxic smoke and yet here I was, looking at shelves of ignitables and accelerants. What did it mean? I alone would figure it out. I was full of import and utterly out of my gourd.

My writing brain was ON and I felt superhuman—I could forge connections with my juiced-up brain, leap tall metaphors in a single bound, reveal deeper truths with my x-ray vision.

I started this Substack, thinking I would now overcome my perfectionism, my history of shame, my fear of judgement and tell this story from every angle. I would become a writing machine. I would be the voice of those who survived. I would turn this tragedy into peerless prose and Substack glory would be mine!!!!

One year later I have posted exactly eight times.

It turns out I had trauma brain, and as I came down off that neurological high, my sense of super salience ebbed and I found that writing about the fire was really fucking hard. It’s not that I didn’t know what to write about—the problem was there was too much to write about. The assignment I had given myself was too broad, too scary, too confusing. I built up a folder full of nearly-finished drafts I couldn’t publish. I wrote about my mother, my family’s history, my dead father, the things that burned, but I couldn’t hit “publish” on any of it. I was in the deepest goo I had ever known, and though my intentions were sincere, all I really wanted to do was thrift and smoke weed. Instead of becoming a Substack Superhero, I succumbed to the goo.

It was almost 9:00 a.m., so I packed up my Tarot cards, wiped the guano off my foot with an Ivy leaf and went inside for a scheduled Zoom meeting with our architect (more on all that in an upcoming post). When I looked in the mirror I saw a second splotch of bird shit on my tear-stained cheek. That sphincterless, feathered herald of good fortune was really trying to tell me something. Keep writing. Post up the imperfect draft. Trust your instincts. Have some faith in yourself, for once, Schickel.

So…I’m going with it.