Don't Drink the Water

living on the edge of hell

Jan 12, 2025

From our son’s utility truck this week - Eaton Fire

I’ll open this by saying I’ve been watching the hellstorm of our beloved Southern California with the entire world, from a city near the SoCal mountains and the 210 freeway, where we fled after too many fires in the hills of our former home, including a great one we survived as a family in 2003. I see the image of my oldest son, a linesman high up on the lines, in the city of Pasadena, the top of the world, looking around.

Gas masked dystopian view of utter devastation.

Don’t drink the water. Don’t use the water. There’s blood in the water. The spiritually dead principalities of the world have left us all in a chokehold. Didn’t the pandemic show us?

The song attached below, by Dave Matthews, was written for our Native American Indians. I recalled it for some reason today…

Come out, come out, no use in hiding
Come now, come now, can you not see?
There's no place here, what were you expecting?
No room for both, just room for me
So you will lay your arms down
Yes I will call this home

Away, away you have been banished
Your land is gone and given me
And here I will spread my wings
Yes I will call this home

What's that you say?
You feel the right to remain?
Then stay and I will bury you

- Dave Matthews

But who was this written for really? Like in The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,”

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

I have been thanked this week for being vulnerable to speak. I am putting myself on the line - but then when any kind of tragedy strikes, crushes your soul - you either get off your knees and stand, or you go down.

I have read Joan Didion’s piece “The Santa Anas” this week. An essay from 1968.

and shared it, in Substack Notes with my own quote:

“The devil most definitely comes in these winds. The spiritual battle is unfolding in real time at the expense of those with good character who adhere to the basic decency of God’s commandments and those who get swept up in the Devil’s lies, and the fools who fan the flames of those lies, while profiting themselves.

We live on the edge of hell as we strive for heaven.”

But are we striving for heaven or did the Devil and his monsters see a vulnerable state? and it’s sleeping leaders.

We are a state of people who have been criticized for not leaving. For “voting in bad leaders. We, all of us, deserving of punishment?” I’ve been reading this all week.

But what if I told you that the “perfect design” of these leaders is to cripple/trap the people who live here. The rich have been toppled, yet they still have the means to waste, to go to another home, let their attorneys deal with insurance, albeit, we are all equally leveled, when it comes to our mementos, our “proof of life” or the complete loss of their long-time neighborhood. An entire community. As singer/guitarist John Mayer posted this past week on IG, with a picture of a small packet of photos he holds dear:

“This is the most valuable thing I own. It’s a folder of photos of my father, spanning his life from being a baby, an educator, a husband and a father. It’s the only evidence of his life that will exist over time. These are the “documents” you read about people taking from their homes. When you hear someone say they’ve lost everything in a fire, this is much of that everything, if not all of it. Those who say they’ll be okay still have their folders and their albums. Those who are inconsolable have lost them. Just behind the immeasurable loss of life is the loss of the proof of life.”

We all want to pass down a small proof-of-life packet.

California is set up to fail most of us. Many of the homes burned to the ground, in over-priced cities, were occupied by multiple families or they were occupied by elderly individuals who saw no way out, without the government setting up the perfect storm to their years of hard work and deserved generational proof of their existence.

Homelessness, especially for seniors and those who are getting there, is at an all time high in California and rarely a young person can make it here or own anything.

Years ago I read an article about one small gated NorCal coastal community, representing many in California. Several who continued to live in them were elderly widows who had once made it big and purchased a relative-to-the-time expensive home, back in the 50’s, 60’s. My brother’s friend had such a mom, who was a widow living in a beautiful cliff-side home in Pacific Palisades, built and purchased for $610k, whose value had skyrocketed to near five million in recent years. With little time to leave, it burned to the ground. She lost everything. Those mementos. Her community. Same in the Eaton Fire of Altadena, California. Blocks and blocks of normal nice average homes, purchased by hard working couples in the 1960’s, now valued at a million or more. If you noticed, multiple families were living together. Or many families bought homes near each other and they lost them all. Many families are also helping their elderly parents stay. Larger homes have insurmountable upkeep that the elderly naturally can’t do. This is why we “downsize.” Yet we are penalized for doing so.

This is because, by design, if you sell at it’s value?, you are forced to pay high extortion fees for everything and then forced to re-invest the worth somewhere else. You are already living under mass regulations, so you move your family in (a possible win-win for help in your elder years) or you wait it out in your home alone. This also leads to a very slippery slope emotionally and is a whole other conversation. We are also penalized for “watering” which keeps a moat around our fire vulnerable areas.

The dream is an actual home in California, but now it’s a mandatory apartment. There is no more new home building. If your kids move in or stay with you, they will still inherit high taxes, high maintenance, high utilities and face the exact same thing. So by design, multi-generations are forced to live together to beat the system. And they don’t. Many homes are also run-down as a result of all the high costs/regulations to live here in a state that has the fifth highest economy in the world. It is treated like third world.

The system beat us this week. It beat hard.

The news has also talked about State Farm “leaving residents high and dry” without fire insurance or insurance in general. Most of our budget is spent on insurance, but I love how our leaders/news people are the first to blame a private over-regulated business. Insurance is unaffordable, and every year it increases despite how good you drive or keep your house perimeter clean. And it fails us as well. While we, the mice on wheels, do the right thing, our leaders undermine us, forcing businesses out. They left cause they could. California leaders did that.

Another reason people stay in Southern California is the warm weather and the beautiful California coastal waters that glimmered back at burning houses this week. Some of us are lifers. We’re not yay or nay nor political or horrible.

Our bones just love warm weather, wishing for a real season on occasion to guide us a little better. Make us less spoiled, more assured that we won’t burn down. Our family is here.

Many figured they paid enough for someone to come and save them this week. They didn’t look around. They didn’t think twice in the glare of packed windshields cascading down un-policed highways at maximum speed.. or while skating along beach boardwalks in winter, palm trees swaying upon their lifestyles. That the historically hottest state in the country would naturally have infrastructure set into place and a perfect water system for fire personnel. Perhaps police at every corner directing drivers out of canyons, like they do at large concert venues?

Many residents foolishly trusted those in charge.

Some homeowners saved their homes, using water from their garden hoses, like my husband did in 2003 and his brother and nephew did in a huge firestorm in Mount Baldy a few months ago. They saved whole blocks single handedly.

One man was found dead on the sidewalk, holding his hose, aimed toward the home his parent’s loved and purchased back in the 60’s. “Laying peacefully like an angel,” his sister said, when she came back to their parent’s home in Altadena to see it had burned to the ground. And her brother lying there. Like an angel on the edge of no regulation heaven.

Land, the people are driven out of, then settle back into,

and driven out of

again and again.

Who’s in charge of this? Who’s in charge of breaking up the family for generations to come? Who do the people in charge worship? what do they worship? Who do we worship? what do we worship as a society?

These are the questions within the Santa Anas.

Within the souls of the Natives long gone.

Of all that has come back to haunt us again and again.

“The winds show us how close to the edge we truly are.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Trapped by design
don't drink the water
it's pure like blood wine
and it's mine, don't bother

The devil wind of time
an opportunity I strike 
to devour this crime
I am the millionth reich

Vulnerable indeed
but I say be quiet
get on your knees
I am the balm of riot

And if so much you dare
to climb heaven's ledge
I will push you to despair
on earth you will be wedged

Between evil and the One
of all space and time
And I don't want no one
to taste something so Divine

Be wise to my ways
of this great dispossession
I weave madness and malaise
into your wide-eyed oppression

On the edge of suicide
let me comfort you fool
I will be your guide
the crack you fell through

Of this uncommon blaze?
in the smoke it's unclear
be wise to my ways
I turn sense into fear

And oh the fire of Glory
there is only One exchange
turn in the same old story
and seek the winds of change

Bring us those who love You
revive this great southland
see us to a breakthrough
and let us do it hand in hand... 



Breakthrough - deborah t. hewitt

THE FAMILY WE KEEP | by Deborah T. Hewitt

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