Something to Feel Normal

Last month, I made a game called Cocoanut Hotel with Nightwell Games founder Gwen Katz for the public domain game jam. Also last month, a little more significantly, we went through the LA wildfires. It was a harrowing experience for Gwen. I wanted to know her story, so this is our interview. When we last left Gwen, her and her partner Jason were leaving Panera as news of a “serious fire” was spreading fast.

This is part two of a three part series. Read the first part, if you missed it. You can expect part three in your inbox next week. Standard Disclaimer: I edited this interview for length and clarity.

(Gwen) As we’re driving home, we can see this fire. It’s one hill when we walked out of Panera. Then we get home and it’s two hills. It’s spreading, like, visibly fast.

(Geoffrey) That has to be the scariest thing.

You know, at the time it wasn’t that scary, because we expected a fire. There have been various fires that were close to us. There was the Bobcat Fire [in 2020]. There was the Station Fire [in 2009] on the close side of the mountains, and you could just see it at night burning there on the mountains. And they’ve always, in the past, stopped those before they got to the city. In some of them a few dozen homes were lost, and in the very worst ones, a few hundred homes were lost. 

But we’re a mile from the actual wild lands. We’re thinking unless the whole city burns down, our home is fine. We’re really far away. There are hundreds and hundreds of homes between us and where the fire is. But we were looking at the evacuation maps and stuff, and we’re making a plan. We contact some friends who are close to us and ask, “Hey, if we need to evacuate, can we come to your house?” We pack a go bag. By then, half of Covina is evacuated.

At this point, we’re still thinking, okay, it looks like they’re gonna stop it at Lake Street. We stayed up watching the evacuation maps. They’re getting closer and closer. Then finally, we’ve got to go to bed, and then we get the evacuation notice at 3:30 in the morning.

Oh my god.

Yeah, and we still think we’re okay, right? We still think they’re evacuating us because there’s smoke, or because they want the firefighters to be able to work in the area and not worry about, you know, civilians getting in the way or endangering themselves.

We grab our cats and our computers and our go bag and our box of important papers and we leave. We go to our friend’s house.

In the morning, the reports are coming in. Buildings are burning down in the city. They didn’t stop it at the wild lands. The fire’s in the city. We have to find out [about our home]. There are these really, really spotty reports. People are listening in on the police radar. They’re hearing there’s a fire on this block, there’s a fire on that block, but it’s super, super unreliable.

Everyone’s getting texts from friends like, “Oh, I heard somebody was up in Altadena and they saw this building was gone, they saw that building was gone.” It was just chaos. Nobody knew what was really happening there. We’ve got to find out for ourselves.

So we drove back up to the city. Our whole block – the entire block – on fire. Everything was gone. And that was, like, seven hours from when we left the house.

Seven hours.

When we left the house, we had no idea we wouldn’t be coming back. We didn’t really grab that much stuff, other than emergency stuff, because we had absolutely no idea what was gonna happen. All the stuff we grabbed, it was absolutely for stupid reasons. I wanted to be able to work on the jam while I’m evacuated, right? If I left my computer behind, I wouldn’t be able to work for, like, three days or something. Jordan didn’t even grab his power cord. He had to borrow a power cord.

Luckily, we were staying with our friends who… the husband’s superpower is he can produce any cord you need just out of his cargo camp pockets. Regardless of what it is, it’s just like, “Oh, you need this? Here it is.”

He’s like Forge from the X-Men.

He was famous for this in college.

I found out about your house on Bluesky. You posted that your house was gone. Why did you decide to post about it?

Oh man, I was just posting through the apocalypse. You know, terminal internet brain. Where your response to a disaster is like, “Ooh, this will make great social media, right?” 

You know, we got to a Panera and the hills are on fire. So, of course, I post a photo on social, “Hey, the hill’s on fire, wow!”

Right, but there’s a difference between, “Uh-oh, did anybody feel the earthquake?” and “My house is gone.” That’s a tough piece of content to post, even to post through it.

Honestly, in retrospect, maybe I would have not posted it. Maybe just told my friends about that privately instead of posting it to the entire internet. I was in shock at that point, and the only part of my brain that was still working was the terminally online part.

By the way, I don’t think it’s a bad choice. I mean, it’s like… such a raw thing to post publicly. You were really posting through it, the whole experience. It was very vulnerable and brave of you. And not “brave” in the way we make fun of when people say something is brave.

All I knew at that point is that I wanted to help. I was asking, “What do you need?”

We were super lucky on the logistics side. We had a friend who could put us up, and then we found an Airbnb the next day. We had cash on hand. Not everybody had cash. So we could go to Target, replace immediate necessities, and buy toothpaste and changes of clothes and whatever. We were lucky in that respect. 

And not everybody was. There were people sleeping in their cars. There are still people sleeping at the convention center. The convention center is completely closed to the public, because it’s a temporary shelter with hundreds of people there.

The effects of this will not go away anytime soon. It’ll reverberate through the city for years to come.

Yeah.

So here’s one thing I really wanted to ask. Why continue the jam project?

If there was a bet on FanDuel as to whether or not Gwen would want to finish the public domain game jam the same month her house burned down, it would be long odds that you would want to finish! This is not a paid project. This is just something we decided to do for fun. A whimsical thing.

I have to say, I was very surprised. I was thinking I probably wouldn’t hear from you for, like, a couple weeks, and I’d reach out periodically and you wouldn’t text me back. Then eventually, maybe two months later, you’d text me and say, “Hey, I’ve been going through a lot. Sorry about the jam.” 

And I would say, “No, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal at all. I just submitted whatever. The important thing is that you’re okay.” 

But no. You messaged me the next day. You said you wanted to talk about the game “today or tomorrow.” I was like, “what?” I was so dumbfounded by that.

Well, I think there are three things going on here. One is: I am a stubborn bitch. That’s a well known fact about me. Any time the universe is acting like, oh, you’re not going to do this, that 100% will make me double down on it. I don’t let the vagaries of fate prevent me from doing something that I wanted to do.

But the second thing is: I feel like this is something you don’t realize about surviving a disaster… It’s really boring. Like, it’s traumatic and emotionally difficult, but in those first few days, there’s nothing to do. I mean, there’s a lot of replacing stuff. And later on, there’s all the insurance and this and that. But especially those first couple of days, when I was like sitting on my friend’s couch, it was like, what is there to do?

My to-do list was, you know, tend to the garden, put away the dishes. Everything on my to-do list was just kind of gone. And I was just kind of sitting there mucking around on my phone, in part because whenever I put my phone down, there was nothing. I didn’t have a book to read. I had nothing to do. And I really wanted something to occupy me, especially something that was not disaster recovery related.

But the third thing – the most important thing – is that we lost a lot. Some of the things that hit me the hardest was all the art I made that I lost. All my analog art, other than stuff I sent to people that I had given away these gifts. A lot of that I didn’t even have photos or documentation at all. 

Losing so much stuff I’d made… I really, really did not want to lose more stuff as a result. A lot of projects I’d done were now completely gone, and I was like, well, I’ve got this one project we’re working on that’s in progress and it doesn’t have to be a casualty. I don’t have to make this one more victim of the fire. I really wanted to finish the thing we started.

I completely understand everything you’re saying. I still think that the amount of time you came to that conclusion is remarkable. Even taking what you’re saying into account, I can absolutely imagine a version of this where first you spent several weeks watching TV and snacking and crying…

I definitely did lots of that!

Yeah. And then you got back to me after the jam, like two or three weeks later. And you’re like, “Hey, I know we missed the deadline for the jam, but it would mean a lot to me if we finished this.” But you displayed a Wolverine-like emotional recovery healing factor.

Making things and building things is an important part of my process. It’s really important. Sitting around and eating snacks and watching TV doesn’t make me feel any better. Working on something does.

So, like, the first 24 hours, my house was burning down. For whatever reason, I wrote a bunch of poetry. Terrible poetry. I absolutely will not show this to you under any circumstances.

I don’t need to see it. That’s okay.

It is terrible. Maybe someday I’ll burn that as well. But that was how my brain was processing it for whatever reason. Then I wrote flash fic about a Mars rover, because JPL is right by my house. JPL didn’t burn down, but it was closed. I think they’re just now reopening. The fire department did a really good job defending JPL. The Arroyo in a very high risk zone.

But while JPL was closed, they couldn’t send instructions to the rovers.

So the rovers are like, “What do we do?”

Yeah, so I wrote a little story about a rover on Mars, wondering what’s happening on Earth.

Now I’m doing some visual art. I made a lot of custom clothes with my own designs on them, and I’m remaking some of those and making new ones. All this is just kind of how I process. By making stuff. Also I just, like… I really wanted something to be normal.

That Friday was Jackbox night with some of my other friends. I remember joining that call and then realizing, oh man, everybody knows my house burned down. Every conversation is going to be weird now. The second I join it’s gonna be the conversation about how Gwen’s house burned down.

🎲 Your Turn: When things are at their worst, what do you do to help yourself feel normal? Please share your tips. I think folks will find them useful. Reply to the email to tell me your healing rituals and self-care routines, or tell the world by commenting with the orange button below.

📨 Next Week: How to keep calm and carry on with your Marx Brothers video game.

Image by KC Green