This Will Be a Summer of Love
Everything is beautiful and all of us are free.
Hi friends!
Greetings from Los Angeles, where a good chunk of the city is smoky BBQ-flavored from a massive warehouse fire. It started last Wednesday, when solar panels on the building’s roof caught fire, but it wasn’t until Saturday that the smoke blew over to my neck of the woods. This smoke is particularly toxic because the warehouse is a cold-storage facility with 85 million pounds of food now rotting inside its formerly refrigerated walls. Compared to Boyle Heights, where the warehouse is, or the surrounding neighborhoods in Northeast LA, my part of town is fine (is it tho?), and it wasn’t until the smoke spread westward to more affluent zip codes that both the city and the state declared an emergency. For days, the residents of Boyle Heights were told to shelter in place under a noxious cloud of burnt industrial chemicals. I can’t even imagine what the air is like over there when going outside this many miles away has felt like a game of lung cancer roulette with odds based on which direction the wind’s blowing.
It was only about a year and a half ago when wildfires flattened multiple communities in this city. I came out unscathed, but having to once again decide between polluting my lungs or staying trapped inside gave me a whiff of PTSD. It makes me so sad that we are all being poisoned to varying degrees. Sometimes a bitch like me can ignore the toxicity of this world, and then sometimes it manifests physically. This past weekend, on the summer solstice, while the California sun burned bright through the haze, I gazed out my window and yearned for a remedy.
We’re at the halfway mark of 2026, and the past six months were vibrationally deranged. We all know the state of the world at large, so I won’t recap. As for my life, I started this year by being awake during surgery twice in January. I barely remember most of the winter, but I wrote a lot here and in my journal, so I have a record for posterity. I spent too much time alone feeling like shit. When all of my demons came a-knocking at once, I invited them in to keep me company, put on a pot of coffee, and said, “Sit down, old friends.” Spring was for integrating that unplanned psychedelic journey by crying in yoga class every day. Now, I have so much energy that I’ve recently taken to blasting early Kanye on repeat as I power walk for two hours at a clip that could qualify me for the Olympics.
At the beginning of January, right after I was shanked by an elderly doctor at Kaiser Permanente, I announced the theme of the year as “2026: We’ll Try & Fix?” and said:
Lots more to come because I’m excited to explore this theme as we move through what I’m sure will be another year of many notable moments. Even though we’re in January, and it feels wrong not to set goals for the new year, I’m giving myself the grace to just not. After yesterday’s heart rate incident and World War I surgery, it’s clear that I’m in the trenches and the only thing I need to fix at the moment is myself.
It took … six months … but I’m thrilled to be fixed and back in business. And my favorite notable moment so far was Kristi Noem’s husband’s huge titties.
When I call this world toxic, I am obviously talking about much more than the air in Los Angeles. There’s the environmental toxicity that’s turning our climate into a disaster, which always becomes more apparent, here in the Northern hemisphere, between June and October. Sending a cool mist to everyone shvitzing in record temperatures.
There’s the spiritual toxicity of the tech ghouls who are openly on a mission to dehumanize us with their war on empathy, self-expression, and what remains of our work, communities, and ability to form a sentence.
There’s the cultural toxicity of everyone’s misbehavior.
And then, of course, there is politics.
It’s high time for us to detox, and while I don’t know how to fix the climate crisis or get everyone to stop talking incessantly about AI, I do have a grasp on how we can remediate the zeitgeist.
When I named the Age of Unhingement™, I didn’t realize that what I was naming was really a structure of feeling, a concept coined in the 1950s by cultural theorist Raymond Williams to describe the collective emotional experience of an era. We no longer live in a monoculture, but ask anyone whether the past decade has been unhinged, and, unless that person has made contrarianism their personal brand on “X,” it’s hard to say no from any frame of reference.
The anti-maskers thought it was just as insane to wear a mask as those of us who abide by science thought it was insane to expose ourselves (and others) to a deadly virus. You can think Nazis are in the White House eyeing CNN as the new frontier in state media or that the libtards are delivering fake news to spread a woke mind virus. Paranoid billionaires are building doomsday bunkers but it seems we’re too tired to revolt. The offline crowd thinks the rest of us have lost it and the extremely online community has no choice but to concur from an endless scroll.
The real, physical threats and widespread instability haven’t helped in our collective search for the hinge, but the structure of feeling we’ve been living in has been ruthlessly shaped by algorithms. That’s why all the endless discourse around “taste” does my head in, I am less concerned with aesthetics than I am with how the past ten years of reconstructed reality has manipulated our emotions.
Algorithms drive so much of our perception and it’s not that hard to game them. The cheapest, most organic option is good old fashioned baiting a reaction. The most effective option is the stealthy marketing tactic known as “clipping,” where creators are secretly paid to promote a point of view, most overtly seen in the music industry because they use it to blow up artists in a contemporary form of payola. The jankiest option is to employ an army of bots that boost your likes, and your views, and fill up comment sections with inflammatory or effusive nonsense. All of these very common practices tell us the same thing — virality can be faked and the mood of culture is being cooked by nefarious chefs. Add in the proliferation of AI content and you’d think that this would lead me to unleash a primal scream. But it’s summer, I’m feeling alive again, and I’m desperate to get my groove back. So, instead, I will ask: If reality is so malleable now, who’s to say that it can’t belong to us instead of them?
The structure of Unhingement thrives because the pandemic left us more isolated than it found us and it’s easy to be terrified and depressed when you’re alone staring at your phone. We think our emotions live inside our heads but they’re actually contagious. It’s why the Knicks winning the NBA Championship was celebrated way beyond New York City. The energy we felt, even from afar, is known as collective effervescence, a term coined by sociologist Émile Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th century to describe the transcendence and joy that arrives when people create in harmony or dance together until dawn or sing in a choir or root for their country in the World Cup.
I think we’ve ceded enough ground to fear and rage and this lonely version of what we’re calling culture. It’s time to renovate our structure of feeling. Let love and unity spread like algae because we all deserve to be happier.
As we discussed last time, the news has no boundaries and is weaponized to harm us. So, this summer, I’ve decided to temporarily abandon the news and rebrand Burn It All Down as a love letter. I’m taking a break from the dystopian play-by-play because this fucking internet doesn’t need one more hot take. Every sad motherfucker on it, however, could use a loving embrace.
I have lived in the apocalyptic nirvana known as Southern California for a decade. I’m so soft now that I sometimes wonder where all my bones went. But I wouldn’t change a thing. If I wasn’t boneless, then I wouldn’t be here telling you that my plan for the summer is to exist on a higher vibrational plane. This will be a summer of love because all of us, but especially me, need it. And I don’t just mean romance, although that would be divine, I mean kindness and fun and making new friends and loving ourselves in an act of rebellion against the man and all of us allowing the bud of joy to blossom and pollinate outward in our lives.
One last thing before I go: To my beloved Aussie readers who got this far, I didn’t forget you, this will also be a cozy winter of love. I might not have the reality-shaping power of a psychotic trillionaire and his little friend Grok, but I am blessed to be read all over the world by enough people to spread a lot of love. Let’s all cling to the idea of a better vibe like a koala on a tree trunk.
Yours in effervescence. ♡
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Right on Liz...I'm right with you:)