The weather app tells me it’s somewhere between 28 and 30 degrees. There’s a nice looking sun on the app. Growing up, we always drew smiles on the sun, it was happy and it made us happy. I guess.

Lately the app has the ability to tell us when there’s smoke. But it doesn’t show any. And that’s a god damned lie.

The 30 degree smiling sun isn’t visible. There’s an orange haze where the blue sky should be. This is what we’ve come to call Fire Season or Wildfire Season.

Which is just to say we’ve given up. We slap a name to it and pretend like there’s nothing we can do about it, like we didn’t have a role to play in bringing it about.

Maybe it’s better this way. We don’t have to struggle so much if we just accept it.

Some days are more dirty orange than others. Some days you smell smoke. And some days you taste it. You come inside and have to shower because your sweat holds the ash and it creates a creamy layer of paste.

The other day my google photos put together a collection for me. It was called Golden Hour. It looked beautiful, but half the photos were of smoke and fire-related haze.

Maybe this is our new golden hour. The AI behind the photos app has accepted the logical conclusion to our fire season. Good news for photographers.

That happy sunshine in our childhoods and in our app is a bit more menacing now. It feels like it’s smiling while it burns us, or smiling while we cook ourselves. Maybe we should have drawn it with an angry face.

But then again, we’d just be trying to blame it for something we did.

Either way, I look to the apocalypse outside and ask: darling, just how fabulous do I look in this light?

To die for, is the response I can almost hear when I look hard enough.