Our home city of Los Angeles is in the news for a series of heavy hitting winter storms. While we’re on high ground and in no danger of flooding, our under-framed old house made ominous creaking sounds throughout the night.

I checked on our rain garden late last night (excuses for the bad photo) and the water level was the highest I’ve ever seen it. The rain garden gets all the water from one half of our roof which I calculate to have been about 1,500 gallons of water in the last 24 hours.

To briefly get back to the Žižek book I rambled about last week, I was reminded of Lacan’s notion of the “Real”, that which is unrepresentatible, unthinkable. Subjects such as our own deaths and climate change fall into the category of the Real. The incomprehensibility, the challenge of forming symbols or language around climate change and the hard choices we face in the future are why it is so difficult to understand and discuss this issue. Five inches of rain in one night in Los Angeles ain’t normal. It calls for a response outside of our current symbolic system. Welcome to the New Real.