July 2017: “the palm trees died so we could live” July 2018: “as a young child, I always dreamed of closely associating my personal identity/professional brand with palm tree fires. in Los Angeles, anything is possible” July 2019: “Flaming palm tree: the official symbol of the city of Los Angeles.” July 2020: “not ashamed to admit that the only reason I’ve downloaded the Citizen app is to detect L.A. palm tree fires” Like anything done as a gag for too long, the schtick becomes associated with you, which I have mixed feelings about. I don’t particularly enjoy the thought of flaming palm trees. (I like trees, dislike destruction, value durability.) I also have mixed feelings about randomly retweeting internet strangers with small follower counts who post a photo of a tree fire, even when their captions are something like “fireworks caught the palm tree on fire lol” or “MY IDIOT NEIGHBORS CAUGHT THE TREE ON FIRE.” It’s generally pleasant to just hang out online and post random stuff until some horrible, surprising, controversial situation arises that centrally involves you, and lots of strangers are suddenly watching you closely with intense interest.