The Thing About Losing Everything

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Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.

This is HyperFixed.

On this show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them.

Or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't.

This week, the thing about losing everything.

The whole premise of HyperFixed is that there's just no problem we can't solve.

Granted, people tend to come to us with sometimes ridiculously small problems.

But in principle, I don't want to turn away anyone because I feel like maybe just the fact that I'm a journalist will give me connections that they may not have that will help me solve a problem that's bigger than them and then sometimes problems come into our inboxes that are just unbelievably huge and we couldn't possibly begin to solve and the best we can hope to do is take the incredible weight of this unavoidable unfixable situation and just try and make it like a little lighter And that's what this week's episode is.

A person who is currently like waist deep in a million different problems that are way more than anyone should have to deal with.

Someone who, against their will, is starting over completely and just wants a little help to remember the person she was before her life changed irrevocably just a couple months ago.

I

was on high alert for fire for over a week because I knew the wind was going to be really bad that day.

I felt like I knew there was going to be a fire.

Fire in the Palisades had already started that morning around 10 a.m.

And so I was pretty aware of the fire conditions, but I just,

yeah,

didn't think to pack a bag, really.

There was a lot going on that day.

This is Allie.

She lives in Los Angeles, and she teaches at USC.

And the reason we're talking to her is because on a Tuesday night this past January, she was one of the thousands of Angelinos who heard that a fire had broken out in their neighborhood and it was moving in the direction of her house.

Allie had been living in this house for only a little over a year, but from the moment she and her husband first saw it, they knew it was their home.

Located at the western edge of Altadena, a suburb about 30 miles from the coast, The 1960s ranch-style house had a layout that was wide and flowing.

There was a massive deck and a 10-foot picture window that looked out onto the San Gabriel Mountains.

The house was a fixer-upper, but that was fine for them.

They were just gonna take their time, fix it up slowly over the course of several years, plant trees and flowers, and raise a family there.

They were gonna make a little life for themselves.

But then, during that first week of January, all across Los Angeles, the wind started blowing hard and erratically.

Little fires had started springing up all over the city, and those little fires were quickly becoming big fires.

So around 7 p.m., when the news hit that a fire had broken out in Altadina's Eaton Canyon, Allie began planning her evacuation.

I mean, knowing that there was a fire fewer than five miles from our house, knowing that I was alone at the house, that my husband was across town without a vehicle, and that we had three animals, and just being from Colorado, where fires are fairly common, my parents have had to evacuate a couple times from their house.

So I just, it just wasn't worth it to me to stay and find out.

Allie grabbed her pets, her laptop, some clothes, important documents, photos, and whatever sentimental objects were within arm's reach.

And then she packed up the car and drove to a friend's house to wait it all out.

I stayed up all night checking the news and texting with neighbors who had stuck around behind, saw the flames getting increasingly closer, and at some point just kind of knew that it was too close and there was just nothing.

There were no firefighters.

There weren't enough fire hydrants.

They couldn't get an air tanker out there because the wind was so bad.

The next day, while the fires were still burning, the brother of one of her neighbors drove into their neighborhood to assess the damage.

And he took pictures for each of us in the cul-de-sac

so that we would have confirmation for our own sake.

So I remember getting that picture through on my phone and just like seeing that it was real, that it was gone.

And so

I don't love that picture.

When you say a picture of your burned down house, like what

after the fire, like what physically remained?

Just the entryway.

So like the stairway up to our front door, which was maybe three stairs, and then the kind of the frame around our front door and our mailbox, which stood next to that.

Oh my God.

It's like the barest suggestion of a home.

Yeah, just enough to know for sure it was ours,

including the little, our little address above the door was there.

That was probably one of the worst moments of my life to date.

But the heartbreak that Allie felt over the loss of her house paled in comparison to the heartbreak that she felt over the loss of the things that had been inside of the house, which is ultimately why she ended up writing to us, which we will get to in just a minute.

See, Over the years, Allie had meticulously collected and archived countless treasures and artifacts from each stage of her life and from all her most beloved people.

There were boxes of photographs and handwritten letters, all kinds of family heirlooms, and a library of more than 2,000 books.

For Allie, these were way more than just possessions.

They were like physical memories that lived outside of her body.

And now the vast majority of them are gone.

And Allie feels like she lost herself with them.

It feels like I don't exist anymore.

I think that's been the biggest.

It's like the identity crisis of identity crises.

Like to have lost all of the things that I feel like

defined me or were kind of physical manifestations of my past.

It really feels like I was severed from my past self and I just exist in the present now.

And I think part of it is just like not having those objects that proved that I had a childhood, that proved that I like.

became an adult, that I like was loved by people, that, you know, I had a box of letters that, you know, notes from friends in high school, and like kind of all those things were just a record that I existed and had experiences.

And they were a place to keep memories.

Like, you can't keep everything in your head all at once or in your body.

Like, it's too, it's too much.

So they were like little places where I could outsource my memory to these objects and let them be and then like connect with those memories later by holding those objects or looking at them.

They were like prosthetic memories.

Losing all of that must be incredibly disorienting.

It's very disorienting.

I think one of the strangest things was in the early days after the fire, maybe in the first month, I

was always surprised that my tattoos were still on my body.

Oh, God.

Because

I think of my tattoos as also these kind of markers of, I think I got my first tattoo when I was like 22.

And a lot of my tattoos were done by friends in their homes.

I feel like my tattoos are kind of markers of like where I've been and who I am.

And I think because I lost every other record of myself, my brain couldn't fathom that I still had

these other records of myself, like the tattoos.

So it was very disorienting to even see my own body after the fire and was like, who is this?

And oh my God, I still have this tattoo from this Roberto Bolano novel that I got in like 2015.

Crazy.

I have that, but nothing else.

Like I don't even have that novel anymore.

Virtually all of Allie's neighbors have lost their homes, which has forced many of them to move to other areas.

Some have left Southern California altogether.

But Allie and her husband have decided to rebuild their home, something which requires navigating insurance, city permits, contractors, and so much more.

And she's also a block captain for the other people who have decided to stay, answering questions they might have about rebuilding.

But Allie told us that every time she has a new question, answering it gives birth to 15 more questions.

The questions Allie faces on a day-to-day basis are so large and sprawling, it's become like a part-time job for her.

In the process of trying to rebuild her home, she's had to learn about debris removal and soil remediation, wastewater treatment and boundary surveys, septic tanks and sewer lines.

These are issues that are so complicated and layered that even listening to her talk about them felt overwhelming.

It's hard to imagine that I would have anything to offer her.

But there was one problem that Allie had been afraid to tackle alone.

And for whatever reason, the person she wanted to help her with it was me.

And what is your particular,

well, how can I help you?

I guess is my question.

So we're in this weird situation where like we have very few things that remain from our old life.

And some of them were the things that I chose to evacuate the house with,

which wasn't a lot, but some of the things that we were left with were an accident, like things that just happened to be in the one car that we saved.

And one of those things is my iPod Classic.

The iPod Classic is, it is now the only object I have that contains any of the music that I used to own.

I was a very late adopter of like Spotify or like streaming music.

I was very much into owning, you know, CDs, really, a child of the 80s and 90s.

And so all of my music that I ever owned was like, I purchased the CD

or a friend burned me the CD or I downloaded it from iTunes, but I felt more safe and comfortable having the music like with me somehow.

And now

all of those hard drives, all of those CDs, all the old computers I had that had music on them burned down.

And so the only thing I have left that has my music on it from

pre-Spotify era is this iPod classic.

And what is the pre-Spotify era music that like you would be devastated to lose?

So I grew up in like outside of Denver, Colorado, and I went to college in Denver and I was a really huge fan of the Denver music scene circa like 2007 to 2012, which is a very specific era in a very specific place.

Right.

Most of those bands, really none of them exist anymore.

And I have a lot of their music.

And some of it was music that was never even released in the form of a CD or streaming.

It was stuff that was like on their MySpace page that I downloaded.

Wow.

Or that like their band manager sent me over email because I emailed being like, hey, what was that song this band played last night?

And like, do you guys have like an MP3 of it that I can have?

And that music scene was my life for a very long time.

Like that was, you know, most of my nights were spent in dive bars in Denver going to these shows.

If I can be honest with you,

I'm like really impressed that you managed to hang on to so much of it.

Like I don't think many people have that foresight.

So here's the

aside from the regular devastating things about losing your home in a wildfire,

I am like an archivist at heart.

I preserve everything.

in an orderly way.

I wrote a dissertation about archives.

Preserving things is just like such a deep impulse in me.

So not only had I preserved most of the things from my childhood, my adolescence, my 20s but i had preserved them sort of methodically so i had like the cds but i also had hard drive backups and then i also had this ipod but then i lost the cds and the hard drive backups so all i have left is the ipod and i do not know how to get music off of an ipod this is why allie reached out to hyperfixed because amidst this insurmountable difficulty she's facing and all this loss, she was hoping I could help her with this one small problem.

That problem being that she has all this irreplaceable music on a 20-year-old iPod and she doesn't know how to get it off.

And if you think that sounds like a frivolous task, that's probably because you've never had this happen.

I remember back in the days when iPods were still like a thing that people used as their primary mode of listening to music.

I had plugged my iPod into my computer at one point and it started syncing it.

And it was like a different computer and it wiped everything off.

If you're either too young or too old to remember this period when everybody had to sync their iPods by connecting them to their computers in order to get music onto them, if you did it incorrectly, it could wipe everything off of your iPod.

And I know this because I personally did it more than once.

It was frustratingly common.

And at least at that time, I had backups of stuff.

So, you know, I panicked, but then I was like, okay, let me get this external hard drive and put all that music back on.

But now that hard drive's gone.

Her CDs are gone.

And this music that feels like the soundtrack to the process of Allie becoming the person that she is, it lives on one device she originally purchased in 2008.

And she is terrified that she's going to lose yet another piece of herself.

One of the few that she feels like she has left.

After the break, we're going to plug in Allie's iPod and cross our fingers.

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Welcome back to the show.

So before the break, we met Allie, who lost almost everything she owned in LA's Eaton Fire.

But there was one notable exception, a decades-old iPod with irreplaceable songs by bands she grew up listening to as an active member of the Denver local music scene.

She's desperate to get them off her iPod, but she's also afraid that her computer might wipe the iPod entirely.

And although I haven't told her, I am a bit afraid that even if she gets the music off her iPod, the files might be corrupted.

Either way, we're going going to need to plug this thing into Allie's computer to find out what we're dealing with.

So I do have the cord, and that cord was in my car.

So I have the iPod and I have the cord, but I do not have an appropriate cord to connect this iPod to the computer that I have.

I don't think I have enough storage space on the current computer that I have, even if I could get this music onto there.

And I'm also terrified that if I plug in this iPod, which is the only repository of all of this music that exists now, that it'll wipe it, that it'll something will happen.

I'm going to flex a bit here.

It is rare that I can solve a problem on this show without even looking it up.

But there are two things here that are working to Allie's advantage.

One is that this is the kind of problem that was right in the wheelhouse of things 20-something Alex Goldman had to deal with on my own iPod.

I loved screwing around with that thing.

And two,

the iPod existed at a very specific moment in my life, a very tech-savvy moment.

This is like a holdover from a period of time where I was much more technically savvy than I am now.

Because, you know, 2005, I was working IT.

This is the kind of stuff I had to know.

I have gleefully forgotten 90% of it, but

I do remember this.

So you are going to need an adapter, a USB to USB-C adapter, but you can get those off of Amazon for like four bucks.

Okay.

Yeah, great.

And then iPods have a function that is called opening it in disk mode.

Old iPods would automatically try to synchronize with iTunes, and depending on your settings, it might overwrite whatever's on the device with whatever's on your computer.

But in disk mode, your computer just treats your iPod like an external hard drive.

They don't make it easy to actually get the music off the iPod this way, but it's possible.

So Allie got an external hard drive and a USB to USB-C adapter, and we reconnected a couple weeks later.

I gave Allie the series of button presses to get the iPod into disk mode and we were off to the races.

It says disk mode, okay to disconnect.

Okay, so go ahead and try connecting it to your computer.

Now, in theory, you should be able to see it in your finder.

It says on my desktop, there's a little icon that looks exactly like it, and it says MyPod, because I think I probably named it MyPod.

It's very cute.

Aiden thought it was funny to call an iPod MyPod.

I'm thinking that's me that did that.

iPods back then did a couple of annoying things when you loaded music onto them.

They renamed the files and arranged them arbitrarily into folders.

And they also hid the folders that the music was in.

I've read that Apple said that this was for quote-unquote optimization, but my pet theory is they did this just to make songs harder to pirate.

So even if the mp3 file is renamed with gibberish, if you drop them into iTunes, they'll have the correct info.

So if you're in the finder,

if you press Command, Shift, and Period, that should show you your hidden folders.

Got it.

Okay.

Hidden folders.

Oh, okay.

No, I think I found it.

Okay.

So I did, there's a hidden folder called iPod underscore control.

And then that opens a bunch of other folders, one of which is hidden, just called music.

And I click music, and now there are folders.

F00 through F49.

So there's 49 folders.

If you open those, you should see MP3s in there.

I do see a bunch of just like scrambled letter MP3s.

That's your music.

Yes.

That's my music.

And it's all just totally random.

But you said the metadata remains.

The metadata remains.

So in theory, if you put those songs in your iTunes, they should

still show up with the proper information in them.

So now I just

drag all of these.

Drag all of them.

I mean, I would copy them so you're not taking them off of your iPod, but I would do like a a copy and paste okay copy and paste onto your external hard drive it is going to take a while because it's a big thing and uh the usb speed for ipods is of that generation are pretty slow so you're just gonna have to have to wait but i'm wondering just so we can see for sure if you could just pull like a single song off of the thing and toss it in iTunes to see if it shows up properly

while it's copying.

Yeah, any one of them.

It's not going to be, it shouldn't be a big deal if you just do one song.

Okay.

Let me see if it'll let me.

I think it's starting with

F100, F00.

So let's see what music is in F00.

Because this doesn't necessarily seem to be alphabetical.

It's not alphabetical.

It's in no order that a human being can understand, as far as I know.

Okay.

Well, here's going to be a random song from the Eels album Soul Jacker, circa early 2000s.

Let's see.

Allie pressed play, and I held my breath.

And then this

is the sound that came out of her computer.

Over the din of this cacophony, I could hear Allie say, wait a second.

And I panicked.

Here it is again.

In the moment, I was sure I was going to have to tell Allie that in addition to losing her home and most of her possessions, I had somehow corrupted her irreplaceable music files.

And then when Allie stopped the tape, all she said was, Yeah, I think it's working.

Now, I was still in shock, so I didn't respond to her at all.

But Hyperfix producer Emma Cortland took herself off of mute to say, Wait, so that's how it's supposed to sound?

Yes.

I picked something a little more mainstream.

And does it show up in iTunes with normal names and things?

It does.

Yep.

It says David Bowie, Diamond Dogs, Rock and Roll With Me.

There you go.

Alex, I just need you, for the sake of this, to reflect on the fact that having that be the first song that we actually heard play was like in no way an indication that this was a successful kind of transfer.

It did sound like a corrupted, it did sound like a corrupted flow.

Oh no, we're fucked.

Alec, I was like watching your face, and I was like, she's not showing any signs of like, if this is good, if this is bad.

I don't know what this music's supposed to sound like, but this can't be it.

So it turns out that's actually what the eels sound like.

And as a lover of nearly unlistenable music, I tucked that in my back pocket.

But it seemed like we were pretty much done.

Her music was copying both to her computer and her external hard drive.

And beyond that, I don't know that there was anything else we could do for her.

So, you know, Allie, I feel like

in the grand scheme of things, this is like a drop in the bucket for all of the stuff you have to do.

But I am really glad that we were able to get this stuff at least backed up so you're not going to lose it.

You know, it might seem like a small thing, but I think that's the thing about losing everything, is that like when you lose everything, any little thing you can get back is huge.

Like, huge.

If, yeah, i mean any small thing i had a swimsuit that was the pony brand the sneaker brand pony um which was my favorite sneaker brand when i was uh in high school i used to drive like 45 minutes to the aurora mall to go get pony sneakers um

and I had bought that swimsuit for $5 and it was my favorite swimsuit and I wore it everywhere.

And after the fire, my husband somehow found it on Poshmark or something and ordered it.

And like, it's just a crappy Forever 21 branded swimsuit.

Like it's not like, but it was like, oh my God, like I wore this swimsuit to my best friend's bachelorette weekend in Colorado where we swam in a lake all day.

And like, you know, and I wore that swimsuit on like our third date when we went to the beach.

And

so just having like these little small things back sometimes is, is everything because that's all we have now.

There's very little I have that has like connected me to my old life.

So any little thing like that, and especially my music, because like music was absolutely how I defined myself for most of my life.

Like really my whole sense of self was like through music.

So having that music and knowing that it's not going to like,

if my iPod gets stolen from my car, which I'm always afraid it will,

that I won't lose that part of myself is huge, truly, truly huge.

So I really appreciate it.

This episode of Hyperfixed was produced by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sariasofer Sukenek.

It was engineered by Tony Williams.

The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me.

The episode is fact-checked by Amore Yates and Sariasofer Suketek.

You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and more at hyperfixedpod.com/slash join.

And if you're curious about how much we make, what our money goes to, and more generally, what it's like to run a completely independent, reported podcast, I wrote an article about it last week which you can find on my sub stack, which is called The Cool Dude Zone, and I'll also drop a link to the article in the show notes.

HyperFixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts.

Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.

Thanks so much for listening.

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