Plug speaks:

Picture a sunny day on the sidewalk of Fuller Street, Los Celestiales 90046, Goldensun, Unified States of Amerigon, Mother Earth, Via Galactica Galaxy, Universe.

More precisely, a few steps downhill from the entrance to a city park, Runyon Canyon.

It is a hot afternoon.

“How hot?” you ask.

“You feel like grilled cheese” hot. But it’s always hot these days, as in, “Remember when it wasn’t so damn hot?”

As if it weren’t already hot enough, a desiccating Santa Ana wind has been building all day with a faint but menacing whiff of wood smoke, pushing down the steep Runyon Canyon trails amid the scrub brush and occasional trees, out through the handsome wrought-iron gate just up the sidewalk from me, and on down Fuller.

These Santa Anas are more frequent now than they ever were before.

And so are the grand-scale arsons. Both are signs, in different ways, but parts of the same larger equation, that the social contract is tearing apart as habitable space dwindles here on our overheating Mother Earth.

Today, as every day, despite the heat, the canyon trails and the sidewalks leading up to them teem with hikers, most of whom are tethered to either of two companions: a phone or a dog – or both.

Every breed and shape of canine is represented here, from the smallest yippy white accessory dog with purple punk ‘fro to Great Danes, which, like very tall men, appear to be as embarrassed as they are by the attention their size draws.

Runyon Canyon offers a testament to the fragility of the human race’s claim to own the surface of Mother Earth. Amid the dense foliage in the canyon’s depths are the ruins of several stone-and-concrete walls left from the tract of houses that a real estate developer named Runyon started in your 1920s.

The housing tract was never finished. These ruins, now covered in graffiti, the rich language chronicling the long-raging war between Minions and the Enlightened, will be gone from sight in another 30 years.

If the Universe lasts that long, that is.

The wind begins to swirl ominously around a high-rise dwelling just below the park.

This skyward residential sprawl at 1901 Fuller Avenue, built inside the former boundary of the park on a foundation of zoning variances and a mortar of political palm grease, is typical of a Los Celestiales luxury high-rise condominium.

A semicircular driveway sweeps in from the street and under a broad portico. White-gloved valets park cars for a sleek, groomed clientele who ascend marble stairs to a glass-fronted, marble-floor lobby with a front desk, where uniformed staff members hover 24 hours a day.

Its hive of 300 luxury condo units is owned by a cast typical of a Los Celestiales high-rise: resident and absentee owners, some of them formerly famous or notorious, who used the spoils of their fled Moviewood fame to acquire the urban metaphor for property: a condominium or two.

They include a once-locally-famous jazz musician, now not; a former male porn star, now a producer of same, who “auditions” future female porn stars in, and, so to speak, with, his unit; a dentist skilled at selling $100,000* smiles; and a good number of glittering young tenants on their way up the social ladder (or fancying themselves to be).

They pause in the lobby, sparkling fashionably and noisily – always noisily, as if a quiet passage through the lobby would quell their very existence (or worse, social status), and who are denizens less of this place than of whichever Cahuenga Boulevard clubs are deemed this week to be the places to be seen.

*The “$” sign denotes a Unified States greenbuck; the currency in your iteration of the Universe might have a different name.

I dwell on this building, its surroundings, and its well-heeled and yet commonplace occupants because, in every way, its polished modernity is at odds with the character of the neighborhood – with both the few remaining Twenties movie-star mansions and the many Sixties and Seventies low-rise apartment buildings that replaced other old-Moviewood mansions.

The truly successful have long since moved their digs west to the Bird Streets or Bon-Aire or more distant enclaves of the super-rich, from Utopia Hills to Playa Mariposa and beyond.

It is this very contrast with its neighbors that makes this building exactly and precisely an everyday and mundane example of Los Celestiales as it is, and as any sentient resident would expect it to be: something new and gaudy, pushing out both recent history and the last remnants of Moviewood’s Golden Age.

And, as with any payoff worth spending, this high-rise has filched a piece of what had been public parkland in the process.

So, in other words, nothing about this luxury high-rise condo building is a surprise to anyone who understands the City of Celestials.

Ah, but there is one surprise.

Inside this building, each day, a frail-looking old woman, bent and wrinkled and not quite five feet tall, the sort of old person you don’t notice because you don’t want to, slowly makes her way with the help of a hundred-year-old Kentucky Basher M43 baseball bat (the “M” signifies a major league model), which she uses as a cane, down the hall of her penthouse apartment to the elevator.

Then, she rides down the elevator, slowly crosses the lobby with barely a nod at the front-desk clerk, and sits in a particular chair with a strategic view of  the criss-crossing halls of the building in all four directions and out to the driveway, the street, and the passing foot traffic to and from Runyon Canyon.

This woman is not friendly and engaging to the staff, as one would hope from a woman of great-grandmotherly age. She is simply observant.

It is assumed that she watches the passing traffic because she is old and alone and has nothing constructive to do, and that the baseball bat in her hands, a pathetic symbol of her frailty, is for self-defense.

The first two assumptions are correct. She is indeed old (in fact, eons older than she looks), and for now, she is alone.

However, “frail” is the farthest antonym from what she really is, and she does have something to do:

It is her task to set in motion the quest to save the Universe.

Those of us who know her well call her the “Old Hag” behind her back, mostly for want of a friendlier thought about her, but also because the name is so ironic, given… But that is getting far ahead of the story.