Los Angeles, my dark city, you were my first true love.
I’ve loved you since I was a teenager, and I love you still now that I’m old.
Moving from the flat, boring, Midwestern place that I came from when I was younger, your earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides were always part of your charm. I knew the risks but dared to love you anyways.
For a while, at least. While I could.
What I’m seeing now is breaking my heart.
A Great American City under siege by wildfire is shocking. The Palisades are gone.
The videos are horrific. Seeing people abandon their cars to flee on foot down Sunset Boulevard is unreal to me.
This should not be happening.
The tragedy is still unfolding, so we can reserve judgement and blame until we know more, but I have feelings. Big feelings.
I hope you’re OK. I hope you recover. This is a doozy.
We still have people sleeping in tents in North Carolina, which is horrific enough. But somehow there is $500 billion in aid to Ukraine announced while the wildfires are still raging in Los Angeles - and I’m just gobsmacked. I am NOT ok.
What the actual fuck. Are you paying attention?
People have lost everything. The most affluent area of Los Angeles had no water pressure. What is going on?
This one feels different.
I am so sorry. No one deserves this.
Love always,
AMO
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LA is a place that attracts the dreamers and the doers and the odd ducks like me who felt different and energized in a city where almost anything was possible, where almost any dream could come true. I moved there when I was 18 to pursue my heavy-metal dreams, and again when I was 29, to get my MLIS.
I loved it, but I had to leave it both times. I knew I’d spend my life in survival mode if I’d stayed. Even if I’d found fame and fortune there - LA still asks a price of you that sometimes you can’t pay.
I long for it sometimes, though - the most creative city in the world, full of writers, filmmakers, book-lovers, artists, passion and purpose. Reality and make-believe collide in spectacular fashion there. It’s a city full of characters and story-tellers and culture and great food. A city that is so good to you when you’re riding high, and impossibly indifferent when you’re low.
But the thing about LA is that you can always take a drive.
A drive down Sunset, through history, time, legend and lore, through architecture and landscape, through thickets of memories and secret ambitions and hidden stories. Through old Hollywood, West Hollywood, The Strip, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, past UCLA and into Brentwood and Pacific Palisades and up along the coast into the wilds of Malibu.
You could drive away from your misery all the way to the ocean. Find a place to pull off, to sit on a beach, and to reset your mind and your heart. A place to talk to God.
Los Angeles is a beautiful city, but it is not an easy city. It requires some sacrifice - and the people who choose to stay and take that bargain work hard for what they have. Generations of families are now uprooted. Insurance coverage? Who knows at this point.
It’s easy to give LA a bad rap if you haven’t lived there. It really is a magical place.
It’s easy to blame “climate change” when you are still processing the incompetence, irony, and reality of the politicians and bureaucrats who left these neighborhoods without enough water. No amount of magical thinking will escape that reality.
Wildfires are a part of life out here in the west. We have them here in Arizona every year. And look, we don’t have great forestry practices either.
I’ll be honest though - this time it feels different. Sinister. I can’t shake the thought that these fires all over the city were intentional, set during an opportune moment by evil-doers. The winds were forecasted.
I haven’t lived in LA in 20 years, but seeing all of this makes me angry, and sad.
So sad. I don’t know what else to say.
To my friends and readers in Los Angeles - Be safe.
Thoughts and prayers, of course.
And then I hope we get some answers.
With love, always.
AMO
Such a heartfelt and well written piece. 💔
So surreal and devastating. 😢