To L.A., With Love
I was going to talk of intentions instead of goals and cycles instead of new beginnings. Instead, in light of the horrific fires eating up the place I used to call home and still do in my heart, I want to tell you about LA.
I ended up there be happenstance. None of it was planned and none of it went smoothly, but somehow, after five bumpy years, a pandemic, a strike that shook our industry, and my own industry job hops to boot, I ended up with some truly beautiful friends and a new identity as a person.
This piece isn’t about how LA looks in the media versus what its’ “actually like.” That I would argue, is a definition belonging solely to the people who live there. The ones who have been planted there for years. This piece is about my LA which I haven’t always shared about but want to now.
Sometimes I don’t remember exactly what I did but I do remember where I was. For multiple years when I first arrived, I spent many afternoons in Altadena with my friend Tiffany in her little garden backyard trying to avoid her chirping bird. He was a wile fellow and prone to dramatics but I enjoyed the idea of him from a distance. From the back of Tiffany’s house you could see the broad expanse of mountains which we quite often took to to get out and away from the Pandemic and its city claustrophobia. To the west of us was a park with a dam long dried up. Recently they brought the dam back to life but then, when we took our hikes, you could still walk along the sand and stare up at the structure that would one day hold water again.
Southwest of Altadena is La Canada Flintridge. On a regular day, you start in the hectic city of LA then you take the 134 Northeast and you end up in this tiny oasis outside the city. Downtown is visible from the highways but just off and into the neighborhoods there is a tiny town that might as well be a set for a Hallmark movie. During the fall and winter they have parades through the streets and the shops stay open late. There is one incredible Spanish restaurant and a respectable diner next to a used bookstore called Lost Books, full of plants and birds. It’s all surrounded by the most incredible green hills.
South of La Canada Flintridge is Eagle Rock where I took a break from the TV industry during the pandemic to work in and eventually run a coffee shop. Eagle Rock is probably the coolest place in LA though haters will claim it’s Silverlake or Los Feliz. Real ones know better and yes, I am absolutely biased because I had the most beautiful community there while I worked again in coffee. Not long after I left, the owner sold the shop but I am happy to say it remains a coffee spot, just under a new name.
I lived in North Hollywood. There’s not too much to say about that except it was some of the most challenging and beautiful years of my life. (So yeah I guess alot to say, but we won’t get into that here.) I would not have made it through those years if not for my roommate and friend Nandini. We survived a pandemic together and I think that qualifies us a top tier friends. I am still wistful for our old neighborhood.
But often when I think of LA I don’t think about the city at all. I think about the coast. I think about Malibu and Point Dume and driving my way down to Santa Monica to meet up with friends for a movie night after a day at the beach. I think about the whales we saw in March and the sea lions we saw in June. I think about my body in the sea green water, remembering itself for the first time in years. I think about the white sweater I bought in Tucson and wore to the beach on cloudy days and the croissant and coffee I always secured before I made my way there. I think about watching a baby sea lion I saw rescued by biologists on my last day saying goodbye to the ocean before I left for Tennessee.
Slightly up the coast, headed North you can find a trail head whose golden grass in the summertime shines brighter than the sun against the blue sea. If you really want to journey, you can keep going West to Ventura which is what I did often when I still wanted the ocean but different. (It’s outside of LA but it’s part of the LA story for me.)
In 2023 Creature Comforts opened a taproom in Downtown LA. For those of you who don’t know, Creature Comforts is a brewery from my hometown in Athens, GA. Their beers were featured in a Marvel movie and their connection to Hollywood led them to open the location. I felt a special kind of awe at how I could now have a taste of home in this wild, industrial place. It struck me as cyclical, me the Athens native and Creature Comforts the Athens brewery, a nearly straight shot directly across the country. Somehow we both ended up there at the same time because of the same industry in the heart of a city that never looks so good as it does when the sun is setting and you’re re-thinking your life on the highway.
I don’t think of LA as a whole. I think of it in series of fragmented moments cobbled together by the through line that is my own experience. After all the shit I went through and all the self-reckoning, it’s the cups of coffee on days I felt real, the friends who let me cry in their living rooms, and the waves attacking the shore of the PCH that I remember more than anything. I’ve heard mothers don’t remember the pain after they have a child and frankly, sometimes I don’t remember the pain of becoming myself in a city whose name prompted the tiling of heads and the raising of eyebrows.
I don’t know what people expect when you tell them you’re moving to LA. I’m really not sure what I expected. Certainly not what I got. But despite the battering I sometimes felt I received I managed to build a life I was proud of and it’s incredibly hard to watch it burn.
In a previous piece, the one I may or may not send out, I wrote about cycles. I wrote about how things must die to renew. I can’t help but feel I am in the winter of my current life; a death of some sort is happening. I am underground coming apart and re-stitching myself into what I will be in the spring. Sometimes it feels that the entire world, certainly the Media industry, is also in winter but some seek to poison the ground and others aren’t sure spring will ever come back at all.
I would like to believe that the Creative Life of myself and others will come back one day much like LA will eventually regrow itself. But we are forever changed and so is that land. I worry for a future in the hands of a select few who do not seem to grasp its purpose. I worry that many of us are looking at places like LA thinking “Thank god that’s not us” but it is. It is us. It’s all of us. We are all people of memory, people who are etched with the experiences we’ve had on this earth. We are not media presences or brand names or shareholder investments we are people and we need each other to show up and be there.
And we do. We do show up. I’ve been so busy texting/messaging people these past few days. When did I come to know so many people I care about? When did I forget that made me rich beyond my wildest dreams? Going out to LA was never really about achieving the moment of success; one pure moment to make it all make sense. LA was about breaking the lens I had one life. That no one moment fixes or ruins everything. It all comes back in its own, unique and reborn way. You are not broken forever or fixed forever, you are just a person experiencing the cyclical nature of life. I will love the City of Angels forever for teaching me that.
As of this moment, 01.10.25 I do not know the state of the fires in LA. I think there is some small bit of control happening but that could change. Please donate and support where you can.
Normally this is where I would put the Little Magick Things. But this list is of LA memories because that suits our theme here today:
Every day at the coffee shop in Eagle Rock a man would come in for a coffee. He had a pleasant demeanor and was resolved to teach my The Four Agreements. His good nature and friendship with the shop owner won everybody on our team over. He gave me a pink crystal not long before I left. I found out last year he had died rather suddenly. Two days ago I found that pink crystal in the pocket of my jacket, the day I learned of the fires’ severity.
My first friend in LA, the friend who got me my second job which led to my permanent move, let me live with him and his roommates those first couple of months. We sat on the roof of his house and looked for the Big Dipper. I never actually found it and he teased me about it for years, but that night on the roof I new I was a person who could have friends, a person who could be loved.
When my dog was put down and I was unable to get home to Athens and say goodbye, I bumped into somebody on set who’d been a casual acquaintance. I really couldn’t stop myself, I cried right in front of him and the poor guy had to pull me aside so I wouldn’t weep all over the prop cart. That person became one of my closest friends and his dog Noodle and I are good buddies.
During the pandemic I was out of work and my roommate had to move her office home to the kitchen table. We were stocked up from a Costco haul and I had nothing to do but lounge on our futon by the window, eating berries and watching the world go by because I absolutely hating being cooped up. One day she’s watching her screen, then looking at me then back at the screen and starts laughing. I asked what was up and she said, this is us right now. She turns the screen to face me and she’s got a YouTube ambience video in the background. The video is of a girl at her desk working while her cat sits in the window and twitches its tail, dying to get outside. I nod. “That tracks” I say as I laugh and go back to being a cat in the sunshine.
My friend Rachel convinced me, with the promise of food, to join her for Bachelor nights at her apartment. Mind you, I’ve never been a reality TV watcher though I did work in it for several years, but she was dying to watch it with somebody so I said fine, because who doesn’t love free dinner? That started a bi-annual community hang out of dinner, drinks, and dessert that kept me properly sane for three years. I didn’t at all care about The Bachelor. I did very enjoy getting to know my friend.
