As soon as you get here, people tell you all the ways Los Angeles is not really a city, but something else. 

It’s a city-state, an author friend told me once. Or a collection of suburbs. It’s actually MULTIPLE climates, locals love to point out, with a smug little raise of the shoulders. “LA County alone has more people than 40 states,” they’ll say. It’s the fifth-largest economy in the world. 

What they are all trying to tell you is that you have chosen to live in a city that is too unwieldy for just one word. 

After they tell you all the ways Los Angeles isn’t a city, then they will tell you how to leave, lovingly. The comedian Naomi Ekperegin made my favorite joke about LA ever, in her 2021 Netflix set. She described a right of passage every new Angeleno experiences: all the ways veteran Angelenos tell you to get the hell out. 

”You should go to San Diego,” she’d hear from locals. “What about Santa Barbara? Ojai? Big Bear! Big Sur. Palm Springs.” A weekend away from a place you’ve just arrived.

“Welcome to LA,” she deadpans. “Pack a bag.” 

This city that eludes definition — this city so overwhelming it’s often daring you to leave it — became something else in the American consciousness last week when the wildfires kicked up. LA, it seemed, could now be summarized in just a few words: “disaster zone,” “catastrophe,” “hell.” 

The jokes about leaving for the weekend could not be told for a few days, at least. Because, all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of Angelenos were displaced, and all I could wonder was whether any of them would actually choose to come back. Ever.

What has happened to this city I love? I have so many questions. 

I also have the luxury of spending a lot of time contemplating how the fires have changed what we believe to be real and true about Los Angeles. I am safe. Those close to me are safe. I am checking with my people and dropping off the supplies and giving to the GoFundMes and responding to ALL the texts, but mostly what I am doing right now is spending my time thinking. About this city. Existentially. 

And how all of this changes the ways people choose to love or hate LA. 

There are two ways to love a place when it’s gone through a tragedy. One is that locals can tell everyone how all the bad stereotypes about the city aren’t true. We actually ARE nice. And kind. And there IS community here. And not everyone here is in the industry and not everyone here is rich! 

I have seen all that. And I agree. 

Then there’s another way. Not just telling everyone we actually beat the allegations, and have been doing so for a while. But telling everyone else that actually, my place, THIS town, it's better than yours. Some version of, “Yeah, LA is on fire, but I still wouldn’t live where you do.” I’ve seen those posts, too. They're allowed as well, I guess. 

But what I am hoping for in this moment when all eyes are trained on LA is something different. A third way of understanding this place that is hurting so much. 

I don’t care if this disaster makes you love or hate LA even more. I don’t even care if it makes you think that LA is any better or worse than what you thought it to be before these fires started. What I do care about, and what I hope for you, is that you realize there is already a little bit of Los Angeles in you, and around you, and that it has been that way for a while. 

Chances are, somewhere in this metro area, there is somebody from just about the same place you’re from. Using the same slang you do. Maybe even pursuing a dream you had or have as well. 

Chances are, almost any food you could possibly find anywhere across the world, and maybe even in your own hometown, you can find here. And someone in and around LA is doing any and every job you could ever imagine, at any given moment. Chances are, every political persuasion you could think of exists somewhere in the LA metro area, too. And this very metro area — this urban/suburban/exurban sprawlscape you may mock, the one that increasingly defies conventional political wisdom — there’s someplace near you that is slowly or quickly becoming the very same thing.  

Chances are, climate change is knocking at your door as well. It may not be fire. But it’s there. 

Every problem and crisis and transition your hometown is going through, somewhere in LA, someone here is going through that, too. And any solution to all the challenges we face, they are being pondered and studied right here as well. Chances are, we’ll share any good stuff we find out on that front with all of you. 

If you all take only one thing from this last week of disaster in Southern California, I hope you take it to heart that a little bit of you is already here. A little bit of you is already here, and a little bit of us is already in you and around you. Wherever you are. It's been that way for a while.

So blessings to Los Angeles, each and every one. 

– Sam 

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