Happy birthday, Los Angeles. You turned 241 on September 4, 2022, but no one said anything. The city government wrote something for your last birthday when you turned 240, but this year it seems they just gave up. Your own government ghosted you. This makes me sad, and frankly a little mad, because I love you.

I’m sorry that no one thanked you for this strange otherworldly world you’ve given us: the shocks of hot pink bougainvillea; the buzz of hummingbirds; the strange winding steep streets where it’s terrifying to park your car; the monstrously large agave plants that tower over us; the trails above the city where you can run into coyotes (that somehow remind of me B-list f*ck bois) and rattlesnakes and the plant that you can make ricin from, if you paid attention in chemistry class or even to Breaking Bad.

No one toasted you to thank you for being able to drive up the coast and get drunk on beer and fresh fish, and then sober up by the tide pools. No thanked you for the gift of being able to fly down the freeway to your cousin’s house in Chatsworth and float in their pool during the 103 degree heat while they smoke pot and giggle. No one thanked you for being able to have horse here, (right in the city!) stabled in strange random neighborhoods. No one mentioned that you can walk along a river filled with egrets and cranes; or that a red-tailed hawk or an owl might show up on your fence one day, the first sign that you have a rat problem.

No one thanked you for the food, an abundance of riches unparalleled by any city, ever, anywhere. (Fight me, New York City). The Muslim Chinese restaurants with the their pungent lamb dishes; the other Chinese restaurants with slippery shrimp and wildly different opinions on how spicy Kung Pao should be; the dim sum; the Korean barbeque and tofu soup; the fruit stands that taught us to put spicy red pepper on watermelon; the ramen; the sushi restaurants that shame you for ordering california rolls; the diners from the 1950s and even before, still hanging on by a thread; the pastrami and corned beef sandwiches at Jewish delis that are both dying and hanging on for dear life; the oysters (yuck) that you can eat while getting drunk on a date with your endless crush; the restaurant run by a Scottish family, serving sourdough biscuits for over forty years; the street with only Ethiopian restaurants, all serving the same thing yet all with individual fans. (I recommend this one).

And of course, there are the tacos. Not the tacos served by restaurants backed by hedge funds, but the ones that hemorrhage grease through their paper bag. The ones that all pregnant Los Angeles women grab on the way to the hospital, standing in line while timing contractions. (This happens at Tito’s).

Dating in Los Angeles is abject horror, but there are incredible moments, like when I went on a hike with a rich television producer who screamed and screamed and screamed and just wouldn’t stop screaming when we came across a rattlesnake curled up on a rock, sunning herself, minding her own damn business. I knew screaming was not the way to go, because in the 1970s my father made me take classes at an old brick building with a surprisingly abundant rose garden that we simply called “the science museum.” One class was dedicated to snakes and lizards; we wrapped baby garter snakes in our childhood fists, and watched our teacher get bitten in the neck by his pet boa, Glenda, even though he had put her in the freezer for a few hours to allow her to chill out. (Sorry).

“Go get an adult,” he said calmly to a class of seven year olds, as dark blood streamed down his neck. In this, he provided the perfect metaphor for the barely contained wildness of Los Angeles in the 1970s. The city hummed with something magical and dangerous, spiritual and profane.

There were school trips to the La Brea Tar Pits, with sculptures of animals stuck in the tar that I guess was still bubbling underneath the sidewalk? No one really explained it, and we glossed over the trauma of extinction entirely. There were other school trips: to artists that lived on the other side of town, who made stained glass and bred kittens, to weird cabins in the “woods” which were just dusty oaks trying to survive the drought. There was a camp counselor who called himself “Steven Nature” who took us on midnight hikes and cooked up the poor rattlesnake I discovered when I went to fetch a softball. The cooked pieces floated in water in an old milk carton that he passed around to us in an effort to get us to eat it. “You never know when you might have to survive in the wild,” he said to bunch of privileged children from the westside of Los Angeles, who were raised on Pop-tarts and double stuffed oreos.

Last week, I went to a Korean spa with a mineral water pool that bubbles up from the same sticky tar underground that took down the woolly mammoths. Is it remarkable that there is a mineral hot spring in the middle of Koreatown? Yes, but then again no, because this is the city with screeching wild parrots, packs of coyotes who hang out in the Gelson’s parking lot and blue-bellied lizards you can hypnotize by stroking their tummies. (Thanks for this tip, Steve Nature). This is the city where small silver fish come to mate on the beach a few times a year, and people go to watch.

I go to this spa every so often to soak in the water and get a layer of skin scrubbed off by a woman named KJ. She inevitably yells at me that I haven’t been back often enough, muttering “too much skin” as she throws buckets of hot water on me while I lie on a table that is apparently made of a pool flotation device. Last week, she wordlessly greeted me with a cup of the spiciest, gingeriest tea I had ever tasted. “For me?” I asked confused, because kindness is so confusing these days. And indeed it was for me. “For you,” she said, touching my cheek “to keep you healthy.” KJ lives in Los Angeles, yet another reason to love Los Angeles.

There are earthquakes and fires and and mudslides, and at one time there was unbreathable air which was not good, but it made the light more frighteningly vivid. Lawrence Wechsler wrote about the glow of Los Angeles in 1998, and no one has done it justice since. I’m not going to try, but I will say this: I remember the light chasing me and my friends across the UCLA campus as we shrieked on our way to some sort of 1970s movement class, our mothers pulling up the rear. I remember it would follow us when we would go to Swensen’s ice cream afterward, barefoot, just in our leotards. I was so proud of my adult ice cream order — blackberry with chocolate jimmies — and as the afternoon light streamed through the window onto my Very Mature Ice Cream, the light also hit my friends’ faces which were covered in pepto bismol pink, a hazard of bubble gum ice cream. That moment is suspended in amber, because the light was always warm, filtered, a layer of honey.

Now the sunlight blinds me on my drive to work in the morning and anesthetizes me on my drive home. Sometimes when I stay in bed all day it pours over me while I wait for hummingbirds and butterflies to appear outside the window. The light always reminds me that Los Angeles is a vortex you can’t really leave, or escape, depending on how you look at it.

There are tiny signs in Santa Monica warning us about tsunamis, the possibility of which long-term Angelenos are kind of excited about — surfs up, after all. Then months ago, there actually was a tsunami warning, and the very young, very hot actor Valentina was dating started to blow up a raft in his apartment. “Why are you doing that?” Valentina asked while calling him from her run on the beach.

“There’s a tsunami warning!” he shrieked through the phone. Valentina tried to explain that this meant that surfers just had to be careful, but the Hot Actor was from Pennsylvania and just couldn’t wrap his mind around it all. It was all too wild and dangerous.

But he can stay. There is room for everyone in Los Angeles, even extremely hot but dumb actors. This is why Los Angeles never runs out of waiters.

As children, there were trips to the 20th Century Fox production lot, the holy grail for hot dumb actors, where we saw fully built fake city streets. Years later, my friend Sharon and I walked down a twee street in upstate New York. She turned to me and said “this looks like the Fox lot.” I nodded in agreement. It wasn’t until a few hours later that we realized something was wrong with us. We slowly turned to each other and said in unison, “Wait…it’s the other way around…the Fox lot looks like the street. Right?”

But this was the hazard of growing up in a city dedicated to fiction and celebrity. It bred a certain variant of narcissism that infected everyone. When I was seven, my father had to explain to me that not everyone was Jewish, something I believed because everyone on our street was, and all my friends were.

“No,” he said patiently while I sat on the banana seat of my bike, skeptical. “Not everyone is, and in fact most people are not.” I presented my countervailing evidence: how could that be, when Danielle, Gabrielle and Valentina were all Jewish? How could that be, when Liz across the street was Jewish? When Dr. Pivko was Jewish? It never occurred to me that there was a different world outside my world, outside my street.

A few years later, after I witnessed my mother getting mugged, I was sent to therapy to deal with the trauma. The therapist had huge abstract oil paintings on the wall, painted by her, and she gestured to them and said “you can create any kind of life you want.” This was an ineffective way to make me less scared of muggers, but it did clue me in to the ethos of Los Angeles at a young age: you can just do what you want, be who you want. It’s okay. Drop in and reinvent yourself.

Perhaps that’s why I allowed myself to have such a wild adolescence. So wild, that I wonder what spirit was watching out for me. Was it the city? I’m not blaming the oil-painting therapist exactly, but where else did I get the idea that I could sneak into clubs, or have romances with adult men, romances that would surely get them jailed today? Where else did I get the idea that it was a good idea to ride in the bed of of truck driven by (extremely) hot lifeguards, who parked at the beach, then picked me up and ran straight into the ocean at midnight?

Where did I get the idea that could go to parties at friends’ houses where the parents were just …gone, like, forever? As in: the parents had moved, and left their kids to fend for themselves. Where did I get the idea that my first job should be as a hostess at a Mexican restaurant, where the bartender slipped me Midori sours, turning my tongue green? Where did I get the idea that it was a good idea to visit a drug dealer’s house, where I was asked to roll a joint as a rite of initiation? My boyfriend look stricken and secretly rolled it for me. He’s a Los Angeles cop now.

I was painting my own oil painting of a life, and it was wild and dangerous and colorful, just like the city. Those years should have landed me on the back of a milk carton, but somehow I just knew everything was going to be okay. It was as if there was a net of tar and sunlight and saltwater and eucalyptus waiting to catch me. The city led me to danger and then pulled me back, over and over, so I could live another day to survive an earthquake, a wildfire, or meet more random coyotes and rattlesnakes, to pet more blue-bellied lizards.

I love you, Los Angeles. Happy birthday.

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