“Would you ever live anywhere else?” To a lifelong New Yorker it feels like a stupid question but people still ask it, sometimes offering their opinion at the same time: “I could never see you anywhere else, you’re SO New York.” 

What they mean is neurotic, caffeine-addled and busy. I am always ignoring someone’s text or shooing away a pigeon, often at the same time. I’m constantly dashing from place to place, disappointing someone, running late, leaving early, being consumed with my own importance and lack thereof, ping-ponging between being robbed and beloved, stressed, unhappy and elated. 

But if I were to live somewhere else, if I were to pack up and move, I would go to LA. Cut the pigeons, cue the doves. 

I believe if you’re someone who survives only because you’re in a particular place, someone who requires this routine and that coffee blend, this exercise class and that bar; essentially, if you’re a plant that can’t live without the hard terra-cotta walls of a pot, you might be doomed to wither away and die. At the risk of sounding even more like Dr. Seuss: Building your identity around a location makes for a weak foundation. I like to think I could live anywhere for any amount of time. This is, of course, an unsubstantiated claim but I’d give living in a shipping container in the tundra a go if the rent was low enough and it had some southern exposure. 

The first time I went to Los Angeles as a tax-paying adult I was shocked by how much I loved it—and how much I hated paying taxes. I love Hollywood Regency–style furniture. I love movies. I love people who have created a version of themselves that’s far from who they were when they were born, who have forged a new identity from rough material. I love self-mythology. I love Eve Babitz, I love sunshine, I love beautiful girls and boys, and I love wellness.¹ (Oh, to be well!) In New York, everybody seems to be too busy to be well. Even your unemployed friends and those lonesome artist types (writers, musicians, painters, you know and have dated the sort) are suspended in this gelatin of anxiety—wildly windmilling, trying to get anywhere at all. 

I love LA, but the thing I love most of all about LA is that LA is over there. What would I hold onto if it were over here? Would I dream of my ancestral home of Missouri? Yearn for the nightlife of Miami? Become besotted with Berlin? I know that if I were to move to LA, I could be just as unhappy there as anywhere else, and that’s saying something. But I thank God that, for now, LA is still over there.