why i moved to los angeles

In 2008 I started mentioning to some friends in new york that I was thinking of moving to l.a.

And the response, generally, was, ‘why?’.

Not a ‘why?’ of curiosity, but a ‘why?’ that was a combination platter of scorn, derision, disbelief, and then a little bit more scorn.

‘Well’, I’d say, ‘I like l.a’. Which was part of my reasoning. The other part was a bit inchoate and esoteric, and would’ve just invited more scorn and/or disbelief, so i kept it to myself. But I’ll share it here.

To begin:

I was born in nyc, on 148th street, and from almost day one I assumed I was going to be a lifelong New Yorker. I loved New York. To be fair, I still love New York. But then in 2006 something happened…I started trying to get sober.

I’d been a drunk for decades, and from 2006 to 2008 I spent months going in and out of sobriety programs.

Then, finally, on October 18, 2008 I threw in the towel and admitted, and accepted, that I was an alcoholic.

Getting sober was, of course, challenging. But getting sober in lower Manhattan was its own sad, painful gauntlet. I’d go to aa meetings at night, and on my way home from meetings I’d walk past bar after bar after bar after drug den after bar after bar, listening to and seeing people drinking, flirting, buying drugs, doing drugs, dancing, yelling..all of the things I’d been doing a few weeks before. Basically people were living the New York dream: a big life of gleeful hedonism, ostensibly devoid of negative consequences (until of course the negative consequences reared up like the devil horses in lord of the rings).

By 2009, after being sober for a few months, I’d learned two things:
1-being a debauched drunk in New York had been phenomenal.
2-being a sober person in New York was excruciating.

But what to do? I was a New Yorker. So for a few months I struggled on, going to meetings, spending my nights watching the daily show while eating cereal and closing my windows so I wouldn’t hear the sound of drunks celebrating the manic bacchanal of New York City.

If you think New York isn’t a city of debauchery, just name one great New York song that isn’t at least somewhat about being a gleeful sybarite.

Walk on the wild side. New York groove. The Jay-Z/Alicia Keys song. Mona Lisas and mad hatters. Jean genie. And on and on.

New York’s a go-go and everything tastes nice.

Until it doesn’t.

Ironically David Bowie was one of the first sober people I met in New York. And Lou Reed. And if David Bowie and Lou Reed could be sober in New York, I told myself, then surely I could be sober in New York?

But I couldn’t. Or rather, I could, but painfully.

Every street in lower Manhattan was a proustian Madeleine for me, but instead of being a crappy cookie, every street, every corner, every subway station was a proustian vodka bottle. Or vial. Or pill.

I’d started getting drunk in New York when I was 13. So, on and off I’d been getting blind drunk and high in New York for over 3 decades. The names of the bars changed but the alcohol and cocaine and whatever drugs I could get my hands on stayed the same. A7 became king tuts became niagara became something else became etc etc.

So, 2009 rolled around, I was sober, and I was really, really cranky.

And then I had the tiniest of tiny epiphanies. Ok, a big epiphany but in the form of a tiny tree. I was on the rooftop of a building on Lispenard Street, looking north at pretty much all of nyc from the Hudson River to Brooklyn, all the way up to Times Square and beyond. It was January, approaching dusk, and the city was spread out before me, huge and sprawling and beautiful and grand and spiky. As good a view of nyc as has ever existed. And I’d seen the best views that New York had to offer. From the top of the twin towers pre 9-11, from my former penthouse on Central Park West, from drunken weddings at the top of Rockefeller Center, from helicopter rides around Manhattan with mobsters, from the top of the Empire State Building with my grandparents in the 70’s, and on and on. New York is beautiful, and the view from that rooftop on Lispenard Street was awe inspiring. And then…a little voice whispered to me, ‘yeah, but what can you see that’s alive?’

And I was stunned. I was looking at mile after mile of grandeur, of soaring beauty, but I couldn’t actually see one thing that was alive. I looked over the parapet, down at Canal Street, and there in a parking lot I saw one tiny, spindly tree.

Visiting NYC in 2023

I love New York, I really do. But in that moment I felt like I wasn’t looking at New York, I was looking at a cemetery. A giant stone ossuary. And I thought, ‘ok, maybe I should think about living somewhere where I can see life that isn’t just humans (and poor beleaguered pigeons and spindly parking lot trees).’

And I thought about my last trip to l.a. I’d always liked l.a., but usually in l.a. I’d do what all traveling musicians did in l.a.: sit in traffic, stay in a weird hotel, go to erewhon, play a show, do a tv show, look for a party.

l.a. was fun, but I’d never seen anything in l.a. that wasn’t traffic and hotels and tv studios. But, on my last trip to l.a. I’d seen trees. Lots of trees. Purple jacarandas and canary island pines and sycamores and weird Dr. Seuss palms and stolid oaks and even redwoods. And they were almost everywhere, not just in tree museums (parks). I’d gone with a friend for a walk in Los Feliz and there’d been trees and plants and LIFE everywhere. Almost the opposite of nyc; l.a was small buildings, no people on the sidewalks, and trees and plants everywhere you looked.

And here’s where my long rambling story gets esoteric in ways that I should probably keep to myself…but anywhere here goes:

in 1995 I tried mushrooms. I’d done lots of other drugs, but never organic psychedelics. And while on mushrooms I was walking around the woods in upstate New York by myself. It was September and I was in awe of the woods, the nature, the trees.

And I turned a corner on a path and came upon a house. And simply, it was dull. Nature was alive. Nature was complicated and beautiful. This house was just dull. Right angles. Flat walls.

And in an instant I thought, ‘oh, nature is just so much more interesting than the world of humans.’ Sure, humans can be interesting, but nature is complicated in ways that make human creation seem like, well, flat sad houses.

‘But’, I thought to myself years later in 2009, ‘isn’t l.a. full of some of the ugliest and flattest and least inspiring examples of human creation?’ The answer is obvious; of course it is.

But l.a. and Southern California also has millions upon millions of acres of wilderness. Mountains where you can walk for days and not see another human.

And deserts. Mountains, forests, and deserts that are ancient and tell me nothing about humanity. That instead speak to the baffling, complicated wisdom of whatever biological and geological systems started on this planet 4 billion years ago.

And that was the last piece of the ‘should I move to l.a.?’ question I asked myself in 2009: That l.a., for a city of tawdry modernity, is surrounded by, and contains, the truly ancient.

Sorry if that sounds like a tea bag cliche. But I’d grown up on the east coast and I’d spent lots of time in Europe, and 99.9% of the time in civilization, before exploring the mountains and deserts, I’d seen polite environments shaped and dominated by humans.

And yes, human environments can be nice, comforting, easy to navigate, easy to understand. But they’re unbelievably limited.

I was in Paris with some friends in 2009 and one of my friends pointed to Notre Dame and said, ‘wow, it’s so old.’

And I thought of the mountains in the Angeles National Forest. I thought of the mountains in the center of l.a. in Griffith Park, I thought of the cliffs going down to the sea, I thought of the 100 million acres of desert, all of which have been patiently baking in the sun and being washed by the rain for tens, if not hundreds of millions of years. Notre Dame is nice but it’s a few hundred years old. The mountains I was hiking on before writing this essay are effortlessly 25,000,000 years old.

So, not briefly, as clearly I’ve been rambling on, that’s why I moved to l.a. To live an inch away from mountains and deserts where I can see trees and plants and be constantly amazed (and yes, overwhelmed and terrified) by the staggering, complicated ancient natural world that has nothing to do with humans.

I like the world of humans. I like tv and oatmeal. But I learn almost nothing from humans, as by definition humans anthropomorphize everything they touch and describe. When I hike in the mountains and walk in the deserts, surrounded by environments that have benign, ancient indifference to anything involving humans, I’m in awe, and sometimes I think of this anonymous quote from a 12th century Sufi:

‘Why do you spend your time in temples and churches and buildings? While you’re inside sitting on hard benches looking for spirit, god is outside, waiting.’

I don’t know if I’ll stay in l.a. forever, but every day that I can turn my back on the belligerent noise of 2025 and disappear into the mountains and into the deserts to see plants and rocks and animals and bugs that tell me nothing about humanity, I honestly feel like the most fortunate person on the planet.

‘The earth has music for those who listen’. -Shakespeare.

-moby