Notes: Walk Across Los Angeles—A Love Letter

Post Script:
I wrote the following on New Year’s Day after walking across Los Angeles—one of my favorite long walks. The 2025 Los Angeles Fires had not yet started, and I am deeply grateful to have experienced the city once again in all its charm, confusion, chaos, and mystery.

Writing this feels strange, almost guilty—like a love letter to a city in a time of suffering. But I send my full love and awe to the people of Los Angeles for their strength amid the fires, the losses, and the immense challenges still ahead. Sending Metta to all.

I have friends who lost their homes but, fortunately, are safe and have the resources to rebuild. Still, these are terrible, confusing times, and I hope this love letter serves as a reminder—to myself and others—to savor the present moment and be grateful for the opportunities we have to connect with our cities, each other and to value the present moment as it arrises.

Los Angeles is much-loved and much-hated, a perfect and imperfect place, idea, and concept. Walking it lets me see both sides—the beauty and the scars. Now, as fires reshape its landscape and its people’s lives, I hope you’ll consider supporting those affected. Direct fundraising for fire victims and mutual aid networks are great places to start. There’s also this spreadsheet of resources and needs if you’re able to donate time or materials.

This letter is not just about walking—it’s about connection. To the city, to its people, to the moments we share in its streets. I hope it inspires you to explore your own city, to give back, and to keep finding ways to connect with place, with people, and with community.

---

I’ve walked across Los Angeles several times, tracing different routes, each a new choose your own adventure style journey in chance, starting usually in the east side and unraveling towards Venice or Santa Monica. It’s one of my favorite strange pursuits—an act of defiance in a city that others say wasn’t built for walking.

Walking across this or any massive, sprawling urban machine offers its own kind of reward. There’s no script, no pretense. You become part of the city’s circulatory system, its raw, humming pulse.

I’ve walked from the east side in Atwater, cutting through the veins of Santa Monica Boulevard all the way the beach; another time starting with a morning coffee in the mosaic chaos of the Arts District, through the horror and reality of skid row, through commercial nightmare/dream of Santee alley, to the sunburnt expanse of muscle bound and hemp driven Venice. Another time, I ascended the entirety of Sunset Boulevard, where the world tilts, starting in the beauty and quiet of the dusty Elysian Hills. Each journey stretched across 12 to 16 hours—a single day consumed by the city’s totality and labyrinth.

These walks demand nothing, yet they ask everything of your senses. Take water, a couple of fruits or snacks for energy, or take refuge and dive into the economy of street vendors—where abuelitas and tíos sell fruit cups, tacos, elotes. The sidewalks are vast, anonymous. You blend into their industrial currents, a glitch against the city's automotive king. People won’t stop you, but they’ll notice in flickers, the way they register graffiti in passing. You’ll escape into the roar of the streets, into the droning symphony of vendors shouting, car horns, wind sweeping wrappers, and the occasional, startling laughter of strangers.

The city unfolds itself—temples, synagogues, and convenience stores, Byzantine parking lots, strip malls vibrating with the flicker of neon, all humming with a cyberpunk energy. You’ll pass an Uzbek restaurant next to a Hasidic bakery, walk past graffiti-scrawled bridges, past corporate glass obelisks glowing in the smog. Beverly Hills feels like a simulation, its $15-million mansions juxtaposed against crumbling, tented encampments where the wind carries stories you’ll never hear. You’ll pass through spaces that feel like they’ve been grafted from Tijuana or Seoul, layered into Los Angeles’ fractal sprawl. The city mutates as you traverse it.

Your feet will ache. Around mile 15, you’ll feel the creeping edge of futility, a voice urging you to stop—but you’ll press on. There’s no triumph here, only persistence. You’ll cross streets to avoid certain zones of tension, only to be forced back by construction, temporary fences, and chasms of urban decay.

The air thickens, smog rising and clearing in waves, a planetary breath. In the distance, the horizon feels like a mirage, the sunset bleeding through skyscrapers and palm trees like a glitch in the simulation. The oscillation between beauty and horror grows sharper. Here, a hauntingly beautiful Lynchian apartment bathed in golden light; there, a corner dominated by despair and makeshift lives.

Los Angeles is not a city—it’s a system. The people moving within it are its fractal components, ricocheting along trajectories both planned and improvised. Cars flow like blood cells through the freeway arteries, oblivious to you, the errant pedestrian. Watch out on the corners as you cross, you, the walker, are the system’s rogue element, its defense system reaching in distraction.

Bathrooms will be scarce, found in the rare respite of a park or library. You’ll stop for a milkshake in the So Cal Americana institutions of In-N-Out, for indulgence, and for motivation. Keep walking. You’ll encounter joy and misery, plant life overflowing, dust hay, trash piles, and perfectly manicured gardens, children running, all compressed into a single block, one microcosm to the next. The city is an ouroboros of classes, cultures, and contradictions all feeding and renewing on and through you as well.

When you finally arrive at the edge—at the beach, at your imagined destination—you’ll be wrecked, emptied, and paradoxically filled. There’s no epiphany, no narrative climax, just the quiet satisfaction of having moved through. The city has touched you, reshaped you, as you have it.

But walking is more than a personal journey—it’s a subversion of the systems that seek to contain and fragment us. In a metropolis designed to isolate, to compartmentalize, walking stitches you back into the neural network of the city. Each step is a disruption, a reclamation of space from a world that wants you to move faster, consume more, and see less. Walking slows time. It sharpens the cracks where life spills out.

The city is alive, yes—but not just with people. It’s alive with flows: of capital, power, desperation, beauty, and waste. By walking, you plug into this circuitry, tracing its connections, absorbing its energy. You see the strata of human existence, from gleaming skyscrapers to the dark corners where the forgotten gather. And as you walk, you realize these aren’t separate worlds; they’re layers, all vibrating in the same system, all part of the same machine.

Walking isn’t just connection; it’s confrontation — hybridization. The people you pass, the spaces you inhabit, even the air you breathe—they’re part of you now, and you part of them. Every glance, every sound, every fragment of architecture carries a resonance, embedding itself into your mind, changing you in ways you might not understand until much later.

So walk across your city. Not to conquer it, but to witness its systems. Not to master it, but to dissolve into its pulse. Walk to connect—with the place, the people, the hidden energies that ripple beneath the surface. In this act, you reclaim not just the city but yourself—your time, your senses, your capacity to see and be seen. Keep walking. Let the city’s chaos calmly rewire you. And in the end, when you’ve traced its veins and felt its breath, you might just find you’ve become part of something larger than yourself.