The Cheesecake Factory Autonomous Zone

It’s been more than a month since I wrote on here and since then, I walked 3 miles to cancel my membership at Equinox because I wasn’t going, stopped doing EMDR because it’s too expensive, and watched Katy Perry and Gayle King go to space. Did you know that one of the not previously famous crew members of Blue Origin recently signed with CAA? Well, now you do. For the record, I think everyone —including myself — is being too hard on Katy Perry. I think sometimes we see a sliver of ourselves in Katy, and that’s why we reject her. At least I do — minus her love of Rick Caruso and vaguely still-Evangelical aura. Katy is not exactly raging against the dying of the light, but she’s doing something. Flying around a Brazilian stadium on a string, barely bringing her arms over her head during choreo or stomp-running in circles. That is something. Everyone is stompin’ these days! Lorde’s always stompin’. She stopped through Manhattan last month till she got to Washington Square Park to stomp to her new single before a crowd of gays and girls with anxiety disorders. The girls are stomping. Katy is stomping! Stomping is very much not going gently into that good night. We need Katy here on Earth. Not in space. Please don’t do that again, Katy. You really are essential here. We should show her a little more grace. Katy is maybe our most human pop star, if you can believe it. Let them who is without flop cast the first stone. I won’t go first.

And if you can also believe it, I had my birthday at the end of April, I am now 8,000 years old. You can’t even know how it feels to be this ancient, especially in Los Angeles, where everyone is young. When I step outside now, people throw pennies at me and leave vegetable offerings at my feet. They build me altars and bring their babies for me to kiss on the head. Blessings onto you!

Speaking of blessings. The new Pope is hot, right? He’s hot. I would probably suck him, which I hate.

Anyway, the crowds bring me their babies to bless.

“There he is,” they cry. “The oldest gay that’s ever lived in LA.”

36 came and went. And I am fine with it. I pretended to be humble and not want attention in the days leading up to my birthday. I told my husband and some friends that I didn’t “want to do anything.” I didn’t want to make a fuss. Lil’ ol’ me. Birthdays don’t matter after 35. Why celebrate? How tacky. Especially in a world like the one we live in today. What’s there to be happy about? The morning of my birthday I put on an oversized shirt I bought in New Orleans because I wanted to feel like I’d been miniaturized. A teeny-tiny young person. Just like Sabrina Carpenter.

On my way to work, I started panicking about time running out, and called Simon and said I actually want to do a birthday dinner. It started as a dinner for four, and then it became 10. Tee hee. Who me?! My birthday?! We went to El Coyote, where Sharon Tate and her cohorts had their last meal before being slaughtered. I bought myself a cake at Whole Foods and we ate it there. It was lovely.

We had another blast of wharf weather for a few weeks but now the sun is back. We’re on the final day of a heatwave —record breaking temperatures in places around the county. It’s not spring or summer. It’s something else — something not right. Unwell. At least right now you can say LA is a city that is sunny and not feel like you’re lying. Because really, Los Angeles is a cold city. And when it’s not cold, it is on fire. Climate change has already made everything shittier. Sure, in the extreme way. But more so in a way that makes you feel crazy. It’s subtle. Slightly altered. Rearranged. Was it always like this? The answer is no. It wasn’t. Climate change is at worst, deadly, and even worse than that, quirky. It’s a server at a theme restaurant saying, “We do things a little differently here.” The other day, a friend texted me that he feels like “Seasons are a thing of our childhood now.” I actually said “Oh wow,” out loud when I read it. He’s right. But at least it’s sunny for now.

When there is sun in LA, and I look into the sky and see the vapor trail of a jet inching towards the outer band of the troposphere, I imagine it’s from somewhere outside the US and just passing through. The pilot came on the intercom when the plane had entered the mainland after crossing the Atlantic and instructed the passengers and crew to hold their breath until they’d reached the west coast.

“Once we’re over the Pacific, we’ll be fine again,” the pilot added.

Everyone turning purple, trying their best not to breathe the air of this broken nation.

The other week I heard someone in an AA meeting share that they hate LA, which started a swell of “Me toos” from other people. I almost cried I was so happy. I was where I needed to be. Thanks for sharing. More, please. Sometimes community is hating the same thing.

In all seriousness, I don’t hate LA. It’s brought me beautiful things. My husband. Our dog. Friends. It’s certainly kept me sober — I don’t think I would have stayed sober had I remained in New York, at least at that time. I don’t hate LA, I just don’t understand it. Sometimes Los Angeles feels like calculus. Staring at geometry. It is a tesseract floating in the void. It’s a city that shouldn’t exist but does. It’s too sprawling. Built on land that doesn’t want us. The fires made me certain of that. But of course, like any ungrateful little shit, as soon as I knew LA could be taken away from me, I needed it desperately. It took my breath away. All the beauty and the horror, etc. That’s probably it. I’m not grateful enough for this place. Or maybe it’s because this city feels doomed. It’s too fragile. I’m American and want guarantees. LA isn’t guaranteed. It isn’t steely. It’s not a New York, or a Chicago. Even San Francisco, for all the hell portal-opening, society-flattening evil that has been born on computers in its surrounding areas, feels rooted. It’s a part of the country, the world. LA isn’t. I don’t want to grow old in a place that isn’t permanent; a place I might lose. But here I am, getting older. I will either fall into the cracking earth or burn alive here one day. As long as my husband and dog get out alive, I can make peace with this.

It’s more than LA that I don’t understand. It’s this country. This country that doesn’t feel like a country anymore and hasn’t for a while. Even before this White House was conjured into place, riding in on the Western Winds, bringing with them locusts, pestilence. Our Pazuzu-ass president, determined to make sure every plane crashes and no one has money anymore, while still finding time to fantasize about Mayor Pete riding to work with his husband standing up on the back pedals; his Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tea! He and his human centipede of Sphinx-faced psychos and tech ghouls sucking each other’s holes will keep pillaging and dismantling and banning and deporting everyone —citizens next— to El Salvadorian labor camps until we are all gone and there is no one left in the US but them. Then they’ll leave and go to whatever bunker city Mark Zuckerberg is building under his compound in Hawaii or go to Dubai where they’ll go to live out the rest of their days in a Cheesecake Factory in Dubai until they’re close to death and opt to be cryogenically frozen.

This weekend I listened to a complete oral history of 9/11 on audiobook and started taking Nutrafol. Last night I went to the Cheesecake Factory at the Grove and remembered there still might be hope after all. Everyone who was working there was gay or nonbinary and I felt certain it was the safest place I could have been in this entire country. This is what it means to be an LGBT American and at a Cheesecake Factory. We were there together, preserved in the arctic A.C. of this restaurant that looks like Saddam Hussein’s palace at Epcot. They should distribute PrEP at this Cheesecake Factory once they ban PrEP in the US. The Cheesecake Factory is an autonomous zone. A nation state. It is apart. We have our own post office. Your jurisdiction doesn’t reach here.