On a Saturday this past June, in a darkened underground room near Los Angeles International Airport, I yelled things at my father I wouldn't say to him at gunpoint. My mother heard stuff even worse. My parents were sitting across from me, holding hands, while approximately 150 people on every side of me shouted at their families in a mayhem. Actors. Executives. Fashion models. Engineers. Every 20 seconds or so, the noise got louder, when on top of it all came the voice of our trainer, a 50-something woman with an emotional chokehold on her voice, who shouted into her microphone, as if our lives hung in the balance, What did they do to you?! Tell them what they did!

The room was a circus of tortured beasts.

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I hate you, you fucking asshole!

You bitch! BITCH!!!

Why couldn't you love meeeeeeeeee?!??!

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Call it hysterical transference. Call it psychological strip-mining. Not a single parent spoke, because they were only there in spirit. We'd projected their likenesses onto our "dyad" partner, a person sitting across from us, knees clasping knees, another traumatized man or woman likewise yelling stuff. And the fantasy worked: I really did see my parents in the dark, staring back to me with shattered looks. Though by that point I was mentally crooked from several days of emotional manipulation and little sleep, all part of a five-day training, stage one in a three-tier curriculum I had joined, in which I'd been doing this kind of stuff for long stretches, late into the night, in a high-pressure setting where the rules about what I could and could not do were strictly enforced. Rules like when I should urinate or defecate, when I could speak to other people, when I was permitted to eat food or drink water.

Then our trainer told us to picture our parents dead. Which may not sound like a big deal, but we'd been messed with for several days straight. All hell broke loose. Howling. Roaring. Call it mass abreaction. I started sobbing, to a point that I was bent double, head between my legs, feeling like I was about to throw up on my partner's shoes.

In a moment of lucidity, I thought to myself, while a woman near me crumpled to her knees, This really isn't how this article was supposed to go.

Los Angeles is less of a region than a weather system, less of a city than a county, less of a metropolis than an 88-city nation-state. Canyons burn. Slopes slide. We're a megalopolis of cement, of roads that threaten to rupture beneath our feet. There's no safety net if you're not rich; people slip through the cracks constantly. It took me three and a half years to figure out one thing, perhaps the only thing I know for certain about L.A.: Anything can happen at any second. Which provokes a sense of doom or wild hope, depending on the day.

And you feel it in your bones, that sense of uncertainty. Los Angeles has been more of a myth than a reality at different times in history; now it's all reality. Nearly 58,000 county residents are homeless. L.A. has the country's largest jail system; it cages more people than any other city in the United States. And if you're lucky enough to avoid those two fates, our mild climate can still feel cold. You're never successful enough, never pretty enough. Our devotion to fitness lets our worship of the flesh seem less like narcissism (though it is) and more like noncompliance (with death). L.A. is a competitive place, full of transplants on the seek. And with each season comes a new diet ("any three-day cleanse for $90"), a new treatment to fix what's wrong (the "Viora Reaction," the "Vampire Facelift"). Self-help has become a habit in America, but it's pathological in Southern California. Life coaches advertise on telephone poles. Storefront psychics are open 24/7. Writing in 1921, John Steven McGroarty, a poet who later became a congressman, said, "Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before."

I took a walk with a "complexity coach" who treated patients while hiking. I did an afternoon spell session with a witch. I attended a Gnostic Mass in a strip mall.

I've never loved a place like I love L.A., and I love it all. Lakewood. Glendale. Give me Burbank over Brooklyn. I've done my best to make it home, but it's tricky. At no time does Los Angeles love you back. Los Angeles doesn't even know you're here. Over the years, my wife and I started to notice how people who were born here, or who've lived here for a while, have a few L.A.-ish habits that they keep private, as if to protect their roots. A healer in the family. Mushroom chocolates for bluesy Tuesdays. A $60 "wellness" powder in their purse. Inside a week last winter, I had two separate conversations about the psychological benefits of somebody's ayahuasca ceremony, as if it were just another treatment clinic on San Vicente, not a hallucinatory experience so gut-churning that some participants wear diapers.