....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I give up. I surrender. I quit. I fought the 405 and the 405 won. I have been making trips over the Sepulvida Pass in the last few weeks. I now know the workmen on the sound wall by name. I can construct one hundred fifty-three different words using only the letters found in "Skirball Center, Next Exit". And the man who owns my local gas station sent me a thank you card for putting his daughter over the top on her college fund. She's going to Harvard. I now officially hate the 405.
Actually I've been stuck on most of the L.A. freeways at one time or another. The 5 is only a fond memory now but I've spent a few weeks there over the last twenty years reading the license plates of the cars and trucks around me. And the 10, ahh, the 10, famous in legend. Stuck on the 10 is like being eaten by a giant anaconda; you die such a slow death that when it finally comes it's an anticlimax. It takes so long your life does flash before your eyes but then it goes into reruns.
The 101 was my home away from home for about two years. I spent more time parked on that stretch of concrete than kissing my wife. I should have taken her to work with me. Hey, kissing is about the only thing I haven't seen people doing in their cars while stuck in traffic. I wish more people would do it. Car pooling might finally catch on. Watching kissing would be more entertaining than watching men pick their noses and comb their hair. Have you noticed that it's usually men who comb their hair when driving, while women are more likely to be applying make-up. I wonder how many eye liner pencils have been removed from women's corneas over the last fifty years? It doesn't matter. All we have to look forward to is fifty more years of the same; traffic, traffic, and more traffic.
About the only freeway I haven't been stuck on is the 2, the Glendale freeway. There never seems to be a back up on the two. Even when they had a brush fire out there last year, cars just kept driving right through the flames. You know why the 2 is the only un-jammed freeway? Because the two doesn't go anywhere. Have you ever been to Montrose? Somebody wake those people up! They missed their alarm for 1900.
But the 2 is the exception. And those endless hours spent on every other freeway in town, watching Jaguars and Porches and Corvette all moving at under five miles an hour, has sucked the spirit out of me. I can no longer fight the freeways. Hence forth I shall rather embrace them and their congestion. And the rest of L.A. had better do the same.
I was thinking that perhaps the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is horribly short of classroom space, might benefit it's students stuck on their busses and the rest of us stuck in our cars, by putting famous novels on signs along the freeways, a new chapter every week. A page on every sign. Like the Burma Shave ads of my youth. I'm sure we could get corporate backing to fund this project. "Call me Ishmael...There She Blows....The Great White Whale....And shop at Joe's." Inside of a year every driver in town would be literate. It certainly won't improve traffic but it might make the road rage more erudite. "You cut me off, you scoundrel!" "Fie, you, sir. May you and your motor car rot in the depths of hell!" Now, that would be entertaining to watch, wouldn't it?
And that's all driver's want, really, jammed in together like lemmings looking for a convenient cliff, a little entertainment to make the time pass. I mean, if our lives can't be productive at least we can have some entertainment.
And maybe a nosh. Why not sell hot dogs in the break down lane? It isn't like there is any danger from speeding traffic. And when was the last time you saw somebody broken down actually in the break down lane? No, they break down in the middle lane, a mile in front of you. And then they sit there for three hours blocking traffic while your life slips away an inch at time, creeping forward as the seconds of your existence on this planet slowly ebb away. You might as well be watching "Big Brother" on CBS.
There is one structure that, placed in a breakdown lane, would please even the most frustrated freeway speed demon; a port-a-potty. If the people who build freeways want to help those of us stuck there it's that simple - put in port-a-potties.
Well, that's why we're all on the freeway in the first place, isn't it? Because we're all looking for someplace to go? Listen, if this guy Cal Trans, who ever he is, ever installed port-a-potties on the freeways, I think he could be next governor.
Kimit A.Muston is a writer living in North Hollywood. He may be contacted at www.inditer.com or email the editor. His work may be also be read in the Los Angeles Daily News