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2005-03-24 - 9:20 p.m.

[I�ve wanted to post this ever since Sunday, but I am not a gold member, so here it is Thursday evening when finally the "98% overloaded server" let me in to post an entry.]

All of a sudden, seeing things from an entirely different point of view.

I know I�ve written before about how Los Angeles has 50% more traffic than the roads were ever built to handle, which makes driving around in this city dicey in any case. And lately, with all the tiresome flooding rain, landslides, road closures, and 15,000 potholes everywhere, drivers are very much on edge.

Well, yesterday, Saturday, was the single worst driving experience I have ever had in L.A. All I wanted to do was go from where I live in Hollywood over to West Hollywood for a late breakfast (it was around 1:00 P.M.), a trip that ought to take no more than 20, 30 minutes. Well, I knew we were in some kind of unusual trouble when it took several cycles of the traffic light just to get across the first intersection half a block from my apartment's parking lot. And from there, the situation just got worse.

I never knew before that that many freeway on-ramps, off-ramps, major streets, side streets, alleyways, driveways, and parking lots came into that one several-block strip of street that I had to drive down, but it seemed that every conceivable square foot of roadway was filled with a chaotic snarl of vicious traffic, all of which was virtually at a total stand-still. I had already said that the traffic lights were useless, because even when you would get a green light, you still couldn�t go because cars coming through the intersection on the yellow lights still filled up the entire intersection, and cars attempting to come in from the side streets or driveways further beyond the intersections, in that much traffic, were rarely given an opening to get into the line of traffic, so they�d just push their way in anyway and dare the cars in the right of way to keep on going and risk being smashed into by them. It literally was like one of those square alphabetizing puzzles where there is only one tiny maneuvering square with which you can reorder all the other squares, except such reordering wasn�t being attempted by one puzzle-solving mastermind, but by dozens of individual, selfish, impatient idiots who understood nothing beyond the fact that they wanted to move forward.

It became clear to me that no one was going to get anywhere unless everybody cooperated with everybody else�s need to make some progress regardless of what kind of street they were traveling on. No longer could you count on who really had the right-of-way, but instead, you had to establish a mental picture of a reasonable system of fair alternating, such as �well, cars comin from that direction haven�t gone for a while, so it�s their turn next,� except multiplied by about 20 different ingresses and egresses and two lanes of traffic in most of those. But instead of cooperating, people were simply honking, and if anybody (like me) saw what somebody near them needed to do in order to be able to go, so hung back a little longer so that the other car could have a chance of moving into that space, everybody else in the vicinity would begin holding down their horn, (1) as a punishment for the polite person who let the other one in, (2) as chastisement for the other one wanting to be let in, or (3) as a way of reminding everybody else that they were there and they wanted to go, instead.

And if that wasn�t enough, people starting rolling down their windows and screaming and swearing at others, such as the car filled with blonde female teenagers, all wearing their hair in pig-tail braids, who started screaming �Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you� to the elderly people in the car in front of them who had signaled to move over one lane so that they could continue straight instead of being forced into a right-hand turn they didn�t want to take, and I hung back to give them room so that they could move in front of me, but the nasty teenagers couldn�t tolerate having to wait while the elderly people moved in front of me instead of simply going forward when that opportunity appeared.

With all these shouting people�s windows down, you could now hear the noise of whatever horrible stuff they were listening to on the radio, usually very loud and violent hip hop, adding its cacaphony to the chaos. It wasn�t too much time after that that people took to getting out of their cars and screaming at somebody near them, red-facedly shaking their fists and, of course, stirring up an even greater anger (and honking) among those drivers who were near them and who couldn�t stand the fact that that car wasn�t now moving forward another foot because its driver was standing out in the street shouting at somebody.

I thought to myself how Los Angeles truly is the worst city in the United States, utterly unlivable, and unquestionably populated by the worse congregation of low-lifes the nation has ever seen. I am sure of this ordinarily, but an experience like this underscores it.

I contemplated getting out my cell phone and calling the police or 911 and demanding that they get about thirty traffic cops over here to straighten out this mess, but as I was about to reach for my phone, I heard somebody else talking on his phone one lane to my right, about � a car-length back. When he got up even with me and finished his conversation, I could see that he was a nice-looking middle-aged man, so I lowered my passenger window, gave him a smile and said, �Do you have any idea what this is all about?�

He nodded and said that the person he had been talking to said that there had been a protest march and it had blocked all the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard.

I said, �Can I protest the protestors?�

He laughed and said, �Well, if they want to pursuade us over to their cause, they certainly failed in that mission.�

�You can say that again,� I said, �now I want the police to come here with rubber bullets and tear gas and put them away, arrest them all.�

He nodded his agreement, my fellow brand-new Republican, and we mutually closed our windows and re-engaged the fray ahead. He was able to move forward and I could see that he had a silver Christian �fish� on his car�s rear, except that inside his fish-shape were the words �& chips�, a joking dig at Christians, I guess, similar to those fish with legs that say �Darwin� that are digs at the creationists. There, from atheist to Presbyterian in one fell swoop of a protest march!

Somehow knowing what it was all about made me relax a little bit�maybe the Sheriff�s anti-protestor TANK was on its way, the very thing that horrified me half a year ago when I saw a picture of it in the newspaper, but now I welcomed it with open arms and wished they�d hold a bond election to buy the police more of them.

I�m all for free speech and all, lord knows, but the creation of anarchy doesn�t a positive political statement make. Suddenly I understood why President Bush had such an immense police-secured parade route for his inauguration. Whether we love Bush or hate him, stopping the traffic in a major city is definitely not the way to go. Honestly, I glared at whatever bedraggled band of straggling protestors I happened to see, shuffling along the sidewalk or threading their way through the thick of immobile automobiles as I inched my car closer to ground zero, and I wasn�t impressed. My thoughts were just like a homophobe at a gay pride parade, �Do they always have to send their most objectionable representatives?� Didn�t I just see that tattooed, pierced, orange-haired, dressed-in-black girl waiting in line at a concert for some unrecognizeably-named band, with hundreds of other teens who looked just like her, the other evening as I drove home after working very late? Don�t these people have anything else to do besides �hang out� everywhere something, anything, is going on? Even their signs didn�t show much in the way of conviction, or even communicative value�they seemed to letter them all in very small letters, almost the size you would use if you were writing in your spiral notebook in high school�-so nobody could possibly read what they were trying to say, which was probably a benefit.

So I can�t say that I even really know what the protest was all about that prevented me from getting to the restaurant for breakfast until 3:00 that afternoon. Anti-war I guess. But for all I know, it could have been to protest against low minimum wages, or the pulling out of Terri Schiavo�s feeding tube, or even against heavy L.A. traffic! [I later found out it was the anniversary of the attack on Iraq.]

The only thing I know is that next time, I�m voting for more tanks, that is, if I don�t just buy one for myself.

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