This is by far the worst part of my day. As the crow flies, I live approximately 10 miles from my office. To the normal person, that sounds reasonable. When you tell this too a fellow Los Angelan, they give you their condolences.
Depending on how much I have drunk the night before, I normally leave at 8am in order to make it to the office by 8:45. I check my iPhone for the traffic report, not because I actually plan on changing my route, just so I can see how miserable the next hour of my life is going to be. The iPhone shows the traffic on the freeways with the colors green, yellow, and red. Could none of those self-proclaimed “geniuses” at Apple figure out a way to show the traffic on side streets? What the FUCK? I don’t understand how they monitor the freeways, but I’m sure they could do city streets just the same. Whatever. Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time on the roads of Los Angeles can tell you that freeways at rush hour are an absolute joke. Most of the time my phone shows yellow during rush hour. Every time I am naïve enough to think that green means light traffic, I get my hopes up.
They get shot down. Hard. In Los Angeles, the three colors have much different meanings than in other regions of the world.
Green = 20mph
Yellow = Parked
Red = Turn off your Engine
I have never experienced a time in my life where 2 hours are flushed down the toilet every day, along with roughly 15 gallons/week at $4.50. I never foresaw myself being in a car so often that my iPod would begin to bore me. I have reduced myself to listening to talk radio.
The morning is quite simple. I listen to 710AM ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd first and foremost, but he has an ungodly amount of commercials. Dan Patrick for 570AM Sports Illustrated Radio is a distant second, yet far better than my other options. At 8:30 there is a trivia question show on 95.5FM Mark & Brian. Naturally, I destroy these questions with the exception of those about literature. I read ESPN.com. If the commute takes more than an hour, like most Thursdays, I get the “pleasure” of listening to Ralph’s Show-Biz Beat on 106.7FM at 9. By pleasure, I mean that I am so angry & impatient that I am ready to kill.
The drive home is characterized by me trying to see how many songs will simultaneously be on 102.7FM & 105.9FM. For last three weeks, I dare you to be in the car for more than 20 minutes without hearing Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop.” It is on more than one channel at a time quite often.
All of these things are a bit entertaining, but the monotony of this routine drives one to drink. This was already unnecessary in my case, so use your imagination.
While on the topic of my terrible commute, I would also like to vent about another one of my pet peeves. Motorcycles. More specifically, motorcyclists. Who the Fuck do they think they are? From this point forward, I have zero sympathy for motorcyclists getting annihilated. Those assholes are lane-splitting all day long. My mother always taught me to say a little prayer when you drive by an accident. When they whiz by me at 50 mph during rush hour traffic, I say a little prayer that they get what’s coming to ‘em. And don’t explain to me that it’s legal to split lanes. I know. It’s legal to drink, and I will die from that one day too.
