405

For some ridiculous reason I was still at the office at 11:45pm yesterday. When I got on the highway at 11:55pm, I mistakenly assumed that traffic would be minimal and I would zip home.
Ha!
They closed the 405.
They. Closed. The. 405.

Comically they chose not to let you know that it was closed from Getty Ctr. Dr. to (freaking!) Sepulveda until you were about 50 yards from what turned into an hour-and-a-half delaying detour through un-get-off-able mountain passes and backwoods backroads.

What’s amazing to me is that there are the same number of maniacs applying make-up, reading, pitching pilots on their portables, and trying to eat ramen with chopsticks while driving at midnight as there are at 7am. (That number, by the way, is two trillion.)

Every city I’ve ever called home has had something nasty … some ineffable idiosyncrasy … that its dwellers hold high, wave with pride, and flaunt in the face of visitors. In Daytona it was how stupid all the tourists are (were), in Gainesville it was the humidity (and / or stupidity of visiting Seminoles), in Boston it was the months of dark, gray winter. Have you ever had someone from Gainesville visit your home city? “You call this humid? In Gainesville this would be dry!” How about a friend from New England? “You think this is cold and crappy? Hell, in Bahstin we’d be running around in t-shirts if we were lucky enough to have this sawta weathah.”

In LA it’s the traffic. People here brave the traffic and even – though they would never admit it – take pride in battling the world’s worst commute every day.