Why? Because it gets more and more like Southern California every day. And boyoboy did I hate living in crass, sprawling, ticky-tacky, crowded, cuh-RAZY Southern California.
And today I kinda hate living here. Especially I hate driving here.
About 40% of drivers here aren’t paying much attention to what they’re doing; maybe 20% aren’t paying any attention at all. They jerk around, they stop and start for no discernible reason, they turn left out of the center lane, they cut people off…and cut people off…and cut people off. And everyone has gotta get there first!
Traffic either moves too fast for the volume packed onto the road, or it moves too slow for the size and quality of the road. Traffic lights are not consistent: some have left-turn lights and some do not; some turn green quickly, while others make you wait until you turn green. Certain main drags (but not all of them) have complicated no-left-turn rules that kick in during the rush hours. And the only rule that’s consistent is the Rule of the Emperor of Wackiness.
it takes forever to get from here to there. Evening rush hour starts around 3:00 p.m. and proceeds through until about 6:30 p.m.
Costco: insane any time close to a major holiday.
Not so forever. When I was a Young Thang, believe it or not, I loved to drive around. Yeah: that’s drive around and around and around, just for the fun of driving around.
Do you remember the coin-flipping game?
You’d get in a car with a pal. One would drive; one would ride shotgun. The person in the passenger’s seat would flip a coin whenever you came to a major intersection: heads, you’d turn left; tails, right.
One could call it the Aimless Driving Game. Aimless it was, but it was more fun…! Sometimes we would end up on the side of one of the Valley’s scenic mountains, slithering unnoticed (we hoped!) through some outrageously overpriced neighborhood. Sometimes we’d end up in the business district, or over in the middle-class residential environs of the east side or out in the not-so-classy neighborhoods on the west side.
Wherever: driving was fun then, not a freaking ordeal.
Today you can’t go from point A to point B without risking your life. And you may be sure that nary a journey is “fun.”
Every moment on the road hereabouts is a fight for your life. If you don’t have EVERY nerve on high alert, you’re likely to get smashed, to run a signal, to make a wrong turn, to hit someone else, to LOSE YOUR FREAKIN’MIND.
Today I drove over to Lowe’s in search of a birthday gift for M’hijito. He likes to garden and to putter with plants, so I thought it would be sorta cool to get him a nice high-gloss plant pot and a cool lí’l plant to go in it.
So it was up to the westside Lowe’s, along about noon.
drive and drive and drive and drive and… Dart into the parking lot, stash the car, and trot into the nursery department.
Search around and search around and search around and… NOTHIN’!
Saddest excuse for a nursery I ever saw. WTF?
. . .
Back in the car. Head up toward the Costco up on the freeway at about Bell Road.
Get parked, hike up to the front door…greeted by MOBS AND MOBS AND MOBS of people.
Sumbiche! We’re coming on to Easter. I forgot. Having abandoned the church choir in the face of the covid epidemic, I lose track of what season it is. Especially what ecclesiastical season.
Navigate through the madding crowds. Search and search and search and search and find…NOTHIN’!
Sumbiche.
Back in the car. Head back into North Central, figuring Whitfil’s nursery will have some sort of fancy pots and plants, it being — yea verily — nigh unto Easter.
Drive and drive and drive and drive, the traffic thick yet very fast. Bastards won’t let me change lanes so I can turn left into the nursery’s parking lot. Overshoot the parking lot, cut a bastard off, turn left into the neighborhood just east of the nursery, drive round Robin Hood’s Barn, and come back onto the main drag. Turn right to head toward the nursery, where at last I get parked.
Clearly, their latest shipment of Mexican pottery has just come in! Hallelujah!
Grab a fairly gorgeous plant pot and, long’s I’m there, a pretty flowering plant.
Exhausted, buy the stuff, trudge back to the parking lot, load the loot into the car, and head back into the traffic.
Horrific, bumper-to-bumper, INSANE traffic.
In the process of dodging my fellow homicidal drivers, I miss a green light that turns yellow. Hurry-up-and-go traffic narrowly misses me as I cruise into the intersection. The light changes, and I’m in the middle of crazed traffic — on the red!
Jayzuz!
Narrowly miss getting hit. Floor it, make it to the other side of the light, my fellow homicidal drivers hollering imprecations and obscenities at me. Holeee sheee-ut!
Even more exhausted, finally make it back to the ‘Hood without killing myself or anyone else.
And think…how MUCH i hate this place and especially hate driving around this place. I hate it for the same reasons I hated living in Southern California. Our City Fathers of the 1960’s got their way: this place is modeled directly on SoCal. And it’s equally hideous.
Southern California Redux.
WHY????
Yeah, I remember the days when driving was fun. Way back in my twenties, when I had a lot more energy than I do now. ;o)
Of course, Little Rock is not anywhere near as large/crowded as Los Angeles or Phoenix, for that matter. I’ve always been grateful for that.
True that! Back in the Day, Phoenix was a medium-sized city, not L.A. East!