Driving Me Mad!!!

The traffic in LA sucks. But you know where else the traffic really sucks? Everywhere. That’s right Hollywood, you’re not special, you gather people into a major city and guess what, it’s going to take a long time for the mass group to move from one area of town to another. Before moving here people drilled into me how bad the traffic was going to be. I was led to believe I’d spend hours in traffic to go five miles and get mugged. But the fact is, the only times I’ve ever had to sit in traffic for more than a reasonable amount of time, the only times I’ve ever truly *sat* in traffic with no forward motion whatsoever have been where there has been a serious accident on the road that has stopped us from moving.

It’s not the traffic that sucks here, it’s the drivers. And I don’t even mean to say they’re particularly worse at driving than in other cities, but rather that they just suck as people. There’s something about getting behind a wheel of a car in Los Angeles that instantly transforms a person into an asshole. I think it’s because people spend so much of their time outside their car being fake that when they finally get behind the wheel the darkest, most vicious parts of their personality are just screaming to be unleashed. On a regular basis, I will hear someone honk at an intersection for the first car to go, while the light is still changing. I’ve been honked at for having the audacity to pause and let a stranded left-turner go so they don’t get stuck in the middle of the intersection. I’ve heard someone call my friend Maria the c-word because they were mad they had to wait for her to pull out a parking space she was wedged into. And absolutely no one here does the courtesy wave to a driver who lets them over.

But what really drives me crazy are the occasions where someone actually gets mad at me because they were wrong. Yesterday I had a driver in the right hand lane refuse to let me over for three blocks despite leaving my blinker on and making many attempts to get over. When I finally gave up trying to get over and punched my steering wheel in anger, the guy screamed at me from his window, asked me if I wanted to pull over and fight over it, and then he spit on my car. Let me reiterate again, this guy spit on my car because he cut me off. Today, the same thing. I was trying to find a parking spot, found one on the left hand side of the steet, and so I flipped on my blinker and started to pull into a driveway to turn around and park, and the car behind me decided that instead of waiting for me to turn, he would dart around me into the oncoming traffic lane, almost T-boned me as I turned, and then he honked his horn at me and threw me a double dose of middle finger. Let me repeat that. This guy got mad at me because he almost hit me when I was in front of him and he was driving in the ONCOMING TRAFFIC LANE.

That’s all I have to say about it, and I know what you’re thinking, “Is this really the end of this blog entry? Come on Rye, we just read three paragraphs of this thing and you don’t have the decency to wrap it up in some poignant way? ” You’re right. I wrote this blog wrong, and hey, go fuck yourself!!