Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Gray skies
First, the blue sky news: Kris Starr has a contest. Promo, baby, promo! And a chance to get a cavity search*, too.
I drove down to San Pedro today to pick up school clothes for my son. That’s a little over two hours in one direction, barring traffic, but it’s L.A., so you can’t bar traffic. Got stuck in the thick of it on the 405 South, and again on the 405 North on the drive home. But the worst bit was the Grapevine, where I crawled at 2-4 mph for 30 or 40 minutes, thanks to a brush fire on the shoulder. That was painful.
Speaking of painful: did you know there’s a Ronald Reagan Freeway now? The Freeway Formerly Known as 118. It astonishes me how many things are named after that criminal.
Smog today: dense. Reminded me of my childhood. Must have been better up here in Bako, since my trainer worked the crap out of me and my lungs weren’t aching afterward (the way they used to when I was a kid. I thought it was a side effect of exercise). If you looked directly overhead, you could see some blue, but elsewhere, just a gray haze. I suspect visibility was under three miles. Yes, I can remember worse, but I grew up in the pre-catalytic converter era. Back then, pine trees would only grow so high. They would hit this invisible ceiling, and the top of the tree would look smooshed, as if the Jolly Green Giant had pressed each one down like Play-Doh.
I drove down by myself. No need to subject Karen to such a long drive, and Jake had schoolwork to worry about. Karen took his measurements and sent me on my grumpy** way. And now Jake is well accoutered to look like all the other Catholic High School kids 🙂
L.A. is like no place on Earth. (No place on Earth I’ve ever been to, that is.) This is where I grew up, this is my brain’s default idea of a city, but it’s still amazingly big. It took two or three minutes to drive from one end of Crescent City to the other, ten to fifteen to do the same in Santa Rosa. San Antonio was a little bigger: it used to take us about an hour to get from our home in Boerne to some of the cooler stores at the southwest end of town. Bakersfield? Maybe 20, 25 minutes tops to cover its full breadth. L.A. has no clear starting or stopping point, but one could easily spend several days driving the named freeways of Los Angeles . . . yeah, just the freeways.
This place is too big. The government needs to break it up into a bunch of Baby Bells. You could put Compton somewhere east of Bakersfield, Rancho Palos Verdes in the corn fields of Iowa. Hollywood gets to stay in Hollywood. Keep a few beaches down there, but not too many; I’m sure a lot of midwesterners would like to learn to surf.
Just a thought.
D.
*By your dentist, that is. Oh, go check it out, you’ll see what I mean.
**I really don’t understand why some guys like to drive.
I like to drive, mostly. I like it because… I don’t know why I like it. I like it more (much more) driving the Miata. I don’t like driving in heavy traffic. I’m indifferent about driving on long straight chunks of road. I think that what I like is the sense of control I get.
Funny thing . . . I like taking plane flights precisely for the opposite reason. It’s the one time in my life I can kick back knowing everything is someone else’s responsibility.