Seeing red

There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that for the past week, and the next couple coming up, I'm working in Santa Monica. I lived here for almost 20 years, and the city feels like home to me. I can see the ocean from my office, the sunsets are stunning and I know the shortcuts when I need to get where I'm going.

The bad news is those shortcuts don't do jack for me at quittin' time.

See that red cross going from where the 10 freeway starts to where it intersects with the 405? That's what I have to navigate every night to get out of the west side, and then crawl the rest of the way home to Long Beach.

As I've said many times here, I grew up on the mean streets of west L.A., north of Wilshire. And I don't want to become one of those guys that starts a lot of sentences with "back then", but back then this was a precision driving town. People knew how to maneuver. They knew how to go with the flow.

Which is hard to do if the flow's not going.

It's also gotten a lot more crowded since I was a kid. I blame it on the Rose Parade.

Every January, at the same time the rest of the country is digging out from fifteen feet of snow, playing hopscotch over downed power lines and holding on to lamp posts so they don't blow away, they're also watching the Kiwanis Club float celebrating "Togetherness Through Diversity" and the Davis High School Marching Band on television, and seeing the clear, beautiful and often warm sunny January days we get to enjoy here.

So everyone watching sells their house and moves here. The majority of them from the east coast. The thing about the east coast is they actually have public transportation that works, so many times the car they're driving here is their first one.

Which is no news to you if you've ever been on the 405 at rush hour.