highways

A few days ago a friend from a long, long time ago recently reinstalled AIM and contacted me out of the blue. While we were chatting I started to mention something about a road trip I’d taken in another life. I was going to say that I had once gotten lost in Washington D.C. on my way to Philly via I-95. What I found interesting was that — after years of living in Los Angeles — I almost referred to the East coast’s massive superhighway as “the” 95. My brain caught my fingers before I’d typed it that way, but it started niggling at me. In LA we honor all of the highways with the definite article. It’s not just 405. It’s the 405. You’d never tell someone, “Take 101.” You tell someone, “Take the 101.” Nobody — afaik — on the East coast refers to “the 95″. The only highway in Florida that gets a the is The Turnpike. In LA every highway gets a the.

And how about this? In Florida if you’re telling someone how to get from Jacksonville to Tallahassee you would say, “Take I-10 West until you smell the Seminoles.” But in California if you’re explaining how to get from Century City to Santa Monica you would say, “Take the 10 west until it ends.” Same road.

Anyone else ever notice that?

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.

I‘ve talked about this happening IRL with several people recently and tonight I finally remembered to visit the site. bigdig.com details “The Central Artery/Tunnel Project” in Boston. Basically they are taking the entire highway system in Boston and putting it underground. It’s amazing.

Fun Fact: Underfund is the only other word in English that begins and ends with ‘und’.