At a Maimed Snail's Pace
Let's all pause for a second to give it up for the unsung heroes of the human race:
TRAFFIC COPS!
No, I'm not talking about the beat cops who apparate in your rearview mirror out of thin air, Dumbledore style. I'm sure there's a time and a place for forcing people to obey basic speed law, but they never DO seem to be at the right time or place, do they? Sure, when you're trying to slink off to school at 7:50, there's no shortage of black and whites, but when your car nearly gets tidily-winked off the freeway by a bass-thumping, low-riding, erector-set-detailed rice rocket.
Wow. How old was that sentence? Nevertheless, it is therapeutic to wave your fist in the air and yell "young whippersnappers!" in digi-rant form.
No, I mean the "standing in the middle of the intersection with the white cotton gloves and scary polyester pants" traffic cops. An integral cog in the machinery of modern society that I've always taken for granted...
Until last Saturday.
Dateline: Devore, California. A little patch of Appalachia nestled amid the junction of the 15 and 215 freeways. Nothing but dirt and monster trucks for miles around. And then, rising like an oasis of pure rock & roll in the wilderness, it stands: the 40,000+ seat Hyundai Pavilion at Glen Helen.
My sister and I headed out to Glen Helen this weekend to see the No Doubt/Blink-182 concert--a double bill about which she wryly observed "we would have killed to see that show...seven years ago!" It DID have a major 1997 vibe up in here. Nonetheless, it was a rockin' show, and we had a great time. It turns out music was pretty strong in the last millennium.
So: encore, No Doubt is coming out for their final bows, and we decide to hightail it out of there to get back to the car as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, about a thousand other people had the same idea, but that's okay: that's still a head start over the other 39, right?
We're hauling as fast as possible back to a parking lot that is somehow exponentially farther from the venue than it was when we left it earlier that evening, trying to save precious seconds by cutting in front of slow-moving couples, bobbing and weaving through people-traffic like the aforementioned rice rockets that irritate me so, but the possibility of making it onto the freeway two seconds earlier than the rest o' the dirt people somehow excuses our inconsiderate crowd wading behavior.
Finally, success! Back at the car, squeezing into the tiny gap formed when we open the doors without scratching our neighbors' rides, throwing it into reverse without backing into the drunken hordes streaming out of the concert, and then: hurrah! We're facing out, we're heading up the aisle, we're on our way, one of the first out, nothing can stop us now!
And then: a car about five spots up pulls out into our lane, and the two of us are trying to get out. No problem. Then, a convertible beamer with a truly heinous lady inside pulls in front of us. But that's cool, we're still rolling...at a snail's pace.
Then another car pulls out. And another. And so on, and so forth. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. And all of a sudden, EVERY car has been pulled out of its spot, but there's nowhere for ANYONE to drive, because we're just a huge line of cars, pulled out of their spots, with nowhere to go. Our brilliant plan of beating everyone else by sliding out juuuust at the end of the encore turned out to be everyone else's plan, too!
But that's no problem. We're good times, we can entertain ourselves, we own some kickin' tunes, we're in no particular hurry...this line will start moving soon enough, right?
Half an hour later, after having moved maybe THREE car lengths total, we turned off the engine to preserve precious battery juices, which means: the small comfort of occupying ourselves with kickin' tunes must go down the drain. Lots of other cars started getting the same idea, so now, we're a whole line of parked cars that only occasionally grind on the engine to roll forward a precious few inches forward, so as not to let any stragglers back their cars into the tiny pocket created by unaware drivers.
Still, we're still good company, right? We have the best of times...when we're in a happy mood, which is 99.44% of the time, a la the purity level of Ivory soap. (David Letterman once said the other .56% of Ivory soap is filled with pure jam preserves...crack open a bar and check it out for yourself!)
You know what gets us into the other .56% of the time faster than anything else? People. Lots of people. Large herds of agitated, obnoxious, drunken, mildly frightening, brain dead 909ers who haven't the foggiest notion how to MERGE properly so as to get out of the parking lot safely.
Merging. Huge, tough concept that Los Angeles natives take for granted. Every other car and you'll get there soon enough, we PROMISE.
But guess what? If NO ONE agrees to let anyone go in front of them, there ends up being an eight-car can-can line at a standoff in front of the two-lane driveway, with no one able to squeeze their cars out of the spot because no one's willing to give an inch and let anyone squirm ahead of them.
And each of those eight cars in the can-can line have an ENORMOUS line of cars behind them, equally unmoving, except to close tiny gaps between cars into even tinier, nonexistent, wafer-thin slices of air between bumpers, so as to ensure NO ONE take their spots, either!
And the longer we dwell in that .56% of our personalities, the more we start becoming agitated and unsafe 909ers ourselves, such that we soon developed a rule for ourselves that, as long as we could see the printing on the top of the next car's license plate frame, we weren't too close.
Bad. Bad, bad, bad.
As we are parked in this car...not even feigning hope that one day, movement may happen, my sister unbuckles to slither up out the car window and survey the landscape. Nothing but parked cars for miles around. No one is moving. Lots of angry red brakelights, and even angrier fists slamming against steering wheels that really never did anything to deserve such violence.
She also sees: a few people who have given up entirely, and have pulled back into a parking spot to take a nap and wait out the traffic; the occasional pod of tailgaters numbing the pain of our hellish standstill with countless empty 40s littering the back of their truckbeds...yeah, I really want to share the road with those guys in a few...years, or whenever we'll get out of this lot; and oh-so-worst-of-all, a few hair-tossing, giggly, slithery-looking girls who have decided to pass the time by making their dates grateful that they don't need to pay attention to the road because SO many more interesting things can happen in a parked car!
Ick.
Yuck.
Ew.
Noooo!
Remember that convertible in front of us with the truly heinous lady inside? Yeah, well, so will everyone else who walked up our aisle on the way to their cars that night. Which, we must confess, did make a decent diversion for a few minutes as we watched other people comment outright, exchange horrified glances at their friends, flash their highbeams or honk angrily at the silly trashy woman. Oh, and to her man's credit, he didn't seem too into her either, because seriously: silly trashy woman! Convertible! No!
Long story short, (YES, this IS short, compared to the actual agony of being there!) can you imagine our abject horror when, two hours later, we've made it to the can-can bottleneck of cars at the driveway, and we realize that the problem was that Glen Helen Pavilion hires NO parking lot attendants, no traffic cops, no one with the foresight to think, hmmm...if we told which cars to go and which to stop, we'd ALL get to go home a little sooner...
Anarchy in the parking lot = total automotive stagnation. Drivers left to their own devices = unparalleled stupidity. Dirt people suddenly evolving into polite sensible individuals who give others the right of way = as likely as when pigs fly at the speed of sound and finally master the art of outrunning Farmer John before he can saute them into full-fat bacon.
Mmmmm, bacon.
Never mind that, once we've made it out onto the street, it's still a sub-1-MPH crawl the final stretch to the freeway, where we somehow managed to anger the truck a few lanes over into a double-fisted flick off, followed by proctologically-close tailgating, high-beam flashing, and attempted faux-ramming worthy of that silly 70s B-movie, Death Race 2000.
Do you see how driving REALLY ought to happen faster than a mere 500 yards in 2 hours? Maybe it's just me, but don't venues have an obligation to ensure their patrons can LEAVE the concert they've just paid an arm and a leg to attend? Wouldn't it just be good business sense to have your customers leave satisfied? And how much trouble would it be, really, to have someone don a pair of white cotton gloves, and do the pinwheel arm motion (go go go!) or the palm out motion (stop stop stop!) at tens of thousands of drivers?
What a waste of hosting a truly rockin' concert, Glen Helen, because everyone stuck in your parking lot that night would rather get their eyeball caught in a beartrap than endure your particular brand of psychological abuse EVER again.
Moral of the story: if we had to live out the mind-numbing agony of the Glen Helen parking lot, we'd hate to see all our pain and suffering go down without helping our friends and family avoid getting their limbs caught in the meatgrinder as well. I'm sharing our pain as a public service, a cautionary tale, and a call to action!
Boycott Hyundai. Shout angry things out your window as you're cruising up the 15--or, at the very least, save those angry fist-shakings for the young whippersnappers who designed the traffic patterns there. Write strongly worded letters to the proprietors of Inescapable Labrynthine Parking Lots, Inc. But most importantly: do yourself a favor, and never, EVER buy tickets to any concert at Glen Helen Pavilion.
Think I'm just whining? Blowing things out of proportion? Flexing my muscles in the Hyper-Bowl of hyperbole? Try this on for size:
http://www.nodoubt.com/band/journal.asp?newsID=13454
When was the last time rock stars flitted down from their gilded cage to apologize to you for forcing you to take a foretaste of the third circle of Hell?
Of course, none of this could've ever happened if we had a decent traffic cop on our cotton-gloved hands...
TRAFFIC COPS!
No, I'm not talking about the beat cops who apparate in your rearview mirror out of thin air, Dumbledore style. I'm sure there's a time and a place for forcing people to obey basic speed law, but they never DO seem to be at the right time or place, do they? Sure, when you're trying to slink off to school at 7:50, there's no shortage of black and whites, but when your car nearly gets tidily-winked off the freeway by a bass-thumping, low-riding, erector-set-detailed rice rocket.
Wow. How old was that sentence? Nevertheless, it is therapeutic to wave your fist in the air and yell "young whippersnappers!" in digi-rant form.
No, I mean the "standing in the middle of the intersection with the white cotton gloves and scary polyester pants" traffic cops. An integral cog in the machinery of modern society that I've always taken for granted...
Until last Saturday.
Dateline: Devore, California. A little patch of Appalachia nestled amid the junction of the 15 and 215 freeways. Nothing but dirt and monster trucks for miles around. And then, rising like an oasis of pure rock & roll in the wilderness, it stands: the 40,000+ seat Hyundai Pavilion at Glen Helen.
My sister and I headed out to Glen Helen this weekend to see the No Doubt/Blink-182 concert--a double bill about which she wryly observed "we would have killed to see that show...seven years ago!" It DID have a major 1997 vibe up in here. Nonetheless, it was a rockin' show, and we had a great time. It turns out music was pretty strong in the last millennium.
So: encore, No Doubt is coming out for their final bows, and we decide to hightail it out of there to get back to the car as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, about a thousand other people had the same idea, but that's okay: that's still a head start over the other 39, right?
We're hauling as fast as possible back to a parking lot that is somehow exponentially farther from the venue than it was when we left it earlier that evening, trying to save precious seconds by cutting in front of slow-moving couples, bobbing and weaving through people-traffic like the aforementioned rice rockets that irritate me so, but the possibility of making it onto the freeway two seconds earlier than the rest o' the dirt people somehow excuses our inconsiderate crowd wading behavior.
Finally, success! Back at the car, squeezing into the tiny gap formed when we open the doors without scratching our neighbors' rides, throwing it into reverse without backing into the drunken hordes streaming out of the concert, and then: hurrah! We're facing out, we're heading up the aisle, we're on our way, one of the first out, nothing can stop us now!
And then: a car about five spots up pulls out into our lane, and the two of us are trying to get out. No problem. Then, a convertible beamer with a truly heinous lady inside pulls in front of us. But that's cool, we're still rolling...at a snail's pace.
Then another car pulls out. And another. And so on, and so forth. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. And all of a sudden, EVERY car has been pulled out of its spot, but there's nowhere for ANYONE to drive, because we're just a huge line of cars, pulled out of their spots, with nowhere to go. Our brilliant plan of beating everyone else by sliding out juuuust at the end of the encore turned out to be everyone else's plan, too!
But that's no problem. We're good times, we can entertain ourselves, we own some kickin' tunes, we're in no particular hurry...this line will start moving soon enough, right?
Half an hour later, after having moved maybe THREE car lengths total, we turned off the engine to preserve precious battery juices, which means: the small comfort of occupying ourselves with kickin' tunes must go down the drain. Lots of other cars started getting the same idea, so now, we're a whole line of parked cars that only occasionally grind on the engine to roll forward a precious few inches forward, so as not to let any stragglers back their cars into the tiny pocket created by unaware drivers.
Still, we're still good company, right? We have the best of times...when we're in a happy mood, which is 99.44% of the time, a la the purity level of Ivory soap. (David Letterman once said the other .56% of Ivory soap is filled with pure jam preserves...crack open a bar and check it out for yourself!)
You know what gets us into the other .56% of the time faster than anything else? People. Lots of people. Large herds of agitated, obnoxious, drunken, mildly frightening, brain dead 909ers who haven't the foggiest notion how to MERGE properly so as to get out of the parking lot safely.
Merging. Huge, tough concept that Los Angeles natives take for granted. Every other car and you'll get there soon enough, we PROMISE.
But guess what? If NO ONE agrees to let anyone go in front of them, there ends up being an eight-car can-can line at a standoff in front of the two-lane driveway, with no one able to squeeze their cars out of the spot because no one's willing to give an inch and let anyone squirm ahead of them.
And each of those eight cars in the can-can line have an ENORMOUS line of cars behind them, equally unmoving, except to close tiny gaps between cars into even tinier, nonexistent, wafer-thin slices of air between bumpers, so as to ensure NO ONE take their spots, either!
And the longer we dwell in that .56% of our personalities, the more we start becoming agitated and unsafe 909ers ourselves, such that we soon developed a rule for ourselves that, as long as we could see the printing on the top of the next car's license plate frame, we weren't too close.
Bad. Bad, bad, bad.
As we are parked in this car...not even feigning hope that one day, movement may happen, my sister unbuckles to slither up out the car window and survey the landscape. Nothing but parked cars for miles around. No one is moving. Lots of angry red brakelights, and even angrier fists slamming against steering wheels that really never did anything to deserve such violence.
She also sees: a few people who have given up entirely, and have pulled back into a parking spot to take a nap and wait out the traffic; the occasional pod of tailgaters numbing the pain of our hellish standstill with countless empty 40s littering the back of their truckbeds...yeah, I really want to share the road with those guys in a few...years, or whenever we'll get out of this lot; and oh-so-worst-of-all, a few hair-tossing, giggly, slithery-looking girls who have decided to pass the time by making their dates grateful that they don't need to pay attention to the road because SO many more interesting things can happen in a parked car!
Ick.
Yuck.
Ew.
Noooo!
Remember that convertible in front of us with the truly heinous lady inside? Yeah, well, so will everyone else who walked up our aisle on the way to their cars that night. Which, we must confess, did make a decent diversion for a few minutes as we watched other people comment outright, exchange horrified glances at their friends, flash their highbeams or honk angrily at the silly trashy woman. Oh, and to her man's credit, he didn't seem too into her either, because seriously: silly trashy woman! Convertible! No!
Long story short, (YES, this IS short, compared to the actual agony of being there!) can you imagine our abject horror when, two hours later, we've made it to the can-can bottleneck of cars at the driveway, and we realize that the problem was that Glen Helen Pavilion hires NO parking lot attendants, no traffic cops, no one with the foresight to think, hmmm...if we told which cars to go and which to stop, we'd ALL get to go home a little sooner...
Anarchy in the parking lot = total automotive stagnation. Drivers left to their own devices = unparalleled stupidity. Dirt people suddenly evolving into polite sensible individuals who give others the right of way = as likely as when pigs fly at the speed of sound and finally master the art of outrunning Farmer John before he can saute them into full-fat bacon.
Mmmmm, bacon.
Never mind that, once we've made it out onto the street, it's still a sub-1-MPH crawl the final stretch to the freeway, where we somehow managed to anger the truck a few lanes over into a double-fisted flick off, followed by proctologically-close tailgating, high-beam flashing, and attempted faux-ramming worthy of that silly 70s B-movie, Death Race 2000.
Do you see how driving REALLY ought to happen faster than a mere 500 yards in 2 hours? Maybe it's just me, but don't venues have an obligation to ensure their patrons can LEAVE the concert they've just paid an arm and a leg to attend? Wouldn't it just be good business sense to have your customers leave satisfied? And how much trouble would it be, really, to have someone don a pair of white cotton gloves, and do the pinwheel arm motion (go go go!) or the palm out motion (stop stop stop!) at tens of thousands of drivers?
What a waste of hosting a truly rockin' concert, Glen Helen, because everyone stuck in your parking lot that night would rather get their eyeball caught in a beartrap than endure your particular brand of psychological abuse EVER again.
Moral of the story: if we had to live out the mind-numbing agony of the Glen Helen parking lot, we'd hate to see all our pain and suffering go down without helping our friends and family avoid getting their limbs caught in the meatgrinder as well. I'm sharing our pain as a public service, a cautionary tale, and a call to action!
Boycott Hyundai. Shout angry things out your window as you're cruising up the 15--or, at the very least, save those angry fist-shakings for the young whippersnappers who designed the traffic patterns there. Write strongly worded letters to the proprietors of Inescapable Labrynthine Parking Lots, Inc. But most importantly: do yourself a favor, and never, EVER buy tickets to any concert at Glen Helen Pavilion.
Think I'm just whining? Blowing things out of proportion? Flexing my muscles in the Hyper-Bowl of hyperbole? Try this on for size:
http://www.nodoubt.com/band/journal.asp?newsID=13454
When was the last time rock stars flitted down from their gilded cage to apologize to you for forcing you to take a foretaste of the third circle of Hell?
Of course, none of this could've ever happened if we had a decent traffic cop on our cotton-gloved hands...
posted by Tangentially Yours at
10:13 PM
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