the vast indifference of heaven in life stuff and misc.

The pop song was literally wrong, of course, they all are. It was correct, however, as a metaphor as only the really good ones are. It does rain in Southern California and even when it does, it rarely pours. It rains occasionally in Southern California but mostly in the short winter that falls there in between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, when all the rich folks are either visiting back East or skiing. Just a little bit of rain, though, feels like it is pouring.

Everyone forgets how to drive when it rains in Southern California, is the thing. If they’re from Seattle or Omaha, no matter the weather in the place they came from or the place they learned to drive, they just goddamned forget how to drive in the rain after a while.

These people learned to drive in their daddy’s Beamer in the Hamptons where it rains. You know they learned to drive in Massachusetts or New Jersey or wherever they’re actually from, places where it rains a lot in the spring and even snows in the winter. They shouldn’t forget how to drive in a light rain and yet they do. They’re mostly from East Coast places where urban driving is a damn-fool death sport.

There are parts of heathen Boston where they turn the break down lane into a legal driving lane for the rush hours. I’ve seen signs! The little strip that’s only supposed to exist for cars that are broken down or for ambulances to pass, in Boston, they just throw up their hands and say: “What the hell, drive there too. We’d rather go fast than live.”

Have you ever been a passenger in a car driven by a person who learned to drive in the suburban parts of New Jersey? Burning fifty through city alleyways while you’re trying to remember the names of gods from obscure faiths, just so you can pray to them all in case one of them might listen. They’re acting like this is normal while you strain to recall Vishnu’s gender that you might not offend a monster in the sky while asking to be saved.

Have you ever tried to merge onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan at three in the morning on awhen all the drunks are going seventy-five to get back home to White Plains? How was the anxiety attack afterwards? Driving in the big cities in the Northeast is like a prank Mad Max would play in Thunderdome, they should be able to drive in Southern California. LA as it exists today was basically built for cars after World War Two, it is a giant grid of highways.

If you can deal with driving slow in gridlock, there is nothing difficult about driving in L.A, If you just leave way early for everything and deal with it, there is no problem at all. Look, I grew up at the edge of the Adirondacks where if you wanted to do anything cool, you had to drive thirty miles to Utica if you got lucky, seventy miles to Albany if you were less lucky.

Maybe I was constitutionally conditioned for Los Angeles driving? I grew up resigned to the fact you’d have to drive an hour to get anywhere. So what if you’re driving twelve miles instead of seventy in that hour? It was all the same to me.

It is almost unconsciously easy to adapt to driving in the rain, providing the rain is not torrential or anything, if it is just a regular-style rain storm. Step One: Drive ten miles an hour slower than your standard pace. Step Two: Keep a little more space between you and the other cars than usual. Step Three: There is no step three, just drive your motherfucking car. That’s it. That’s all there is to driving in the rain. Go a little slower and space yourself out better. But there’s something about the Five and Four-Oh-Five and One-Oh-One and so on that leads people to suddenly either driving fifteen or seventy in a fifty-five mile-an-hour zone instead of forty-five as they would have in New England. Somehow they either crawl like fucking grandmothers or race like Nic Cage with his skull on fire when the rain comes.

The fault in Los Angeles driving is not in its stars but rather in the fact that it is a town full of ghosts passing through that did not grow up there and just know how it is supposed to be. There’s too many people living there temporarily, as I was though I didn’t know it then, who just will not adapt to the realities of where they are.

It is a place designed only for cars but not designed for that goddamned many cars and can’t be fixed now.

They are from places that were built in the time of horses and river boats that were slowly integrated into the roads, the roads adapting to them while the cities too adapted to the roads. They are from places with functioning mass transit systems, not the absurdist parody of such a thing that exists there and won’t be changed anytime soon. They believe that if they are just rich or important or beautiful enough, they should be able to get quickly from place to place whenever they want. This is, of course, not the case.

Los Angeles had its heart ripped out in the Forties and Fifties and its veins of river and rail were replaced with a system of roads that was absolutely perfect for the amount of people that lived there around the end of the Korean War. The driving landscape of that city was set in stone in a way that made total sense for a certain snapshot of the population and purpose. Except it was put there in a way that locked the infrastructure down so that you would have to move Heaven and Earth to change it now. Los Angeles is a city of roads that got too big for its roads.

So those roads are just clogged forever, now. The narrow passes that the Four-Oh-Five and the One-Oh-One cut through, for example, the Sepulveda and the Cahuenga, there is only so much to there. There just isn’t that much more width to carve out for roads, now, that can be carved out short of shutting the city down for years and blowing the space out with nukes.

It would require an Act of God to fix the roads so they weren’t too tight for that many cars every day and, even then, I don’t even think God could get the permits and the clearances to close the roads long enough to get the work done. Some rich bastard in Beverly Hills would complain that his assistant can’t get down from Toluca Lake to get him his organic granola and God Himself would have to bow down before that rage and the project would get shelved.

The roads of L.A. are locked in slow forever and you just have to learn how to deal. Well. You have to learn how to deal and have to be able to continue living there, too. I only had the first part down.

The roads in Los Angeles simply are. Whatever you bring to them is what you’ll get out of them. If you bring impatience to them, they will quickly have you screaming and swearing and blowing a gasket in your mind and someone will be waving a road-rage pistol in your face. If you bring your forgetfulness when it hasn’t rained in nine months so you now choose to believe it will never rain again, you are going to end up either crawling through the rain or blowing through it like a maniac and getting in a wreck.

If you can just let it rain when it’s raining and adjust accordingly in a subtle and rational way, there’s nothing to driving in the rain at all. The idea of all the spilled oil in the pavement coming up to make the streets slick in the presence of occasional rain is exaggerated at best. It might be true that such a thing happens but its actual effect on drivability is almost nothing.

The thing that they think is happening might actually be happening but that doesn’t mean that it is doing the thing that they think it is doing. People put things into water and take them out of the water and think that the water keeps the memory of the thing even still and it is bullshit and it is a scam and it is crazy in a way that makes no sense.

It’s called homeopathy, I’ve heard tell, and of course it is horseshit. That’s not how water works, that’s not how reality works. It presumes a kind of magic that even magic itself would laugh at. Merlin himself in his grand tower in Avalon would laugh at the idea that water can remember something that was in it a little bit once.

However.

Despite homeopathy being anti-science and beyond even the logical stretch of magic, sometimes homeopathy seems to work anyway. The ludicrous theory that water can remember sometimes works anyway because of the placebo effect. Some people believe in awful ridiculous things so fully that their body does something different so they can believe that thing is real.

You don’t have to do it with imaginary miracle water. You can do it with fake pills made out of compressed sugar. You can do it prayers to monsters in the sky. You can do it by putting a sprig of celery in someone’s front pocket if they want to believe in the celery enough.

People sometimes crash and die because they want to believe that the oil in the road and the rain in the sky can combine into something dangerous unholy. It happens almost every day when it rains in L.A. even just a little bit.

It doesn’t even have to pour. You just have to believe the wrong set of things and then drive while under the influence of that belief. I was never afraid of the rain on the road and so I never wrecked my car because of the rain in Southern California. But that was all it protected me from.