I hate traffic. It's probably because I'm an impatient person. Disneyland is my worst nightmare because the lines and a traffic jam is nothing but a line with cars. My job, my girl, my family--they all live within ten minutes because if I had to drive 11 minutes, I probably wouldn't see any of them again.

Last month I caught in the mother of all traffic jams. I know there have been 80-car pile-ups in the Midwest, but since that hasn't happened to me I'm gonna pretend they never happened. I was sitting on the 210 freeway--completely not moving--for reasons unknown. I know this is SoCal and folks sit in traffic jams everyday--but not me. The idiots who work in LA and live in OC brought that upon themselves. If they wanna sit in traffic for an hour each way, that's their business--the lifestyle they chose. But not me. I hate traffic more Kevin Costner movies and people who vote for the Green Party. You're forced to do nothing but sit and wait. I'm not an important person--but I have more important things to do than sit around twiddling my thumbs.

I called The Girlfriend up. She said according to sigalert.com, traffic was slowed down to 15 miles per hour (15 miles per hour my ass--it felt more like 15 feet per hour: it took me over an hour to drive three and a half miles) because of an accident that happened two hours prior.

If the accident happened two hours beforehand, what took so long to clean up the road? Get a tow truck out there and a couple of guys with brooms. It should only take 20 minutes--half hour at the most. Get the cars off the road and let the traffic flow.

It's California policy to shutdown the entire freeway in the event of a fatality (might be nationwide, too--but I wouldn't know). At the risk of going to hell, what kinda garbage is that? It doesn't seem fair that tens of thousands of people have to be inconvenienced because some jerk had the audacity to die on the freeway. Inconvenienced is too weak of a word. People are on the freeway going somewhere for a reason. They're going to work, a ballgame, court hearing--whatever. In my particular case, I was on the clock returning to the office. Think of all the wasted man-hours because people were forced to spend an unplanned couple of hours stuck on the freeway. You hear it all the time: number of hours lost by people goofing around at work. The amount of time wasted due to identity theft. Studies are always able to place a dollar value to the number hours wasted. If that's a tangible loss, how can anyone justify shutting down a freeway because somebody got killed by a bad driver? It doesn't make sense to me. Maybe if the president died or someone important: but who gives a rat's ass about Joe Commuter?

Besides Mrs. Joe Commuter.

"Postpone the wedding," I told my bride to be. "There's no way I make it outta here before the wedding."

I thought I was gonna go nuts. There's nothing that has me feeling more helpless than being forced to wait. The Girlfriend suggested I get off the freeway. And go where? I needed to take the freeway to get back to work. Besides, getting off wasn't an option: I spent at least a half hour staring at the same exit sign. I wanted to get outta my car just to stretch my legs--maybe even ask the other prisoners if they wanted to play some pick-up basketball. There was nothing to do. I sure, I had countless podcasts on my mp3 player and the radio to listen to. But it wasn't enough. I needed something to do. I was bored out of my friggin' mind.

"I need a TV," I told The Girlfriend. "FedEx it to the 210 and Rosemead. It's a half-mile away so if you overnight it, I should be able to get it by tomorrow."

A trip that normally takes me 45 minutes to make took three hours that night. I came home and felt like crap. Didn't wanna watch TV, look at porn, or even talk to anyone. I don't know how folks can live that sorta life. I was a mess for the whole evening. And there are many people out there who face that sorta hell everyday. It's insane.

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