A few months ago in LA, I drove the 405 freeway with someone who'd never been on it before. For him, the ride was merely insanely boring (so boring he photographed the monotony); for me, getting on that freeway, the busiest freeway in America, is like Proust putting that cookie in his mouth. A little taste of it takes me all the way back, gives me a tightening feeling at the throat, makes me think of all the family secrets, various instances of shouting and crying. It was part of Dad's commute to work—his long commute used to inspire awe in our neighbors and distrust in Mom (where was he?)—and after they got divorced, it was the sad, unending road my brothers and I had to take every other weekend to get to his house. A lot of bickering and growing up and fathering happened on that freeway, in the white and red lights of stop-and-go traffic.

That's the thing about LA that kills me, that makes it flatly unacceptable—how much of your life you live just staring into other people's brake lights.

Your eyes are desperate for anything to fix on, and yet there's nothing but cars and signs to look at (that probably explains the emotional connection I have to the chunky lettering of these highway signs). One of the many odd things about LA is the fixed delusion that living anywhere else would be so drab you couldn't stand it. People constantly say, "Yeah, but can you imagine living anywhere else?" As if the fact that the sun's out while everyone's baking in their cars on the 405 makes sitting in your car so much more worth it. Every city has its pride and its sense of distinction, and LA's is getting-to-hang-out-in-your-car fetishism.

People in LA must just like being in cars, like being on the freeway, like all those shitty radio stations, like having nothing to look at. People worried real hard about the freeway closing and got very, very excited when it opened up again: "Drivers honked their horns and waved from car windows as traffic started moving in all 10 lanes of Interstate 405..." WOO-HOO!!! WE'RE BACK ON THE SHITTY FREEWAY AFTER TWO DAYS!!! FUCKING FINALLY!! In an LA Times article headlined "Drivers Relish Being Back on the 405," a reporter wonders whether closing the freeway for the weekend will prompt the city to head away from its storied car culture, but an LAPD motorcycle cop ain't having it: "We ain't going back to no horse and buggy, man. This is LA."

City officials talk about the weekend—the one time they made and active effort to keep people out of their cars and it worked—as if it were an alien landing, or a ripple in the time-space continuum.* "Two-thirds of the people who normally drive the freeways of this area were not on the freeways this weekend ... and everybody can live to talk about it," said L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Meanwhile, the futility of adding another lane, the psychological effect of which will be that everyone will think the 405 is the best freeway to take, thereby jamming it up more, doesn't seem to be on many people's minds. One exception is LA resident Rene Bernescut, who watched the freeway open in 1962 and who said he "is not optimistic the widening project would fully relieve the traffic that clogs the canyon pass on a typical day." As Bernescut told Reuters, "Two years from now, we'll be in the same condition."

* Kinda reminds me of Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire referring to non-underground-freeway options for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct as "social engineering to push people to get out of their cars"—as if finding ways to get people out of their cars would be a bad thing.