Love it or Leave it...

I don’t blame Saudi women for wanting to drive cars and be independent, but living here in West Hollywood, I confess I wouldn’t mind a driver once in a while.  I used to enjoy driving in Los Angeles.  It took a long time to get anywhere but you could keep on going until you got there.  I used to take myself to Santa Monica, stroll along the promenade, drive to Venice beach, walk on the sand, and treat myself to a nice lunch at the Fig Tree Café on Ocean Walk. 

   

These days driving is stop and go and wait and blocked intersections, and traffic jams and freeways where nobody moves, impossible backed up bumper to bumper all the way.

Nowadays I won’t go more than 3 miles away from home.  Traffic is too horrible, and it keeps getting worse.  I sometimes have to wait ten or fifteen minutes just to get out of my garage.  Whoever said Fountain was a great east-west cross street told too many people.  Now Sunset is often much better than Fountain.   And Santa Monica Boulevard has become a nightmare.  

A few weeks ago I met a friend at the Getty Museum in Malibu, only to discover we couldn’t get in because we didn’t have a parking reservation, and then I spent more than two hours driving back to West Hollywood.  There must have been an accident that blocked all the streets on the west side.  But there’s always something.  It’s one bottleneck after another.  

What’s the good of living in Los Angeles if I’m trapped in my own neighborhood?  I’ve got 6 Trader Joe's, and three Whole Foods in the immediate vicinity, Erewhon, the Hollywood YMCA, the greatest farmers market in the city, restaurants, shops, the best of everything, but it would be nice to look at the ocean once in a while, and watch that sunset on the blue horizon.  

And what about the air?  How long can I live with the exhaust from millions of cars?  And the stress of it all.  I can’t put myself through it anymore.  I’d rather stay home.

Or, maybe it's time to leave

     

FED UP

No!  I can’t bear this.  First they shut down the government, causing unnecessary pain & suffering to innocent people, but not to the congressmen who made it happen.  

Now they’re taking away 5% of the food stamps that should be used for poor families to buy milk for children, and feed hungry people.  So many families have lost their homes while Jamie Dimon, who turned their suffering into cash, dines at the Ritz.  Next they’ll be tearing down the blackboards & cutting down class hours in schools.

Do we live in a dictatorship, where we are at the mercy of the leaders?  Is this North Korea?  What happened to this country?  It’s Karl Marx all over again: thesis and antitheses; the reaction to the action of electing a man who gave us hope – for a few minutes, anyway.  

Now we feel hopeless.  Why do we have hungry children in America?  Why should some people’s children get better health care in this country than others?  Or Education?  Whatever the reason, it’s wrong.  Every child should get the best health care money can buy. Period.  

If my grandparents saw what’s happening here they wouldn’t believe it.  

The money cut from the budget of our government should come out of defense spending - the military industrial complex, and those masters of war. Moreover, I think all political lobbyists should be immediately fired & retrained as social workers, and I would outlaw all political contributions.  Period.  They don’t need money, they need brains.

I know nobody reads this blog but that's too bad.