What's Your Rush King Tut?

"Fifteen minutes late," I said to the bum who was busily digging for gold in the garbage can with one hand and his nose with the other...guess he wasn't waiting...The phone, buried in my backpack started to ring, I answered it. "Where are you? What's your 20?"...old yeller strikes again...


Unlike the cacophony of taxi hacks, cross-town, uptown, downtown, express shuttle, NJ Transit, PATH train and interstate lines that could shoot you wherever you needed to be on Manhattan's tall and tight cityscape, getting around L.A. takes hours off your life that you'll never get back -- because the city's spread over such a wide geographic area. If you've never been here, you can't fully understand what will drive those with weaker resolve to break down in a froth of road rage, get "chitty-chitty bang-bang" and scatter buckshot all over the freeway asphalt...Mind you, the MTA is quite extensive and goes everywhere It can get downright daunting when you're trying to get to Point B in a timely fashion; the tantric discipline that one has to muster in order to keep the wolves of commuter hostility at bay and remain peaceful while waiting for their connection going to the other side of town can raise the bar of said endeavor to Torquemadian proportions and it'll put you in a real mental shitty if you let it...better bring a book, son...

I glared at the face of my watch again as I lobbed a string of muttered epithets back in time at the civil engineers who lacked foresight back in the 40's to connect the inner city with the suburbs and slam-dunked their plans to construct a proper rail system into the round file which pleased both the automobile and oil industries...the bah-stuhs!...30 seconds since the last time I looked Westward, past the cars slowly merging and turning up Fairfax..."still not here," I thought (having harvested a couple of empty soda cans and boogs, the grubby guy had moved on down the road)...I looked across the street at the list of upcoming events at LACMA (L.A. County Museum of Art) and realized that though I'd planned to since June, I hadn't made it to the Tutankhamun Exhibit yet and noted to myself that I should get in there to see it before the circus left town on November 15th...I looked down at my shoes to check if they were both securely laced -- they were, by the way -- and realized that the Fishbone logo was actually lifted from the L.A. DWP signage denoting sewer outlets that emptied into the ocean which makes it forbidden to dump shite like bleach into them...the #720 came shortly after my little microphany and it was practically empty -- a rarity during rush hour on Wilshire, to be certain...when sitting on a bench soaking in the UV rays of the blazing SoCal sun I notice little things like that...my mind begins to wander...which is why I always have a pen and memo pad on my person...this has been one of those times...Laters...