This Saturday morning we awoke, made some breakfast, and went out to run a couple simple errands before getting on with the rest of our day. That's an uncertain presumption to make in L.A. though, that you will be done with something quickly and then get on with something else. Perhaps we should know better by now, but here is a tale of how we don't. Setting out to do much of anything in L.A. has an element of stepping into the void, mostly because of traffic. That famous, incredible traffic that we have here, created by our complicated web of clogged freeways and arguably the worst public transportation system imaginable for a city of this size in a country of this wealth, is a mysterious force influencing our every endeavor. Will the traffic gods be with you today? Or will there be a lane closed, a sports event getting out, a detour, or god forbid an accident in your path to impede your progress and remind you of how insignificant your plans or desires may be in the face of the universe. For those of you who aren't familiar with driving in L.A., when you request directions within the city on google it will give you the route, the mileage, and your best and worst case scenario, with the same trip often ranging from something like 23 minutes at best case to something like 2 hours and 15 minutes in traffic. And there's usually traffic.....and then inexplicably sometimes there's not! It's quite absurd. L.A. traffic is a mirror of that terrible reality of life that we all fervently yet pointlessly try and keep ourselves from facing all of the time in order to hold on to our sanity; you can't control anything and you never really know what's going to happen. And so it went with our day on Saturday, driving the streets of L.A.
So we needed to get some tools to start fixing up the yard of our new rental house. (Yes, we are moving and we did find a nice place but I am still in a little bit of denial about the whole thing so I won't start in on this subject until next week!) It was hard to find the tools that we needed without paying exorbitant prices near our house so after checking a slim yet very expensive selection at a local garden store we headed for the nearest awful chain store that I feel really guilty to support but I knew they'd have what we need at a price that we can handle. Anyway, off we head to Culver City. I had been to this particular Home Depot at the request of our landlords last fall to procure some garden supplies, so I knew about where it was but couldn't remember the street name. We don't have a GPS, which is somewhat unusual in L.A. I think, and leaves us prey even more to the whims of traffic chaos. Tim has a free navigation program on his phone which we have used once or twice with mixed results, but we decided to check the address on there. It came up and looked right to me so we worked our way along the freeways and then surface streets heading for the location. As we drove further and further east toward Hollywood the road became more and more detoured and complicated and the directions more and more incomprehensible. We drove back and forth and around and around this little area at the eastern edge of Culver City looking at warehouses and overpasses and stores and apartment rows and a sad river trickling through a concrete riverbed and the empty construction mess where in 3 or 4 years if we're lucky the metro train running through East L.A. may actually extend to the western half of the city. We became hungry, thirsty, exasperated and gave up. We couldn't find a phone number for this Home Depot and when we finally got through to another Home Depot they explained that this one had closed. Apparently all traces of it had been obliterated since I had been there last fall and shifting detoured streets and vanishing corporate retail spaces were creating for us a small Culver City Twilight Zone. We drove away from the vortex to Inglewood, a bit farther but nothing like the driving we had done so far in search of the lost Home Depot. We bought the tools, made one more stop on the way, and feeling alternately grumpy and slap-happy at this point we fought the traffic home five hours from when we had set out on a 45 minute to one hour errand, best case scenario that is I guess. But the day was not over yet!
We got home, unloaded, I made some late lunch and cleaned the kitchen up. Bricky's friend came over to play video games but the battery ran out so I helped them make and paint wooden swords to battle in the back yard sunshine. I made the kids dinner and then rushed into the shower to get ready for a fundraiser that we were going to for Nick's new school. I kind of dread schmoozy things like that where people stand around all dressed up and you have to make conversation with people that you don't know and usually don't really want to know. Nick's school has GREAT financial aid though, and fifty percent of the kids enrolled benefit from it including us, so it was totally worth it to support this cause. I put on my one cocktail dress and glued my black heels together in the car. We dropped off Bricky's friend and headed to the school, only like 35 minutes late. Except no one is at the school. So we call Nick and he finds out where the event actually is, somewhere in Culver City. Hmmm. We put the address into Tim's phone, head into Saturday evening traffic. We inch along the highway, we get off onto surface streets, and things begin to look eerily familiar. We're back!!! Back on the same detoured streets, underpasses, apartment rows etc. We're in that Culver City Triangle again! And once again the navigational system is making no sense and once again we are hungry and thirsty and exasperated only now we are dressed up! AND, now we are getting to know this mysterious little vortex of confusion. Much like the hero on his journey, we have acquired some powers and skills from earlier trials that we will use to overcome this one. We systematically drive the nearby streets, spotting sights that we recognize from before, until finally we find the right street and pull up to the valet parking for a converted warehouse event space. We're like 2 hours late. Whatever though, we're there. We go inside, get our free glass of wine, talk to some jerk, talk to some nice people, look around hungrily and fruitlessly for food. We get tipsy and bored. We go have fun dancing like crazy to some pretty bad d.j.'d music, find out that we didn't win the audi in the raffle, then we leave. We drive to a nice gallery nearby to see an opening, and amazingly don't get lost. The opening is ok, but we're getting tired though and starving at this point. It's been a very long day, and our trials have been many, but they are soon coming to and end for now. Luckily parked outside the gallery is the Dosa Truck!! Now as bad as L.A. traffic is, that is how good its truck food can be. It can be bad too, of course, but Dosa Truck is one of the good ones. Their cuisine is southern Indian and their motto is, "Ommmmm good." We stood on the curb with the other hipsters in our heels and tie and ordered a dinner of fresh off the griddle thin lentil pancakes filled with delicious sweet potato, spinach and ginger goodness and fresh ginger limeade all for under $20. Ommm good. We've faced confusion, uncertainty, frustration and felt our lives in the chaotic palm of the unknown. But we triumphed in the end, and it's over for this Saturday, and we go home.
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