prompt: weep, title: not in my backyard in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Using a bus inside Los Angeles as a means of transportation is about as efficacious as putting a note inside a bottle then hurling it into the Pacific Ocean is in terms of means of communication.

You may eventually end up somewhere, hell, it might end up being somewhere interesting, but in terms of efficiency or of accuracy, essentially hopeless. There was once an incredible network of light-rail all across the city, street cars, the Red Lines, a marvel of the times, able to get you from anywhere to anywhere in Los Angeles with ease. Eventually, however, the oil men and the auto men and the tire men paid off the city council to tear it all up for new highways, great ridiculous cloverleaves of gridlock and pollution, exhaust trapped inside the bowl-shape of the city itself, both literally and figuratively choking it out.

They sold this gross upheaval to the people of Southern California as progress, as independence, as The American Way, every adult man and woman in control of their own destiny in their own chariot instead of “sharing” mass transit with others like some kind of commoner. They ate it up, of course. Americans love pretending that we’re not interdependent as human beings, that we’re not all in this together, we’re each and all of us just temporarily-embarrassed kings and queens, oppressed by the needs of that cartoonishly ungrateful everyone-else.

This cruel delusion is sadly not just the Curse of the Thirty-Mile Zone, it’s a national disease, but it’s doubtless to say that the haze of entitlement and unrealistic dreams that hang over the region accelerated it, amplified it, made it even worse. Now the only mass-transit left in L.A. are those buses, aimlessly adrift in the endlessly individualistic traffic surrounding them, no doubt trying to get from place to place at reasonable pace but utterly unable to control the tides around them.

Sane people try to get new light-rail put back in, but the madness of aspiration gets the crazies convinced train stations would lower their property values via frequent contact with the rabble, so dedicated bus lanes no one ends up using are installed instead, at best. Often not even that.

Not that Frank minded, buskers make their own hours, all Frank had was time. Time to get lost amongst the storefronts that changed every six months, the billboards that changed every three months and the weather that never ever changed at all. Blue skies and beating sun forever while history got rewritten underneath with every economic trend or architectural fad to come on down the popular culture’s line. He found it meditative, like getting lost in those giant redwoods of his youth, back when there were still other yeti left to find him when the sunset arrived.

Myself, I would get into my car, knowing it’d take an hour to drive ten miles and it’d leave me about to weep. Or were my eyes just stinging from the smog? Would the difference even matter?