The Ass Backwards Shortcut 4

When you drive as much as I do, you end up knowing every ass-backwards route to get where you’re going.

And when you’re in your car as much as I am, you want to get the fuck out of the car as quickly as possible.

Thus, today, I went the ridiculously long way around to get home. For anyone who’s ever lived in LA, I went from Burbank to Venice…via downtown.

There’s something immensely satisfying about going 10 miles out of your way and still getting home faster than you would have if you took your normal route.

The nice thing about a lot of LA freeways is you can see from where you get on whether it’s moving or not, and if it’s not, you can switch to one of your four bazillion alternate routes.

There is no “from point A to point B” here, there’s six million ways to get from place to place, depending on the time, the freeway traffic, and the necessity of being on time.

Talking about how to get from place to place is what replaces talking about the weather here, since the weather is pretty much the same all the time (hot in the valley, Marine Layer [i.e. fog] at the beach).

Strategies are dissected. Record time drives are related. Amazement at the emptiness of the freeways at 3 a.m. is expressed.

You have this discussion over and over again, and for some reason, people don’t seem to tire of it. Perhaps we all want to learn a new ass-backwards shortcut to get places.

It’s the secret route from that will get you from the Valley to Hollywood in ten minutes that we all know exists…we just don’t know where, so we keep taking Laurel Canyon.

But today, I have my ass-backwards shortcut story for the next few months. And that makes me way more excited than it should.