The city of Los Angeles always seemed, to me, famous for its fantastically shitty traffic. Regarding driving and cars and such, I felt that that was the main drawback. Oh, how wrong I was. You know what's equally shitty, if not shittier? The fact that the highways are easy to traverse and get off of, but if you ever want to get onto them, you may as well consider yourself totally fucked if you're unfamiliar with the area, as I am. Everything is so poorly labeled, all the blind drivers in town are on equal footing along with the rest of us. But perhaps the shittiest of all? Parking. LA is ridiculously strict when it comes to parking. First, there's the whole parking on the side of a three-lane thoroughfare, thus making them all two-lanes wide. Then there's all the signs posted all over streets and neighborhoods alike about certain times deemed no parking times because street cleaning is scheduled for then. I was watching the news the other night and there was this big fucking headline breaking story about how the latest translation of "Los Angeles" has nothing to do with angels. Rather, it has more to do with all the potholes and cracks on each and every mile of the over 2,000 miles worth of streets here. Or 20,000 miles, I forget what the exact quote was on the news.

Can you say 'bitter'? Please do. You would be too if you fell prey to the parking enforcement vultures and, like me, found yourself having to shell out $35.00 for parking someplace you've been parking periodically and without incident for the last two weeks. I could've been a few inches into the no parking zone, maybe. Or the enforcement only comes around once every other week or something. Whatever, the case, I'm lucky to only have just gotten the one ticket so far, I suppose, given just how anally retentive parking rules are out here. I'd sure hate to see the uniforms they make the parking elite officers wear.