MetroRiderLA

Izzy Skenazy was 9 years old when he first rode the subway. The above video is the aftermath. The below is the exclusive journal entry from the day of his legendary voyage, as well as the tumultuous days that followed. A fictional account by Tyke Johnson.

I have a map because my mom gave me one. It’s huge. A tri-folder type to which I have no use. But it was apart of the requirements for me taking this trip. I told her I had already memorized the subway system but she’s my mom and moms are cautious. So I put it in my bag and forgot about it. She then handed me twenty dollars and an MTA card. The twenty was a “just in case” fund and I took it to mean, just in case I came across a WIRED magazine and Red Bull at the newsstands. I did.

Before I finally got away from her in the handbags area of Bloomingdales she asked me to clean my room when I got home. I laughed a little. She said she was serious. I said I would and I got the hell outta there.

I hate the smell of Bloomingdales. I hate the smell of department stores, the handbag area is almost as bad as the perfume area, but in case my poor nostrils had naively started believing in a God, I had to pass through that section on my way out. A hell only three hundred different fragrances—glassy and sweet, wooden and sour—could produce, finalizing my verdict on the omnipresent.

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Yesterday afternoon while traversing the ever exhausting Vermont corridor a man in headphones and overalls was the unfortunate victim of bike theft by an all too loud and obnoxious, possibly insane, bus driver. Of course if I were a driver on Vermont I’d be half crazy as well.

I should have known the trip was going to be a disaster since after boarding it took upwards of fifteen minutes and a good amount of unnecessary yelling and scolding by the driver to load a disabled person. The driver had already closed the door and I guess by doing so decided he was no longer letting people board even though he was of course still at the bus stop; however, the people standing at the door way thought otherwise.
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Who says you need a car to buy and plant a Mexican dwarf lime tree?

I’m terrible to go shopping with. I like to wander. I have no problem being at a grocery store for a half an hour to leave with nothing but bread and a twelve pack.

I’m a phase kind of person. I live through ideas that may last only an afternoon. Public transit lifestyle and advocacy might be the only thing in my life not based on phase theory. This Sunday I was in such a phase. This Sunday I was going to garden, and by God, I was going to do it car free.

Now this isn’t all that new really. I’ve been through this phase before and on such days I spend a couple hours at Home Depot spending more money on the items to make/plant than the item/plant will ever yield. Recently was a compost pile and making it, albeit fun, will in no way produce the amount of fertilizer equal to its relatively meager cost. Not to mention I don’t go through all that much fertilizer. The same can now be said about the Mexican dwarf lime tree I decided to buy yesterday.

To move this along—when I stepped up to the register I had in total: a 25lb bag of manure, a 25 lb bag of potting soil, a gigantic black plastic pot, a lime tree that stood about 3 feet tall and had thorns, as well as 2 succulents (the reason for the trip), a lavender plant, and spider killer.

The pretty black girl in her orange apron, after talking about how cold she was and giving me the eye (probably not), was blown away that I was taking the subway from MacArthur Park back downtown with all this stuff. I assured her it was no big deal and that it was worth it to not have to drive. She summed up the point of MetroRiderLA in 7 words by questioning where I was from because “that’s not what people do in LA.” I gave her a smile and she gave me a good luck.
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Image courtesy of mrjerz.

Dodger Stadium has long been hailed as one of the least car free friendly/public transit accessible ballparks in the nation, especially in comparison to their NL West rivals, the Giants and Padres. The stadium could’ve been built with the beauty of Elysian Park in mind but instead it was decided by the parlance of the times to destroy any sense of connection to the city by not only ruining said park and paving it over with one of the largest parking lots I’ve ever seen for a sports arena, football stadiums included, but by facing home plate towards a pointless hill rather than the lights of downtown—the lights of the city we all proudly call home.

Obvious complaints about the terribly car-centric 1950’s planning aside we all are still wishing and hoping something in the McCourt world changes for the good of us non-drivers and therefore, the city. But $15 a car in a full parking lot of 16,000 automobiles on 21 terraced lots is understandably hard for him to turn down. My dream would be for a trolley to travel from the Gold line China Town station up and around the stadium and down to Sunset, but that dream is far off and the season is almost here. Streetsblog puts it best when summing up LADOT’s uselessness on the subject:

Major League Baseball might be in Spring Training, but the LADOT’s excuse machine was in mid-season form. The Department seemed uninterested in exploring transit options, offering a variety of excuses ranging from “it’s difficult to get buses up the hill” to “there are limits on how much the Dodgers can kick in because of FTA regulations” to “shuttle service connected to existing routes could cost up to $200,000.”

So here we are everyone. The Golden season of the beloved, even if wavering, Dodgers, starts this Saturday with an exhibition game at the Coliseum against an equally storied franchise, the Boston Red Sox.

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As of this past weekend I have bid adieu to my less than useful, often pointless, Zipcar membership. It was a tough decision because I wanted very much to stick with the idea that even through the terrible mishandling of their Flexcar takeover and the awfully secretive and annoying six months that followed, it would all work out for the good in the end.

Even at the lowest point, the day all us Flexcar members found out that every car had disappeared from the system and that it sadly was not just a website glitch, I had faith. Even when I learned that Zipcar had actually taken all those cars we used so much, with convenience and delight, away, and were gone forever—moving only a sorry amount of them to a couple local campuses—I still had faith. But sometimes faith is shattered and there’s no way to believe again.

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As Good As It Gets starring Jack Nicholson made me laugh. It might have made me cry too but don’t tell my dad. I laughed like everyone else because of how crazy this man was and what a life such as his must be like. I cried because I saw way too many similarities between he and I.

For the longest time I had forgotten about most of those similarities (I’m not one to re-watch, re-read, re-whatever anything that points out things I’d rather not think about). Then I started riding public transportation.

When I first joined the world of public transit I tried not to hold railings, I wouldn’t sit down, and I carried anti-bacterial hand lotion with me. The little pocket sized tubes replaced chap stick in pocket priority for some time. Most annoying was that I didn’t really know why I was doing all this. I have my fair share of neuroses but at no point in my life was I victim to germaphobia. I may not have been open to the sharing of a toothbrush or underwear but a germaphobe I was not. Germs were never real to me. They were to absurd and there were too many products out there to stop the spread of them that the panic had to be fake—a marketing gimmick is all. To me, Airborne couldn’t have been more absurd.

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