Lusting for leather and chrome

Los Angelenos love their cars. No, they don't just have a special fondness for these vehicles that leads them to buff them on the weekends and take them in for regular tune-ups; there seems to be a bizarre, unhealthy sort of emotional dependence going on.

Many sacrifice rhyme and reason, shelling out more money than they have on a beautiful new car just because it feels great to drive. Some give little nicknames to their four-wheeled friends, and defiling another person's car can be just cause for any sort of crime of passion.

In LA, not only are you what you do, you are what you drive. Your car is an extension of your bedroom and it's not uncommon to see people on the freeway doing all sorts of things behind their panes of glass, apparently unaware that we are all flying around in see-through bubbles that can really be seen through. Yes, really, that means we can see you.

None of this is really new news, but this year I think I've stumbled upon another bizarre little story in this morass of strangeness.

Every day, after I get off the bus, the route I walk home brings me from a main street around a corner to the small residential street Christina and Alan live on, up to the top of the hill where perches their little house. About halfway up the street, every day I pass by a woman sitting in her car.

It's a large-ish white sedan, pretty clean, seems fairly new. Especially to someone who knows nothing and cares less about cars, it seems incredibly average and unremarkable. Except for the fact that every single day, there is a woman camped out in the driver's seat like it's her living room couch.

She has the radio turned up to noise-polluting levels, tuned to some obnoxious talk radio that is mostly ads and then a lot of other shouting done by the DJ's themselves. This is not enough sensory input for her, so she resorts to flipping through what look like B-grade celebrity gossip magazines, or coupon pages of the Sunday paper, or something equally riveting. Sometimes her right hand is moving mechanically from bag-of-some-crap to mouth while eyes remain fixed on the page in front of her.

She's there on the weekends, too, pretty much all day it seems. I wonder ... has she ever thought about getting out of her car and walking inside? What's so scary in her house? What's it like to be a lump of mush?

And since nobody walks in LA, not much of anyone really seems to notice she's there. Everyone flies by in their cars, protected by their own slabs of glass and metal, totally unaware.

What makes one turn into a lump of mush? What happens to make sitting in your car listening to trash, reading trash, and eating trash the most attractive option for killing the remaining time in your life?