T-26

It seems wrong to ride the subway in Los Angeles. Just like it would seem wrong to wear a Red Sox hat in New York, or eat a ham sandwich in a synagogue. So I don’t do it. I like to drive. I like to ride my bike. I even like to walk, which you’re not supposed to do in LA, either. You remember the WALK-LA thing? How many million dollars did the city spend on sidewalks? How many trees did they plant? How many traffic patterns did they fuck up trying to sync stoplights so people actually had time to walk across eight lanes of traffic? And then, ten years later, the stop lights were all the same again, you still had to run across the street, the sidewalks were all busted up from the earthquake so you broke your ankle every time you walked a block, and the trees had all keeled over dead because of the holes in the ozone layer or some goddamn thing. We’re good at dreaming out here, but we’re not so good at planning. And speaking of the ozone layer, I’m going to say that one good thing about climate change is the return of the men’s hat. Eighty years ago JFK killed the hat, and about twenty years ago it finally rose from its sartorial grave because we’re men! We go bald! Except if we pay not to. But the hat is the one single salutary epiphenomenon of climate change. I don’t give a fuck if you can grow pomegranates in Nova Scotia now; balance that against our climatological sequel Dust Bowl II out there in Oklahoma or wherethefuckever. But the hat. There is nothing bad to say about the hat.