Yesterday I came home from the reading of a friend’s play in Hollywood and traffic was once again snarled. This time Highland Avenue, which connects the city with the valley, was for some reason closed. Flashing traffic message boards advised “Seek alternate route,” which I did. None of them were good. What should have been a 10-minute drive became a 30-minute drive. I was finally able to make my way to Argyle, which connects with the 101. Normally the 101 is not my preferred route — in my 18-year-experience of driving in LA, the 101 is third only to the 405 (at all times) and the 5 (heading south, at most times) in being clogged in traffic. This time the 101 was a breeze, once I actually got on it.

While waiting in the middle of three lanes — the leftmost and center lanes being left-turn only (onto a surface street or the 101) I saw a girl who had just filled up her car at a  gas station on the right pulling her car into the right-most lane, which is right-turn only. I could guess what was coming. Sure enough, she pulled her car entirely parallel to the right-hand lane in an effort to cut in front of me and make a left. This is not only patently illegal, it is incredibly disrespectful to the 20 or 30 cars behind her who would like to make a (legal) right turn, even on a red light. Given my postings of the past three days, imagine my mood at seeing this. She looked at my imploringly, trying to use every ounce of her 20-ish cuteness to justify her behavior.

I rolled down my passenger window and saw her brighten, thinking I was going to accommodate her. Instead, I said, “Do you know you’re illegally blocking that lane, and cutting off about 20 people behind you who’d like to make a right? Have you even thought about that?” Her smile evaporated, the light changed, and not only did I not let her go, no one behind me did either. Maybe next time she’ll think first.

Remember my outrage over the cooked-up panic to immunize pre-teens against STDs (so that Merck can boost its bottom line)?

The state of Texas, of course, has become the first to adopt.

And even the news media has made the connection to the lobbying effort. I can’t resist quoting these few paragraphs:

Merck is bankrolling efforts to pass state laws across the country mandating Gardasil for girls as young as 11 or 12. It doubled its lobbying budget in Texas and has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

Perry tied to Merck
Perry has ties to Merck and Women in Government. One of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas is Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. His current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government.

The governor also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign

Gee, I wonder how that “Children of Men” future comes about…?

I will be very very curious to see how parents in Texas feel about Britney Ann getting injected so that Merck winds up healthier.

Here’s the AP story about the accident supposedly behind the snarl I just posted about:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Traffic is finally moving again on the northbound 405 freeway near Sherman Oaks where a construction site crane earlier toppled onto the roadway.

The accident trapped the crane operator and triggered a collision between a big-rig dirt hauler and an S-U-V when the truck swerved to avoid the crane boom.

Firefighters managed to pull the operator out of the crane cab where he was trapped for more than an hour.

Fire spokesman Brian Humphrey says the operator was conscious and alert. A fire helicopter landed on the freeway to fly the victim to the hospital.

The accident, which happened shortly after one this afternoon, brought traffic to a halt on northbound Interstate 405 near the 101 freeway. The transition road from northbound 405 to the 101 freeway remains closed.

(That’s the update; here’s an earlier story from the San Diego Union Tribune. Again — couldn’t find anything on the Lost Angeles Times site.)

Before we get comfortable and attribute this one accident to the endlessness of my pilgrimage home, let me ask this: Why did it require 70 minutes last night, when there was no accident?

The accident didn’t create the snarl, it exacerbated it.

Hurricane Katrina didn’t create all of the problems it left — it exacerbated many that pre-existed. (People without adequate support systems, bad government on all levels, inadequate emergency response, and so forth.)

We’re going to see more accidents of all sorts. It’s past time to get smarter in how we manage our resources.

On that long drive home I realized two things I could do immediately: schedule some meetings differently, and start to use videoconferencing. We’re all going to have to become more clever.

This morning before leaving for my acupuncture appointment I had time to read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times: “No stopping climate shift, U.N. study says.” (As is typical for the Lost Angeles Times, the story isn’t findable on their website, so here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage.) A quick scan leaves one with this impression: No matter what we do, the glaciers will keep melting, oceans will rise, and everyone — everyone — will pay the price.

The information wasn’t news, but to me the tone was. Just again last week, Al Gore had assured me via DVD that things were fixable. Now all the scientists he is always quoting were making Al seem… naive.

This topic was much on my mind as I left a meeting later that day in Santa Monica that was 22 miles from my office. I left the meeting at 3:20 and 70 minutes later had made only 3.7 miles of headway. (Mind you, I was driving — not walking. Walking would have been faster. Clearly.) Finally, having exhausted phone calls to friends, relatives, and strangers, and having triple-checked my email on my Treo, and having no further interest in being boxed in on all sides by other frustrated people, I pulled into the Westfield Century City mall to go see a movie. And of course the movie that was starting immediately was:

“Children of Men.”

In “Children of Men,” everything I’ve been seeing in the breakdown of our planet and our manmade infrastructure is evidenced in a dystopian future only 20 years from now. The scenes of urban combat look awfully familiar to anyone with a television set, as do the shots of “detainees” and rampaging young adults with guns, and the overall ick of sky and water. In “Children of Men,” pollution has choked the planet, and human infertility has become total. Where watching, say, “The Omega Man” could be entertaining because we had little sense that its future was around the corner waiting for us, “Children Of Men” is a bracing confrontation with a future that seems all too plausible.

I left the light entertainment of “Children of Men” glad for having seen it — glad in the way one is “glad” for having seen Picasso’s “Guernica” (which of course is visually referenced in the film, as is the cover of the Pink Floyd album “Animals,” for reasons that elude me). It was disturbing, surprising and gut-wrenching — precisely like sitting boxed in in L.A. traffic, but less so. I was happy to have made better use of my time. I rode the escalator down, got into my car, exited onto Santa Monica Boulevard —

— and found that traffic had not cleared one bit in the two hours I had been in the movie theatre. No matter which direction or what roadway, traffic was moving with all the speed of a snail on warm tar paper. At one point I called home and left a message saying that if I came across a motel with a lit vacancy sign, I was pulling over and checking in. Eighty minutes later, I finally got to my office. Total travel time: 2 hours 30 minutes to go 22 miles.

I’m not exaggerating.

I know the region had a major traffic and construction accident on the 405, but this is indicative of a pattern that is only going to get worse. Greater Los Angeles is on its way to becoming a city of isolated city-states (if it isn’t already) much like Italy through most of its history. Downtown will have nothing to do with Santa Monica.

But then, I’m not sure what Santa Monica, which is on the coast, will be like. Gore predicts that over the next 44 years the oceans will rise 10 feet, which will turn our Burbank home into very valuable beachfront property. The U.N. report says 7 to 23 inches within 93 years.

Whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re entering a period where great fissures are forming in our civilization. Robert Kaplan wrote about this in 2000 in his book The Coming Anarchy, and I remember thinking when I read it that it seemed the most prescient book I’d read since Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. Toffler wrote about our shift out of the industrial revolution and how painful that was going to be; I wonder if he knew how quickly that shift would happen? Now every day I see signs of a fourth wave, a wave of collapse or retreat. If new technology is riding to the rescue, as the quote unquote president and some others believe, I hope it arrives quickly. Because in the meantime, there is often simply no way to get anywhere, and that seemingly little problem is indicative of many many larger problems.