detours

i find it odd that nobody in the media managed to cover it, but there was a fire down in the tunnels of the los angeles subway system yesterday. i'm not sure where the fire was but everyone was ordered out of the tunnels at vermont and santa monica. as we climbed back up to street level we were told over the pa system that there would be shuttle busses to run us over the rest of the route. not being happy with that, many people ended up getting out of the tunnel and blindly grabbed the first bus they could find. the drivers on both the rapid and regular routes were overwhelmed as roughly 3-400 people queued up to hop whatever bus they could get on.

since i'm a boy from north orange county whose metro bus expertise isn't all that great, i was a bit lost. i followed the mob and stepped onto the 304 to and asked the driver how to get to the 7th street metro center. much to my dismay, the driver had no clue of what was going on and said "the redline goes there. i go to union station."

fortunatley, there was a really nice gentleman that had just come off a volunteer shift at the sunset junction street fair who knew the area's bus routes inside out. after running thru all the possible combinations of busses we could take he figured the quickest route was one that picked up on alvarado and snaked thru the city before dropping us at the grand blue line station. during our detour he told me about how the subsidized housing that extremely sick aids patients get may be ripped out from under them. if that happens, over 500 aids patients in los angeles will become homeless. one of the fears is that some of them may start turning tricks to make ends meat. imagine the problems that would cause in both the gay and straight sides of the fence. i'm trying to find more information on all of this, because i think it's something that needs to be paid attention to if it's true.

an hour after the initial chaos, i was where i needed to be. perhaps i was a bit behind schedule, but i still got where i needed to be and that's all that mattered. if the red line was running properly, i would've been on the green line. the train would've been just outside of norwalk. in a perfect world i'd almost be home. but then again, in a perfect world i'd still be ignorant to the plight of aids patients in los angeles. i guess the term "in a perfect world" is sort of subjective, isn't it?