So I'm running ten hours late. I had intended to leave Santa Barbara at around 5pm on a Sunday so I could get home at a reasonable hour so I could unpack and do other important household stuff (OK, I'm lying already...I would have just ended up watching TV and thinking that I should be doing household stuff). I'm very good at putting off stuff to begin with, and with noone trying to stop me I can usually put things off until the very last moment and that's exactly what I had accomplished this time.

I want to get to work at 6:30 and though L.A. always has traffic, I figured it would be minimal at 4am so leaving at 3 should just do the trick. Lyle always assumes we're going to the beach when he first gets in the car (yes, even if it's 3am...he's a smart dog; he just doesn't use his smarts all the time) so we were both in a good travelling mood and ready to speed our way south.

...That is until we got to the very first stop light. I don't know if it's a curse or jinx I picked up somewhere, or that my car's too light for the sensors, but every so often lights won't turn green for me. And it was the light for the freeway onramp, too. I could see the freeway, I could smell the freeway (ick!), I could feel the freeway...it wanted to me hurry up and break my speed record of 3 three hours and ten minutes! The clock was ticking and the light wasn't turning green.

I know that this has happened to me before and I know that I've thought a lot about going through the red light, but I don't think I ever have. I was thinking about it right at that moment, and had been for a good few minutes, but I wasn't close to breaking just yet. Then a highway patrol car gets off the freeway and stops at the intersection my right. Of course the light turns green for him so I mumble something pig-oriented under my breath and continue waiting. Of course he's taking the left turn at this light because the Shell station behind me has a store in it and is well-stocked with coffee and donuts. As I continue my soft tirade against the men in blue, he has the nerve to pull his patrol car up next to mine and stop!

At this very instant the light finally turns green for me. As he's rolling down his window I'm trying to gauge how mad he'd get if I just took off and went through the now green light and got my high speed race home underway. I figured he probably had nothing better to do at that time of the morning (night? whatever 3am is considered) and the donuts weren't fresh at that hour anyway and wouldn't mind any excuse to chase me down and give me a ticket for some random little thing if I ignored him. So I played his game and started to roll down my window as well. Of course Lyle has been going crazy the five minutes we've spent at a stand-still and now that something is happening he has to check it out. I don't know if there's any law or ordinance against driving with a small dog on your lap, but the way this trip was starting, I didn't really want to find out. So I'm trying to hold back the seething bundle of energy that was my dog a minute ago and roll down the window while not freaking out about missing the light now that I've finally received my clearance to go!

Since our cars our facing opposite directions, once I get my window down I am so close to the man I would have been able to see the donut crumbs in his authoritative moustache and smelled the coffee on his breath had he been coming from the quickimart rather than going to.

"If a light's red for that long, you should just go through it, ma'am," he said.

"Uh...OK" I replied. I'm just so eloquent it scares me!

"Any cop would be a real chicken to give you a ticket for that."

"Heh heh...oh, OK. Thank you. Oh look - it's green now."

Yeah, right! That's a very nice idea, but I wouldn't buy it in a million years! It is unavoidable to not see Cops on TV every once in a while. I hope for the sake of humanity most of those cops act differently with a camera following them and say and do all those dumb things for the sake of slapstick humor, but humor aside, there are definitely many cops on that show that would be "chicken" enough to give me the ticket.

He bid me a good day and I smiled sweetly and got going through the still green light. I guess I would have gone through it if it had turned red by then, but that would have been so hard to do. After that the trip was very uneventful, but that's kind of what you'd expect at an hour when only procrastinators and truck drivers share the road.

4/29/97