Starting and then stopping
Taking off and landing
The emptiest of feelings
Disappointed people clinging on to bottles
And when it comes it's so so disappointing

Radiohead, "Let Down"
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Lately I've actually been getting up at around 7am, and so sleeping in until 8:30am is quite a treat. I arose slowly, meandered around barefoot on the wooden floor until I arrived at the blinds covering my newly installed picture window. I opened and raised the wooden slats so that I could experience the street in high def. Having quenched my desire for direct sunlight, I proceeded to watch DVDs until my brother arrived.

For the past month or so, I've been without a car. I know, I know, in Los Angeles. Let's begin by outlining the places I've been sans automobile.

I've ridden my e-bike to Santa Monica and stayed at a 4 star hotel, then rode to El Segundo for a Super Bowl party. I've been to San Diego twice by train and twice by riding with brother. I've crashed at Stanley's twice, once after the ceremonial post-club trip to Tommy's and once after the ceremonial deleting of the phone number from your cell phone. And all the while, I'm putting in 9 hours a day at work, which is certainly nothing to brag about since all my friends are workaholics, but what renders it impressive is, again, I've got no fucking car.

So many negative aspects of Los Angeles can be traced to the traffic and the fact that people either have to tolerate it or reroute their lives around it. On the other hand, since I've adopted my new method of transportation, my commute has been paradoxically shorter. I'll explain it like this: it used to take me around 17 minutes to get to work. 15 on a fast day, 20 on a slow one. I live close enough to work where one small jam on the interchange isn't the end of the world. This has a lot to do with the fact that I get in at 10am.

But because my total travel time from my house to the bus stop is just ten minutes, I conclude that I'm spending less time doing the actual transporting. Once I hitch my heavy-ass e-bike onto the bus, I get to take a nap, maybe listen to my iPod, or catch up on a reading list whose pace I seemed to have lost. The same is true for the return home. And I'm actually getting to work earlier than before, arriving consistently at the same time thanks to the magic of pre-schedule bus routes.

So while it's a pain that the old distributor housing doesn't quite fit on the new engine block, I'm not in the world's biggest hurry to worry about it. Calibration isn't due for another fifteen days, and I'm no longer dropping $40 one way for cab fare. I can feel it: I can feel cruise control beginning to set in.