Metro Journal: Dec 12 You Know It's Time To Quit When...

While I was waiting at a bus stop this morning, I heard a drop of something on my shoulder. I looked, then looked up. Another drop landed on my face. Rain. There was no rain forecast for today! I looked around. Blue sky in every direction, except directly overhead, where it was grey!

You know it's time to quit and turn around and go spend the day in bed when you're sitting in the only place it's raining for miles.

In the evening,

Joe the Bear

^* asked if I was ready to leave.

You know it's time to quit when you were ready to leave work before you even got there.

We walked to Hollywood & Vine and got there around 6:30. Some reasonably groomed man was picking cigarette butts off the ground. I thought he was going to put them in the trash. No, he pocketed them.

You know it's time to quit smoking when you have to scavenge half-smoked cigarettes from Sammy Davis, Jr.'s star. Seriously.

The 780 didn't show until 6:45, but it was in a regular-length orange Local. It was pretty crowded, and I was more inclined to waiting another 15 minutes than being a sardine on the way home. I took out my Blackberry thinking I would send email or cruise the web or something, but I had forgotten to charge it, and the battery was too low to turn on the network. Crap.

A few minutes later, another orange Local was getting towed by a really big Metro tow truck. It was stopped at the red light at Argyle right in front of me, but unfortunately, by the time I got my camera phone out, the light had changed and it was starting to move. I did get this nice picture of the hitch and the lovely coach parked across the street:


The Pantages Theatre is literally right across Hollywood Blvd from the Red Line Station. They've been showing Wicked at least since I started my job and thus taking this bus route. Early on, you'd see lots of wannabe gothlings in line, but now the crowd is very generic and mainstream. A favorite pastime of tourists is taking pictures of the marquee. By the time the fourth person I saw tonight was framing their shot, I had my camera phone ready. Number 4:


(Embarrassingly, I also got a pretty good shot of the marquee in that one.)

Number five, pictured below, was using her flash. I'm sure that was highly effective across the 4 traffic lanes, left turn lane, and the bus lanes on each side of Hollywood. She probably also has a lovely album of the backs of people's heads that she has taken over the years at fireworks displays.


There was no 780 at 7:00. Or 7:05 or... etc. Not until 7:15. By then I had seen no fewer than 9 people take a picture of the Pantages marquee from my side of the street. Well, 10 if you count my inadvertent shot. And even though I was there 45 minutes, the rate of one picture every 5 minutes was seriously some kind of record.

You know it's time to quit taking pictures of that marquee when there must be 6 million pictures of it on the web by now, people. Seriously.¹

Sure, 45 minutes is a long time, but I clearly managed to entertain myself by taking mocking photos of the completely stereotypically predictable Hollywood tourists.

Don't miss our next installment: You Know You Have No Life When...²

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^* Firefox displays this correctly inline in the paragraph. IE doesn't. If it looks like crap, change browsers.
¹ Seriously. Google for "+pantages +wicked +marquee" and you'll get a crapload of pages with pictures.
² ... when you spend 45 minutes taking pictures of tourists taking pictures on a Friday evening.