Imagine you are driving.
You are driving on one of the most congested freeways, in
one of the most populated cities, in a state known for congested freeways and populated
cities. Imagine your drive a lot.
Imagine you are driving during the prime morning commute hours. And imagine you are smart.
Imagine you drive this freeway five days a week and you know which lanes tend
to move and which lanes don’t. So
imagine you are moving, slowly, but moving in the far right lane so imagine you are not moving
quite as slow as the rest of the lanes of drivers.
Imagine you are in the lane that
moves just a little faster, and gives you a close-up, if fleeting, view of the
curiosities that occupy the no-man’s land that makes up the side of your city’s
freeway.
Imagine you know this isn't quite a no-man's land.
Now imagine you see something strange, something curious,
but something not necessarily out of the ordinary. It is not out of the ordinary because you see
lots of strange things, and even more as you move slowly along a freeway. Imagine this
strange thing is a black Weber grill poised in a slightly
protected triangle of concrete. Imagine
this triangle of concrete is covered by an overpass above and formed on one
side by a wall, and on the other two sides by steel barriers so that it forms a tidy,
protected, concrete and steel triangle.
Now imagine in this tidy triangle,
Next to this Weber grill,
There is a green, plastic lawn chair.
And imagine next to this green, plastic lawn chair this is a beer cooler.
And imagine, on this green plastic lawn chair, next to this black Weber grill, and this beer cooler, sits a lone beer
can.
As if, your neighbor Mike decided to cook out, and while he
was cooking out, he decided bring out a beer cooler, and to have a beer, and sit on a green plastic lawn
chair.
Except,
Your neighbor Mike does not have cookouts on the side of the freeway. Your neighbor Mike does not
place his grill in a tidy cement triangle, bring out his beer cooler, pop open a cold one, and grill up a
few burgers as the cars try, unsuccessfully, to whiz by. Your neighbor Mike does not create this
strange tableau of pseudo-suburban domesticity on a protected concrete triangle, next to
a tightly packed legion of vehicles that is his little patch of the 5 freeway.
But someone does.
