Two weeks ago, on a Saturday Night we were out at dinner in Los Feliz and my girlfriend goaded me into driving to the Festival of Light. This is a free drive-thru Holiday lights display in Griffith Park. You simply drive up Riverside Avenue (just past Los Feliz) and look at all the pretty holiday ornamentation lit with thousands of colorful lights.
Attending this event might have been the single stupidest thing that I have done in, oh, years if not a decade.
To start with, Every fucking human being ever born since the fifth century B.C. is in their car ahead of you for this event. So you don’t literally sit there in the dark for a half an hour. Oh no, you sit in two lanes of bumper-to-bumper nighttime traffic for NINETY UNHOLY MINUTES
And the payoff for pressing on your brake a thousand times and having your retina scarred by the pulse of the brake lights on the car in front of you as you inhale breaths of 22% oxygen/78% nearby car exhaust? The weakest excuse for a public display of creativity in the history of the human species. We are taking about a light show that you could do at home, right now with a string of lights. You wouldn’t even have to stop reading this blog, just plug them in and make the stupidest inane shape possible. Now imagine a steel structure of an elf or a reindeer or the Staples Center roof (which looks like a shaved lavender labia anyway) rendered in ordinary, uninspiring Christmas lights. Your string of lights, at home, on the floor, is more successful than the Festival of Light simply because it stands as a string of lights instead of pathetic illustrations of badly rendered simplistic subjects.
Sure, I was wound a little tight by the time I had the extreme pleasure to see the L.A. City Hall in Christmas lights resembling a penis more than usual as its cockhead shaped tip was rendered in RED lights. Now, to see lit caricatures of councilperson Laura Chick or that Cindy MichiLongNameski from the valley straddling that big lit dick -er edifice – that might have been worth the wait (and the concommitant bad karma of contributing to global warming and asthmatizing the populace), but this was a family affair from start to finish – especially since all of the kids inevitably fall asleep in the SUV during that ninety herk-and-jerk minute wait.
Oh it is for the children that we have LAX lighting a simplistic illustration of a plane taking off, and of other gub’mint agencies sponsoring glib rationalizations of what their department does in colorful, amateurish light displays.
I do not know if my tax dollars paid for this anti-extravaganza. I don’t care. I hope it was the biggest graft of public funds by the slime that administers each agency. I hope ever mistress of every overpaid in-law on the take got a big fat envelope of cash that was earmarked to make the Festival of Light a truly monumental holiday event. At least then SOMETHING of consequence would have happened in this mind-bashingly dreary attempt at topping what an average mall could do at dusk in November without even trying to be organized about it.
Well it turns out all of that braking for two hours led to my Anti-Lock Brake System shorting out my battery. I had to replace my car battery because of the Festival of Light! $77. Gee, thanks government agencies of greater Los Angeles, that ream without lube didn’t hurt too much.
BOTTOM LINE: If your kid begs and your wife drops hints, do everything in your power to avoid the Festival of Light. It is a waste of time, adds wear and tear to your car and is putrid in terms of what one would expect of a three minute wait (let alone 90 minutes) for a Holiday Light Display.