As I've noted in an earlier post, riding buses in LA can be dicey at times. Today I was sitting at a bus stop in East LA, absorbed in an LA Times article, when a huge crashing sound pulled my eyes off the newspaper and onto a nearby car that had just driven into a light pole, abut 20 feet from where I'd been sitting--I would have been a sitting (and reading) duck, had the car driven into me instead of the light pole. I wasn't the one closest to danger actually; two women and a toddler standing nearby were actually closer. Since, at the time of the accident, I had been lost in the fog of the newspaper, I had to ask them how the car managed to find itself hugging a light pole. They said the driver--uninjured, I might add, as was the passenger--must have been drunk.
The two women said they were able to move back from the car as they saw what it was about to do. They were nice enough not to ask why I'd been oblivious to the oncoming danger, just as I was embarrassed enough not to explain that I'd been absorbed in a article about...Paris Hilton's jail sentence. Had that car been 20 feet to the right, well, what a way to go.