Mad Atoms

If six years of driving in Los Angeles has taught me one thing, it’s that everyone here drives drunk constantly. The city’s sprawling layout and sheer size makes regularly cabbing financially impractical and our public transportation blows. Driving under the influence is a blasé part of LA culture. You get good at it. Only celebrities are stupid enough to get caught.So it’s easy to forget how the real world functions sometimes.

Case in point – I’d been in Minnesota for less than 24 hours last summer while visiting my parents when I got pinched for boozin’n’cruisin.' I spent 36 hours staring at a jail cell wall (the Christian bible my only reading material option), my dad’s license plates got yanked and shredded, my driver’s license got clipped, I was fined $1000 and I had to wear one of those Lindsay Lohan alcohol-sensing anklets for two weeks for some nonsensical reason.

It was a shameful and obnoxious ordeal. Though I do finally have an answer to the eternal question, “Can I ever be bored enough to read the Bible?” Apparently not. Some might have emerged from this experience a better person, realizing they had no one to blame but themselves. But I know better. It’s LA’s fault.

See, despite the bevy of alcoholic degenerates that comprise my friend base, I only know two people who have gotten DUIs in LA. One ran into seven parked cars – SEVEN – and got apprehended while attempting to push his destroyed vehicle into a “hiding place.” The other led the police on a 30-minute chase up towards Six Flags, none of which he can recall because he was so colossally shitfaced. Me? I got pulled over in MN cause I accidentally had my fog lights on.

To put it simply - LA has conditioned me into thinking you need to be tossing flaming babies out your window to get pulled over. Unfortunately the po-po in cities without notorious cop shortages have nothing better to do at 2am then pull your ass over.

Fortunately the solution here is obvious: Los Angelenos need special licenses that allow us the same drunk driving privileges elsewhere in America that we experience here. I’m not saying drunk driving isn’t dangerous. It is. But we let old people, complete idiots, teenage girls, and even people with no legs behind the wheel. I fail to see the difference.

Of course drunk driving is a privilege, not a right. You gotta prove yourself. There’ll be a section on your license exam where you’ll pound shots, then perform a variety of aptitude tests – backing up, headlights activation, red-light awareness, lane fidelity, Taco Bell drive-thru etiquette – and then you’ll receive a grade indicating your proficiency up to a certain blood-alcohol level.

If anything, I will be remembered as a hero for alcoholics rights.