75mph

View Larger Image

<rant>

On the Los Angeles freeways the speed limit is 65mph, but it is not safe to drive that slow. The flow of traffic when it is not bumper to bumper averages around 75mph. The slow drivers that hold up traffic until people start cutting around them on all sides are going 70, while the people doing the cutting around are going 80. We're not talking edge cases here, the sports car drivers weaving through traffic at 85+, the shit boxes barely sustaining 60+, or the motorcycles making their own lanes driving on the paint; these are average drivers going average speeds safely within the flow of traffic. That is why I am somewhat annoyed at having been given a speeding ticket for going 78mph last Friday morning at 7am. That said, I was going a few miles an hour faster than I should have been and I should have known better, the 101 outside Thousand Oaks is crawling with cops, especially at the end of the month when they're filling their quotas.

So now I have to take driving school. One of Cybil's friends took it online on Cybil's computer. They googled all the questions, taking the 8 hour course in 2, and saved the answers. But now I have to go, what is it, 18 months without getting another ticket or my insurance goes up? And so I have a new driving resolution. My open highway max cruising speed has always been 80 since I came to Los Angeles. My new top speed will be 75mph. On the drive into work early in the morning (the only time the freeways are clear) I will not drive in the fast lane, nor will I cruise by the traffic congestion using the rightmost lane. And outside of Thousand Oaks I will slow down to 70 and flip off the cops in their fucking speed traps.

</rant>

About the digital water color above, it's a ripoff of Jasper John's numbers (Jon got me to go to his exhibition at LACMA). I'm learning how to use my new wacom tablet. I took Jasper's 7 and 5 stencil paintings, traced them with the pencil tool, then painted them in with a brush that I modified to behave like paint by setting the opacity to fade and increasing the brush size with pressure. When I get better I'll be able to freehand more, but for now I'm still learning to control the thing. Haven't been able to get it to mimic pencil behavior yet (my preferred offline medium), but maybe I'll get into the whole watercolors thing, always found painting in the real world too much of a bother.