As I’m sitting on this 70-degree July evening, I am basically dealing with trying to stop myself from losing my shit.

I’ve decided to meet somebody tonight in another part of LA. Whenever you decide to meet somebody in another part of Los Angeles, you’re literally taking your life into your own hands.

It could be clear sailing. You can actually enjoy driving on freeways that have five lanes.

You can drive down PCH and enjoy the three lanes of open sunroof driving, watching the water on one hand.

It just happens to be on this night, a 25-minute drive is going to be an hour. Why?

Who knows? It’s Los Angeles. There was an accident, somebody sneezed, somebody was texting and driving and went off the side of the road… who knows?

So how do you deal with daily stress, like sitting in traffic and driving?

It’s funny. I listen to music. I’ve got Spotify attached to my phone, so I can play that through my stereo in my car.

I’ve got Sirius Satellite Radio, so I have enough music to calm me down. Really music doesn’t do enough of that, so I’ll start looking at things. I’ll look at nature. Nature is really calming.

I look at the water as I’m sitting here right now wanting to absolutely turn my car into a personal helicopter and fly above all this obnoxious traffic. I look at the water and I say this to myself:

Pretty water.

I’m going to say it again. Pretty water.

It’s not working.

Well I’ll look at the fog roll in and think to myself, pretty fog.

I’ll look at other people and see how miserable they are in their car and how they wish all their cars turned into helicopters.

I look around. I look at people. I look at things. I dictate.

I try to pass the time as best as possible.

Because if not, I will clearly lose my mind and then when I finally arrive to my destination to meet the person I was going to met, that person will have a tense, terse David on their hands and I don’t like to do that.

Because when I show up for somebody I want to show up and I want to show up happy because they’re taking their time out of their life to be with me. They’re taking time out of their day to spend time with me, so it’s not their fault. It’s not my fault that traffic is hell in Los Angeles.

It just happens to be what it is. So, I do whatever I can. I blog. I dictate. I call friends on the phone. I crank the music. I roll the windows down. I look at the pretty wildflowers.

Look! Pretty wildflowers.

Sure, the occasional thought comes to my mind of why the fuck are we going so slow.

Holy shit, I’m so far away from the light. Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m never going to make it through this light.

I’m at least a mile away from the stop light right now and I’m still not even close and we’re going one mile per hour.

Ah, breathe, breathe, get rid of those thoughts.

Not much you can do about it. Traffic sucks. It is what it is. But at least now you can look at Google Maps and find out how late you’re going to be and actually text somebody and say according to Google Maps I’m at 6:47 right now and counting.

Los Angeles, it’s like a relationship. You can’t live with it, you can’t live without it. I forgot that term for this is. Rock and a hard place maybe.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s how I deal with stress.