Congratulations on Stopping Yourself!

As you open your mouth to tell them that this is nothing like the shit you'd see on the 101, something amazing will happen: you won't speak.

Your friends will all look at each other and smile.  None of them will say anything, but they will all look at you, at your eyes and mouth and cheeks, to be sure that you're not having a stroke.  You won't be, thankfully.  You'll just be realizing, for the first time in your life, that the traffic patterns of the painstakingly designed Los Angeles area road system won't be terribly interesting to most people.  They'll be slightly less interesting than the train system of New York, where at the very least weird shit happens, like people finding babies, and slightly more interesting than the Jersey Turnpike, which lacks the revealingly racist backstory that contributes to Los Angeles' strange bifurcating road structure.

This realization will bring with it a painful awareness that Los Angeles is no more special than anywhere else on Earth, that the scale and scope of the City of Angles does not exceed its reach and that LA, like everywhere else, produces products that will surely fade with the passing of time, with the death of mankind and the inevitable expansion of the sun.

Your silence will, after a few seconds, begin to worry your friends, because it will mark a sort of introspection alien to the people of Los Angeles.  And so, sure enough, after a few seconds of pristine majesty, your face will suddenly distort as your eyes and jaw are no longer controlled by your nerves, suddenly strangled by the expansion and explosion of the blood vessels inside your brain.  Your momentary awareness will give you some aspect of peace as your world explodes into rage, then pain, and then just the memory of sensation as your friends, still surrounding you in the car, scream at you, at the driver, struggling to surmise which hospital to take you two in the event of a stroke.

Congratulations on Stopping Yourself!