The man who loved a city of cars, but never drove

Ray Bradbury | 1920 - 2012

SOMETIME in the next five years, traffic all across L.A. will freeze. The freeways that were once a fast-moving way to get from one part of the city to another will become part of a slow-moving glacier, edging down the hills to nowhere.  

 - Ray Bradbury, February, 2006, Los Angeles Times

This is how Ray Bradbury started a Los Angeles Times essay back in early February 2006, expressing his belief that a monorail system would help solve transportation problems in LA. This wasn't a new proposition. Bradbury fought for over 50 years for a monorail system - his clean, noiseless, cost-efficient solution to Los Angeles' public transportation woes. Often seen traveling on his bike, between bookstores, theaters, and other favorite spots around town, even in his transportation choices, Bradbury was from a different time.

Ray Bradbury's unfettered imagination and zest for life, reveling in both its ugliness and beauty - whether it be in the horror and ecstasy of fiction, or the dirt and sun of Los Angeles - will remain an inspiration.  If we remember nothing else, it's that Ray Bradbury challenged each and every one of us to dream the big dreams. He is missed.

What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way...why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto. With them, traveling to the grave, I intend to slap some dummox's behind, pat a pretty girl's coiffure, wave to a tad up a persimmon tree. Anyone who wants to join me, there's plenty of room...

- Bradbury 1973