The Perdition Score

The drive through {Griffith} park skirts the crumbling 5 freeway, then turns inward, bringing you past the park's famous merry-go-round. The ride is a gruesome thing in L.A., the way all merry-go-rounds are. They're the definition of both staggering boredom and ruthlessly enforced merriment. They're the amusement-park equivalent of sticking your hand in fire as a kid. You have to try it once, just to see what it's like. After that, you never want to do it again. All those prancing, leering horses, with their frozen rictus smiles are most kids' first introduction to Hell. Those horses, they think, must have been some murderous bastards to be captured and displayed in such a humiliating way. The wee ones picture themselves in the horses' place, skewered through the gut by a brass pole and yanked up and down—suspended between Heaven and Hell—for all eternity. Parents who've forgotten or repressed their own terrifying merry-go-round memories snap shots of the kiddies in their torment, passing their traumas on to the next generation. Merry-go-rounds are a great shared lie of childhood. Cruelty masked as fun. Tedium cloaked as adventure. A great spinning vessel of torment getting the tykes ready for the damnation most of them will richly deserve, all because their minds were permanently twisted by this parade of pony horrors{...}
—pp.253-254

The drive from Marina del Rey to Hollywood isn’t as hideous as it could be. The 405 is a plodding lava flow instead of a graveyard.