From The Transmetropolitan Review

If the reader will excuse me, I’ll say nothing of the circumstances which led me to leave my native country; the narrative would be tedious to you and painful to myself. Needless to say, I found myself at the base of tall, foreign mountains, brown and black and gray, sparsely speckled with small plants of the darkest green. Beneath these titanic mountains ran a great causeway, a freeway, commonly known to the locals as the 210, or the Foothill Freeway.