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FRIENDS, some of you may be wondering why in hell it takes me so long to publish new columns. When I first announced these web columns I promised a new one every 2 weeks, but these days it's more of a annoyingly random thing. What else can I possibly have on my schedule? My life is one of excessive drinking, goofing off at work, and eating hot dogs. I must have tons of free time, it's not like I'm doing anything important. Well, I'll tell you what I'm doing: I'm looking for parking in Hoboken, NJ, and the struggle for curb real estate is starting to drive me mad.
There are so many cars in Hoboken I'm starting to worry that this is the city where SkyNet from the Terminator movies first achieves sentience, with the cars suddenly waking up and running us all over, a la Maximum Overdrive. Through a series of hands-on experiments I've conducted, in which I physically seek a parking space after 9PM on a Thursday evening, I can state with a high degree of certainty that there are approximately thirteen cars for every human being in Hoboken. No shit. I'm part of the problem, of course; my wife and I each own a car, which means we're in one dwelling with two cars, and if you can assume we're typical of at least half the population of Hoboken, it probably breaks down to about 1.5 cars per dwelling, overall. Most of Hoboken is apartments, too, which means that each building probably has at least 5 dwellings within it. You can probably squeeze about 1.5 average cars in front of every building—you see the problem. Add in yellow and red curbs and you drift serenely into a nightmare. You can literally spend hours looking for a spot at peak hours, which are generally any night that thousands of people from surrounding towns plow into my mile-square city to drink and carouse in one of about 75,000 taverns located here. Which is to say, every night. These bastards don't live here, they drive in, muscle me out of the bar, puke on my sidewalk, scream obscenities at 2AM, and then crash their car into my house—but what really bothers me is the parking space they're taking away from me. I've been known to do all those other things, so I can understand the human need to puke, scream, and crash your car. Who hasn't? But why the bastards are allowed to take away a man's god-given right to parking, I don't know. I know that even on non-bar nights, which occur occasionally, if you get home after about eight in the evening, you're screwed. You drive around trapped inside your car, peering out at the happy people frolicking and dancing in the streets, and you drive around in ever-widening circles searching for parking, until you're eventually about twenty miles from home, meaning you'll need to take a cab home from your parking spot. After a while, you realize the secret to parking in a madhouse like Hoboken: Timing. Think about it: At any given time in Hoboken, one of the approximately seven billion parked cars on the street is being moved. All that getting a parking spot requires is being there at exactly the right moment. And here lies madness. Madness because you start to realize that the Somers Uncertainty Principle is in effect here. The Somers Uncertainty Principle states that you can know that someone is pulling out of a parking spot, or you can be in the right place at the right time to get that spot, but you can never know both. I'm not shitting you, I've proved it, as much as anything can be proved in this insane world. You can see someone idling in a parking spot, chatting with friends, or waiting for their car to warm up, and know that they're about to abandon some prime parking real estate, but you can never be in the right place at the right time to get that spot. Never. Either you see them idling in your rear-view, after you've gone too far to back up and wait on it, or someone is already waiting on it, or by the time you get back to it, it's been taken—because just as every moment a spot is being vacated in Hoboken, every moment a spot is also being filled by a greedy communist asshole who doesn't deserve it as much as I do. Or, you can find yourself in the right place at the right time, but it will always be a screeching-brakes, heart-pounding surprise. The perfect spot will always just open up in front of you, like a Sorority Girl who's had just too much to drink. You cannot predict, because if you could, there would always be someone there ahead of you. Now imagine you have your wife The Duchess in the car next to you, a woman who has no problem putting her car in reverse and driving backwards for two or three blocks, muttering curses and swerving around pedestrians in order to secure a parking spot, a woman who's always ready to get out of the car and start a fight with people who have beaten her to a parking spot. Now imagine that she is watching your every move as you, the Hunter-Gatherer, seek parking for your family unit. See? Madness. Naturally, a lot of these problems would be solved if I just got rid of my car and stopped needing to park it, or if a large number of people in Hoboken would do likewise. It would also be solved if people would stop buying SUVs. SUVs are a fucking intelligence test, and you're all failing. Now we have Hummers, thank goodness, because lord knows we need a fucking tank to drive around here, because those flimsy Explorers were just crumpling up into small cubes at the faintest impact, with people trapped inside them, doomed. I've been seeing a lot of those Cooper Minis, too, which I guess is a step in the right direction. If a law was passed forcing everyone to drive a Mini, we'd all have a lot more parking, don't you think? I'm writing my congressman, as soon as I get out of my car. Of course, the world would be better off if we all just got rid of our cars and started walking, but for most people the very idea makes their gelatinous buttocks jiggle in fear, and for the rest of us it just isn't all that practical: Even though I don't drive my car very often, there are times when I have no other choice—or, at least, no other convenient choice. And if you don't think history is driven by the search for convenience, then you just haven't been paying attention, bubba. Anyway, I'm exhausted just thinking about driving. I need a nap. If you want to tell me what you thought of this column, you know where to find me. Jeff |
June 28, 2003