NO PARKING:
Well, not really NO parking, just weird parking
Is it just me or has parking your car gotten just kind of a little stranger lately?
I went to one of those ludicrous, but convenient, outdoor mini-malls earlier today and parked in a spot labeled, “Parking for 30 minutes or less.” Being a stubborn asshole, I made sure to stay parked there for 31 minutes, just to see if anything happened. This timed parking is clearly a not-so-subtle means of trying to keep customers coming and going at a rapid clip, a maxim of the new and horribly impersonal form of capitalism that pervades our lives. It’s almost as if mini-malls don’t care about us at all, and are just after our money. And to think, I wrote all those mini-mall love poems for nothing. My point is that this timed parking at the mall is new. We’ve had downtown parking meters in cities for years (and my own beloved Athens is the worst city for parking this side of the town of Bedrock), and yeah, that’s a scam, too, but it’s a scam we’re used to by now. Mall parking meters are undoubtedly on their way, and when they arrive, they will join an infamous group of weird, mainly new, largely unenforced, honor code-style, divide us into little groups to reinforce our worst ideas about ourselves, parking standards. Such as:
Ye Olde Handicapped Spot
Yeah, we’ve been condescending to crippled people for a long time. The handicapped spot was the first specialty parking spot. It’s the grandfather of the new sub-spots. I’m not complaining about the existence of handicapped parking spots, but I think I would if I were handicapped. I mean, it really is condescending as hell.
Parking for Expectant Mothers:
This is new. Pregnant women never got their own spaces until recently. Do preggos really need these spots? Isn’t having a baby reward enough? You’re propagating the species, you’re creating a little version of yourself, you’re pushing a free work force out of your vagina. Isn’t that enough? Do you really need better parking, too?
And who checks this? For the first few months, unless you carry portable MRIs to shop at Belk’s, it’s hard to tell if a woman is pregnant. Is there an on-site OBGYN with a speculum belt ready to check the “family status” of these parkers? And, if so, is it anything like the royal virginity checkers of yore?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t help out pregnant women, but I’ve seen expectant mother parking spaces at sporting goods stores. How many expectant mothers are out there searching for good deals on kayaks?
Parking for Eco-Friendly Vehicles Only
Automotive discrimination in its purest form. It’s like First Class in airplanes. We should just go ahead and let the eco-car drivers claim the right of prima nocta on our wives. I understand encouraging us to buy less-polluting cars, but don’t tax breaks make more sense as incentives? These Smart Car only spaces really bring out the class distinctions that we’ve always tried to cover up in America. The distinctions have always been there, but we used to at least try and hide them a little.
Sometimes these judgmental eco spots even come equipped with their own chargers, which is great… if you drive an eco-vehicle. If not, it makes you question why they don’t provide you with a gas pump in your non-eco-friendly parking spot.
Parking for Compact Cars Only
Now there’s even automotive size discrimination going on. Compact car spots would seem to make sense (as a concept) because of limited space, but only if you’re living under the delusion that parallel lines of white paint HAVE TO come in only one size. We can make parking spaces any size we want. We can paint them small enough to adequately park skateboards. We can paint them big enough to accommodate tanks (and for a while there, during the Hummer’s popularity binge I thought this was where we were headed). Hell, we don’t have to paint the white lines at all. We’re the ones in control of the white paint, not the other way around.
I’m sure there are more examples of this around. If not, I’d bet good money that there will soon be many more of these coming down the pike. We seem not to be able to help ourselves from lumping humanity into all these little sub-groups. I suppose it helps some people make sense of the world. Or perhaps we’re just assholes.