Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Oh yeah, I left you people hanging, didn't I? I started a side story in one of my recent "holy fuck is this a lot of snow" essays. I believe I promised a follow-up called "Somerville Can Suck It"? Well, I aim to please.

Follow up:

So, somewhere in the middle of a groan-inducing pictorial where I showed my neighbors' cars socked-in by the cumulative snows of four or five storms, I wrote that I gave up my car eight years ago, yet that it took three winters before I stopped waking up on snowy mornings in a gut-twisting panic. I'd been conditioned into this panicky state from too many winters spent living in Somerville, MA.

Somerville, you see, is a town with a lot of nice features, but whose car-related policy-makers range from inane (I really want to say "retarded" but I do not want to offend any mentally-challenged people) to corrupt. Evil. Predatory. Yeah, predatory! When it comes to car owners, Somerville is all teeth and claws. It's not only me saying this -- there's a T-shirt you might see worn non-ironically by the snarkier Somerville residents. This shirt bears the image of a giant parking ticket, and the slogan says "Welcome to Somerville." If you're looking for a distraction and you want to read some pretty entertaining rants, just Google key words such as "Somerville" and "parking ticket" and "corrupt." Or just ask anyone who lives in Somerville, or did live there, or rehearses there or once tried to visit friends.

We all have stories. Let's see, what have I heard, off the top of my head...

Say your inspection sticker expires tomorrow. Well, you could plan to take care of it in the morning, but more likely a cop will be there to tow your car at midnite so that, instead of going to work the next day, you can spend the day running back and forth (on foot) from the police station to the tow yard looking for your missing license plate, which the cop kindly took off your car and lost for your convenience.

Or you could be parked in a perfectly legal spot that's next to an illegal spot, and you'll find a ticket when you get back to your car.

Or you could find a ticket for what appears to be no reason at all, and when you flip it to read what you could possibly have done to offend the parking Nazi's, you'll find it's a penalty for parking in the same spot for more than three days...? This I still don't get. But it happened.

One good thing, especially for the nightlife, is that you don't have to feed the parking meters after 6pm. Except that now you do. The meters are active until 10pm now. This is unheard of around here, even in Boston proper the meters become a non-issue after 6pm. Excuse me, can I ask how you're going to a movie at the Somerville Theatre if you have to exit to feed the fucking meter? At least for a movie you're just missing some of the movie -- most rock shows have a zero-re-admittance policy. Your choices become a)get a ticket or b)get stuck outside and miss the show because you were trying to be a good person and feed the meter.

Oh and the meters used to be .50 an hour. Now it's a buck an hour. Quarters only. You want to have dinner in one of the fine restaurants in Davis Square? If you're a leisurely diner, don't forget your sack of quarters. WHO CARRIES AROUND THAT MANY QUARTERS?

And the ticket fines, by the way, went WAY up while I was a resident. Formerly $15 for a parking violation, it went up to $100.

The latest thing I read is about some absolutely unfair baloney about the guest parking passes. Okay, if you live in Somerville you pay for these guest parking passes, right? So if you live in a "resident parking only" area, you can give your guests a pass to display in their windshield to avoid a ticket. Well, it seems that at some random point the ballbusters-that-be decided there's a 2-day limit per week. So if your girlfriend were to come over on Saturday and stay until Sunday, that's the end of her allowance for the whole week. What? What gets me about THIS is, when I lived in Somerville with Hub, we had one shared car for awhile, while the pale-faced potato-sack-assed neighbors (two fat adults still living at home with their grim father their whole sad, sorry lives) had the nerve to complain about our guests, yet they themselves had FOUR CARS to park. They each had a car, plus the brother had some giant shitheap truck. How about limiting the number of vehicles per residence, Mayor? If I were still a Somerville resident I would be livid about this; legislating that I can't have company more than two days per week, are you KIDDING me right now?

But I digress. Back to the gut-twisting panic that town instilled in me. If it's harsh any normal day, well, lemme tell ya, these parking Nazi's really ramp it up when it comes to the dreaded "snow emergency." Oh, the quotation marks are fully intended as sarcasm. As in the most acidic level of sarcasm that exists, like sarcasm so acidic that if it could be transformed from words into liquid and spill on your skin, it would rot through to the bone like that face-melting scene in Indiana Jones.

What I mean to say is: snow emergency, my ass.

When Somerville calls a "snow emergency" it means no parking on the right side of the streets for the sake of plowing. Makes sense. Except they're awful quick to declare a snow emergency. Get this: if they do call a snow emergency, and it does not snow one single flake, the city will still tow your car. This I learned the hard way one perfectly clear night, along with a number of my Summer Street neighbors. Everyone had the same idea -- yes, we heard about the snow emergency, but, having brains that use logic and eyes that see, we separately yet collectively did not move our cars. Because there was no snow.

Do you get this? There was. No. Fucking. Snow. If there is no snow, there is no plow to make way for, so would it not follow that the snow emergency is quite moot?

Not according to the Somerville authorities. They towed EVERYBODY and yet it never snowed at ALL. The setting moon was still shining out of a clear sky as morning dawned with a bright sun. The guys who drive the plows were still at home asleep. Schools open. The snow never came. But the Somerville car-owners apparently needed to be up at five in the morning anyway, to move our cars. There was a big hullabaloo in the papers, 'zines and blogs over THAT slick move, and the only response from Mayor Joe's office was that a declared snow emergency sticks even when snow does not. It happened a few more times, too.

It sounds so incredibly corrupt, does it not? Like if it were a movie, Liam Neeson would be the unkempt, socially awkward newspaper reporter (who used to be a Navy SEAL) who stumbles upon evidence of some big underground handshake deal between the tow truck mafia and the city, where the bad guys had naked pictures of the mayor's wife (played by the perpetually worried-looking Julianna Margulies) handcuffed to a radiator and threatened to publish them unless every car was impounded, snow or not, reaping a three million dollar cash cow for the bad guys led by Tia Carrere, who would in turn broker some sort of terrorist-esque deal no one really understands but it involves missiles aimed at the Prudential Center, and it's OK that the details are murky, the point is a lot of bad guys get clobbered, Liam Neeson saves the mayor's reputation and the missiles are disarmed at the last possible second. I don't know how it ends. Uh...stuff explodes a lot, the naked photo negatives are destroyed, and Nicolas Cage and his team, which includes at least one comic actor, say Kevin James, drives everyone's car back to them in a montage set to Metallica's "King Nothing."

Wait, I think I saw that movie.

Back when it was only a $15 ticket and no tow, I confess that I might have been one of the Somerville residents to open one bleary eye in the morning, consider the option of going to move the car, and said "Fuck it, I'm gonna sleep." When it's freezing out and you're warm in bed, $15 seems a fair price to pay, know what I'm saying? Yeah, plow away, I'll pay that ticket. But that shit went up to a staggering $100. A HUNDRED bucks? Instead of a nuisance, that ticket became a giant bill that means you can't buy groceries that week. Plus, the tow! You have the towing fiasco to deal with, which means a)call the police to find out where is your car, because they're not always at the same tow yard. And then b)bring cash to bail your car out of its fenced-in jail, and it's at least a hundred. In cash. Only. Like those books are above-board.

Hence the panic. Unless you want to keep forking over big money to the Somerville snow emergency beatdown crew, you leap from your bed, throw on some boots and your coat over your pajamas, and you find a place, anyplace, to put your car during a snow emergency. Don't matter if you see any snow, just move the car. I know, I know, I never understood either: there's a shortage of parking already, so unless you're George Jetson, what in the name of Zeus's butthole are you supposed to do with your car? I usually ended up parking mine somewhere roughly a mile from the moon. Once or twice I had to take a cab back home.

It's just one of the things that makes no sense. I mean, I get it, Somerville, parking can be an issue in a city. Naturally there must be rules and reg's. But reasonable rules that people can understand, and fines that don't break the entire household budget.

On one of the rantfest blogs, or maybe it was Yelp, I read someone's assessment about Somerville's parking insanity, and it rings true though I have no proof. The person wrote that most of these policy-makers are homeowners. Which means they have driveways and garages. Which means they have no idea what it is like for their neighbors. They are handing down these crazy, non-nonsensical rules designed to extract as much money as possible from the residents. It's like a set of rules and reg's engineered to trap as many car owners as possible, as long as it doesn't affect THEM.

Fuck you, Somerville.