In the spirit of openness and transparency, St.Petersblog thinks Scott Wagman is a douche. Check this e-mail from today. L. A. M. E. Is this working on people? If so, we’re fucked.

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It’s bad enough that you drive that thing, but a crappy turning radius isn’t an excuse for lazy ass parking.  Back it up and try again, sparky.  Maybe next time spring for the model that comes with an entire airplane landing crew.

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My neighbor drives a little tiny car. It’s one fez away from being a Shriner car, really. It’s more of a suppository on wheels. Normally I would applaud this fine middle-aged gentleman for being secure enough in his manhood and status to have such a tiny car. Unfortunately, maybe because he couldn’t actually afford an ‘07 Mustang Compensator, he’s done the next best thing, which apparently involves outfitting his little tiny car with a sport exhaust that sounds like an unusually flatulent Godzilla. This in an of itself wouldn’t be such a problem were it not for the fact that the dude parks in the alley, right up against my window. Seriously, it’s like Monster Truck Super Sunday in the middle of my ear canal every day. Except that it’s not the day. It’s precisely 6:04am every fucking morning, which I have to assume is an appropriate departure time to allow neighbor dude to be at the mall to open the fucking Sunglass Hut kiosk. This is from me to you, neighbor dude, because parking tickets suck.

City ordinance 26.137 prohibits the parking or standing within an alley except for temporary loading or unloading of materials or passengers. If you have a vehicle with commercial lettering, you may park no longer than thirty (30) minutes (unless the sign states otherwise). In no way may you block the alley.

. . . next week’s installment: City ordinances dealing with the number of fire exits required in places of business housing more than 23 exotic animals.

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A car can say a lot about you. A Mustang usually means that at one time in your life you were probably hot shit with girls with crimped hair wearing hemmed, acid-washed jean shorts. It can also mean that you were one of those girls, except now you’re a middle-aged divorcee with a little extra money from the divorce and a crush on an Applebee’s bartender named Tyler. Either way, it also usually means you park like this:

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And the winner of today’s “You Park like a Douche” Award goes to . . .

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Mike down at the 38th Ave Albertsons Liquor Store caught a drunk and disorderly the other night. He totally doesn’t have a problem with alcohol though. Don’t mind the DUI a couple years back, he’s a changed man. No, he was just having a fight with his old lady and things got a little out of hand. Let’s all hope he doesn’t get put back on probation.

That is all.

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Central Billiards (aka, Jordan Holdings, LLC, wtf?) is one of those places you usually end up after doing the majority of your drinking elsewhere (well, that is unless you’re one of those people who actually goes there for the beer pong, in which case you should go punch yourself in the ear). This means two things:  1)  When you are there, you are mostly shitfaced.  2)  It is where you will experience the slow-motion and brightly-lit apocalypse that is Last Call.

I imagine that to anyone working in a bar, last call has to be a particularly unpleasant point in the evening. I think it would be the nightly equivalent of having to convince thirty toddlers to leave a room where Barney is handing out candy and pacifiers, except in this case the toddlers are drunk, think they have rights, are often bigger than you, and, for whatever reason, have decided that tonight, this sad, beer-soaked carpet will be the stage for their final stand against common sense, decency and reason.

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Raise your hand if you remember the Trabant?  I see.  Well, maybe I’m the only one here who was smuggled over the Berlin Wall in a basket full of knockwurst and porn (mmmm, porn and sausage).  You’d think there would be more of us.  Anyway, the Trabant was like the only car you could get in communist East Germany.  Two cylinders.  Dope.  So dope, in fact, that when the wall came down, a significant number of East Germans just drove their Trabants up to it and left them there.  What does this have to do with my alley?  Not much, but it’s the closest thing to communism and parking I could think of.

So, here’s the deal.  I realize St. Pete seems to have its own set of parking restrictions - or a creative lack thereof.  Being able to park pointed against traffic is just the beginning.  It’s almost like asshole parking maneuvers are some form of artistic expression around here.  That dude with the monster truck (bumper nuts optional) who somehow manages to simultaneously park on the grass and block three handicapped spaces might as well put a sign out that says, “fuck yeah I parked like that!”

Somewhere not so far along the questionable parking spectrum are most of my neighbors, all of whom park in the alley next to my building.  Why?  Because they are lazy, and can’t be bothered to find street parking.  Is it against the law?  Probably.  Does it block a fire lane?  More or less.  Does it sound like the Indy 500 at 6am when that chick with the butterfly tramp stamp fires up her Neon with the sport exhaust?  Hell yeah it does.

This annoys me, but that kind of annoyance is a pretty standard feature of living in the world with other people.  I play video games.  I feel better.  Well, that’s my way of dealing with it, anyway.  You could deal with it like another of my neighbors who decided the other night to come out screaming.  His argument amounts to what I guess is kind of like a civic sour grapes.  I’m pretty sure he was pissed because he didn’t have the balls to park in the alley himself.  And well, the fact that everyone else does it must remind him of how much of a tool he is.  Actually, I think I’m giving the guy a little too much credit here.  I’m pretty sure he got frustrated when his meth lab broke down and decided to take it out on the neighbors.  After all, he kept screaming that the people parking in the alley were all communists.  Random, really.  You’d think that people on crank could at least keep up with world politics enough to have updated their paranoid conspiracies a little.  Oh well.

Generally speaking, if you’re ready to bypass normal conversation and yell at your neighbors about parking, it probably has more to do with your own self loathing than your automotive hang ups.  Maybe just stay inside and punch yourself in the nuts next time, okay, champ?  Besides, you’re not going to win when you’re trying to take away people’s right not to have to walk thirty yards out of their way.  The Big Macs might get cold, dude.

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