my life, my pace

My neighbor across the street from me has a problem. Their entire family is so sedentary that they call walking across the street exercise. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why they insist on always parking their ugly SUVs in front of my house even though there are spaces aplenty (and by aplenty, I mean that there is not a single car on their side of the street) in front of their own. Bad enough when it was a Nissan Pathfinder. But now it’s a flaming red Hummer. Which they bought right when gas prices began soaring. Are they trying to show off that they are rich and can afford it? Or that they don’t give a crap about the oil crisis and want to spend more than their fair share of our precious limited resources? All that I know is that I simply cannot stand it when they park their gas guzzler in front of my house. You can’t even see my house past that monstrous thing! And I’m green, darnit—I don’t want anybody thinking that I drive such a thing. I’d seriously buy a Prius if I could afford it and if it were really worth it in the end. My husband and I carpool to work/lab even though doing so means I’m stuck in the lab (from hell) at least an hour longer than I have to be. I like to think that I’m at least trying to do my part.

My distaste for SUVs goes way back to before such a monstrous thing as this Hummer was introduced—they’re huge, they drink gas, most people who have them don’t really need them (and the bigger they are, the more obvious it is that the owner is trying to make up for something he’s lacking, if you know what I mean), they’re unsafe, and I simply can’t see past them when I’m stuck behind them on the freeway. So you can imagine my ire when I ended up with neighbors with SUVs who simply cannot park their cars in front of their own house. The next time I buy a house, I’m definitely going to stake it out at night to see who and what parks in front of it because this problem is seriously driving me up the I’m-so-tempted-to-key-their-flaming-red-Hummer wall.

Apparently, there was a movement against SUVs in Brooklyn back in 2001 in which people posted “No SUV parking” signs on streets and issued prank tickets to SUVs that they found parking on the street. The tickets had such things as increasing US reliance on foreign oil, compensating for lack of manhood, and holing self up in two-ton metal fortress as violations. They’re quite amusing. I wish I could put a copy of such a ticket on the flaming red Hummer parked in front of my house, but these people aren’t exactly decent and I’m afraid of retribution. Here’s the link to it in case anyone reading this has more guts than I do. All I can do is sit here and stew over it and maybe stare daggers at them every time I see them.

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