Last time I was back in Flemington, I met a friend in town. As we walked down Main Street, he pointed to a popular spot, the Shaker Café. He told me he and his dad just tried it recently, while his mom was out. It was a little difficult to find parking on a busy weekend, but they eventually got a spot and had a nice breakfast.

Then his dad called his mom, and the first thing he said was something like, “We had a hell of a time finding a parking spot.”

My friend thought that was interesting. That nice father-son breakfast at a new (to them) place in town wasn’t enough to erase the frustration of waiting a few minutes for a parking spot.

That made me think of myself. When I’m at a store or restaurant and the lot is (or looks) full, I almost immediately get this panicked feeling. What if I can’t find a spot at all? Of course, it might take, at most, five minutes before a spot opens up. Yet that feeling of being stuck in your car with nowhere to put it is almost intolerable, at a level below consciousness.

It feels as though someone is unjustly taking something away from you. It kind of reminds me of that snarky saying, “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” But it does, because I need it. The kind of anger a situation like this can spark is unreasonable, but entirely genuine.

Sometimes, when a parking lot is full, I find myself muttering something like “What’s going on here?” As if there’s something unusual or even vaguely suspicious about a parking lot being full. It reminds of something I saw someone point out on Twitter once. Cyclists love seeing other cyclists, but motorists hate seeing other motorists.

I’ve thought about this before. What is it about the car that seems to bend us towards paranoia, self-containment, entitlement, and rage? Is it that cars are expensive, and one feels it necessary to get one’s money’s worth? Is it that they’re powerful? I think the latter might be more explanatory.

I wrote, in a document where I keep little writing notes, “Frustration is the gap between possibility and reality.” The car presents so many possibilities, but reality impinges on most of them. Perhaps it is simply inevitable that a tool so absurdly overpowered for most of its normal tasks will screw with our psychology.

I remember a parody commercial I saw once, depicting a bunch of absurdly implemented tasks: smashing a table with an ax to kill a fly, boiling coffee with a flamethrower, etc. And then at the end, a guy placing a half-gallon of milk in the back of a pickup truck.

I thought it was silly when I first saw it. Now I think it might be profound.

Related Reading

The Menace of Cars

The Car and Car Dependence

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

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