I'm All Talk About That Peeing Thing. For Now, Neighbors. For Now.

So, the other day, I was driving around my new Seattle neighborhood and realized that no matter what street I tried to drive down, no matter what time of day it was, the fact that people around here park on both sides of the street, turning perfectly good two way sized streets into one way sized streets while still driving on them like they're two way streets, I was constantly re-enacting that scene from Footloose.

You remember the one.


Yeah. That one. The scene where Kevin Bacon's stupid boy hormones get him caught up in a game of chicken with 18,000 pound tractors. Then, fate steps in and Kevin's shoelace gets caught (meaning he can't get his foot loose....) and bail out like a sane person would, so he ends up flipping the other tractor and his romantic antagonist into a nearby irrigation ditch. Which, in the end, will win Kevin the heart of the red booted maiden with the pre-Disney movie but not pre-Hans Christian Anderson name. Because, obviously, he's a classic hero with mad dancing skills.

Yep. Driving around here is exactly like being stuck in a temporal loop of Footloose Tractor Chicken. Well, exactly, except they replaced the farm tractors with Prius's and the boom box blaring Bonnie Tyler with gigantic cups of coffee.  And, instead of launching my antagonists into a nearby irrigation ditch, I bail at the first opportunity (because, duh, death!) and never win anything. Which, come to think of it, is probably why people keep parking in front of my house causing me to troll the streets looking for a spot wide enough to park a semi, because not only am I a horrible contestant in the Temporal Loop of Footloose Tractor Chicken, I also lack basic parallel parking skills.

And, really, once you take into consideration deja vu, 20/20, foreshadowing and all those other literary type elements, I probably should have realized my lack of chutzpah in racking up Chicken points was why the parking space in front of my house was always claimed. Because, you know, of that old saying penned by Howard Pyle. You remember, that classic saying everyone learned while reading Robin Hood under a blanket with a flashlight after bedtime? The one that goes, "Faint heart never won fair parking space in front of thy house no matter how many times thou sayest at the toppest of thy voice "Dudes! 'Tis my space! Verily, I peed in it, I trow!*"

Or, you know, something like that....

Point being, the lessons we learned from Footloose and Robin Hood still apply today.  People with chutzpah don't have to pee on public streets to claim their parking space. They just need to turn up the Bonnie Tyler and earn it.

Now, where did I put my tape deck?




*To paraphrase.

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