Parking Lark
Parking in Sonoma County has become a feast-or-famine proposition, except the feast is usually happening somewhere you aren’t.
In Petaluma, finding a downtown parking spot now requires the patience of a monk, the eyesight of a hawk and the predatory instincts of someone circling a Costco sample tray. Drivers creep along at 4 miles per hour, scanning for brake lights and preparing to duel anyone who appears to be walking toward a parked car.
Sebastopol is no better. Parking there feels less like transportation infrastructure and more like an escape-room challenge. You may enter town freely, but whether you can ever stop the vehicle remains unclear.
Then there is Santa Rosa, where parking garages seem to reproduce when nobody is looking. The city has accumulated so much parking that it is reportedly getting rid of a garage. How extravagant you are, throwing away parking like that.
I propose we simply rename the experience. In Petaluma and Sebastopol, we are not “looking for parking.” We are participating in a mobile scavenger hunt. In Santa Rosa, meanwhile, drivers are touring an extensive collection of available concrete.
Somewhere between no place to park and more parking than anyone apparently needs, there must be a happy medium. Please tell me so.
Cassady Caution
Petaluma
Kapow
If you wish to catch up on your summer reading, may I suggest DC Finest: Wonder Woman: Enter the Cheetah, a reprinting of classic Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s.
In the first story, “Amazon Unbound,” originally published in July 1943, Wonder Woman fights Dr. Psycho, a depraved lunatic criminal mastermind whose bunkum is believed by millions.
Dr. Psycho holds a seance and summons a fake George Washington made of ectoplasm who spews forth Dr. Psycho’s perverted and self-serving version of the American narrative, chock-full of straight white male supremacist propaganda. But, in reality, Dr. Psycho and his evil henchmen are Nazis. Sound familiar?
David Madgalene
Windsor
