Ticket Fix
By Dax-Devlon Ross

In 2004 New York City made more than $500,000,000 off of parking tickets. In order to reach this milestone meter maids and police officers wrote more than 10,000,000 tickets, or roughly 28,000 tickets per day. What’s scary about these figures– besides the fact that the estimated $537,000,000 doesn’t include moving violations and only reflects the amount paid and not the amount outstanding– is that in 2003 the city issued about 8,000,000 tickets. So, in the span of a year the amount of daily ticketing increased by 5,000. The way I saw it, there were only two plausible explanations for the jump. One was that there were more cars in New York City than there were a year earlier; the opposite was true, though. In the previous four years the number of cars in New York had declined by about 5% since. The other explanation was that the city had hired more meter maids to issue more tickets to generate more revenue to, in part, pay the meter maids.

There’s something inherently unethical, even a little vile about cities profiteering from parking fines levied against the very citizens whose wages are already preemptively garnished each pay cycle for city, state and federal taxes. That a city like New York can make more than a half-billion dollars in one year just by sending out hundreds of meter minions whose single mandate is to write tickets says something about how reliant municipalities have become on the revenue generated by what is in effect a back-door tax. In any other walk of life the various city and state parking authorities in to whose coffers millions are poured each year would be called organized crime syndicates and their actions deemed nothing short of a shakedown, under the aegis of the government’s regulatory powers, however, they are free to tow, boot and ticket at their leisure.

In my never-ending endeavor to follow New York City’s parking rules I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to wake up early on a day off to move the car before one of New York’s finest (or NYC Traffic Authority) crept one step closer to meeting their daily quota on my account. There’s little that is more aggravating than having to find a parking space at 8:30 in the morning. Usually it takes me between three and ten circles of the four block radius surrounding my apartment to find a parking spot on a block where an entire side of the street sits empty. There have even been times when finding a parking space on alternate side parking days has been so stressful that I’ve said ‘fuck it’, parked illegally and taken the gamble.

Perhaps, what irks me most about the people who write tickets be they the police or those walkie-talkie wearing wannabees is that they’re usually such smug S.O.B’s. It’s as if they put on their uniforms and instantly they’re part of the hegemony. I understand that they’re working on a quota system, that they’re required to report back to headquarters with at least a couple grand in tickets they’ve issued. I also know most of these people just need a job, that they hate writing tickets as much as I hate paying them. My only question is do they have to look like they’re enjoying it so much? Must they see me running to the car all out of breathe with a quarter tucked between my thumb and index finger, ready to slide it in the meter’s insatiable orifice and keep on writing the ticket? And then, when I finally get there say something like, "Sorry, fella already started writing it," as if I’m supposed to take pity on them, understand that I’ve put them in an impossible situation. Huh? Let’s just say it’s little wonder why in most states assaulting a meter maid is a felony.

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If I had to put a date on it I’d say my battle with the parking syndicate began ten years ago, and it had nothing to do with parking per se. Rather, I was hit with charges of reckless endangerment and traffic obstruction by the New Brunswick, N.J. Police Department. I’d had two prior run-ins with the law in my teens, one involving a handgun to my pharynx, and the other a UNICEF can, $60, and me driving a get-away car, but in both cases I’d managed to avoid any serious punishment or a permanent record because, among other things, I wasn’t yet 18. This time around I was 20.

The story begins at a Rutgers University faculty gathering in November 1994 where school president Francis Lawrence commented that it was hard for disadvantaged students to pass college entrance exams because of their "genetic hereditary background." A tape of the speech was later sent to the Newark Star-Ledger, which then printed the story. The thing is, the story wasn’t printed until the eve of Black History Month. It was obvious that someone wanted Lawrence out, and that they were banking on the knee jerk reaction of the black students to do their dirty work so for the next two months while student groups made repeated demands for Lawrence’s resignation, held countless rallies and teach-ins, I went out of my way to stay out of the loop. If anything, I was a little annoyed. Let’s be honest, while Lawrence’s comments deserved condemnation (maybe even his resignation), many a black student didn’t help their cause by being on the verge of Academic probation semester after semester. Not too surprisingly, there were the main people protesting.

Then came the UMass game at the RAC. Led by future NBA lottery pick Marcus Camby, Massachusetts had the second ranked men’s basketball team in the nation at the time. As usual, Rutgers was somewhere in the middle of the pack in the Atlantic-10. But the game was sold-out. All of my friends went; I, on the other hand, stayed in my room, watched Menace to Society for the umpteenth time and smoked a spliff. About three quarters of the way through, just when Kane was about to get busy with Jada Pinket, my roommate busted in breathing heavily and with a wild-eyed look. I’d missed it, he said. The game had been stopped. A student had walked onto the floor at halftime and sat down at mid-court. When security tried to remove her other students stormed the court. In all, about 200 hundred students stopped what had up until that point been Rutgers’ best half of basketball all season. At halftime they were leading the number two ranked team in the nation. The story was all over the national news wires for the next few days. ESPN dedicated a special segment to the story. There was even a rumor roaming the Quads that Jesse Jackson had called the student to congratulate her for her courage.

A month later a pipe-bomb went off at one of the campus libraries. Another was found undetonated. Fire alarms were pulled all over campus. Finally, strange faces started appearing. They asked questions and drove around in unmarked sedans.

I didn’t learn about the ‘Route 18 Takeover’ until I accidentally ran into a crowd of students on their way to College Avenue where the march was supposed to begin. They were planning to march across Route 18– the highway running between the campuses five colleges– to President Lawrence’s house. Despite the excitement in the air, it was seeing J.P., the basketball team’s power forward, among the crowd that convinced me to hop on the bus. In the previous weeks he’d spoken out against Lawrence’s comments on ESPN and in the papers. I figured that if he could put his scholarship on the line I could be part of this one protest. From College Avenue we marched through downtown New Brunswick, over the Route 18 overpass and onto the highway itself. By then we had a police escort and the major news stations were in helicopters above. For over two hours, two thousand students blocked traffic on both sides of the divide. For me it was a powerful moment, right up there with the Million Man March that would take place a half-year later.

Once we got to Lawrence’s house we all crowded into his driveway where Candles were lit and speakers raged inaudibly through megaphones. President Lawrence never came outside, though. In fact, no one was at home. Eventually, my friends and I wearied of the protest and headed back the dorms to smoke weed and revel in our rebellious act. The next day I was back folding clothes and cajoling customers at the Britches Great Outdoors inside Menlo Park Mall.

A month passed before I returned from class one afternoon to find a summons from the city of New Brunswick beneath my door. Somehow me and two other students had been singled out as leading the protestors into harm’s way and together we would take the fall. Although the details were never thoroughly explained to me, from what I understand the city had made a deal with the university whereby someone had to be charged with something if only to send a message to the rest of the student body. Apparently, the helicopters had taken pictures which were then submitted to professors and students leaders who then had to name names as part of the agreement. Another explanation– one I put together on my own– is that a detective who’d recently graduated from Rutgers had given my name. I deduced as much from an incident that took place a week after the protest. On my way to the parking lot one morning I’d noticed the detective’s car parked outside the Quads. When I approached he rolled down his window and started chatting with me. Then he asked me my last name. Then he drove away.

Two months later I was sitting in a courtroom with my father, and a court appointed attorney. Although my trial had been set for the summer, I had expected some support from the students. The only ones in the audience, however, were the two guys who’d been charged alongside me. That was an eye-opener. Fortunately since I was a decent student with no priors, the judge reduced my charges to misdemeanor counts and granted my attorney’s request for community service. So long as I completed my hours, the charges wouldn’t go on my permanent record.

I told this exact story to a reporter the following semester. Later, when the story ran in the school paper the detective came looking for me. He wanted "a word" with me, I was told. Surprisingly, I didn’t care. By then, something had changed, something akin to what Henry Thoreau described the morning he was released from the jail he’d been held in for refusing to pay his poll taxes. "I saw yet more distinctly the state in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among who I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right."

Now I can say that the experience politicized me. Public Enemy hadn’t been able to do it neither had the Eyes on the Prize series I’d watched in history class; not even Denzel Washington’s performance in X had shaken me to the point that I saw the world differently. What had made me political was being an unlucky stooge. While the thousands of others who’d protested alongside me had gone on about their lives that summer, I’d had to explain to my parents what had happened and then sweat through June and July waiting for my trial date. I hadn’t led the protest, I wasn’t a part of any organization, I hadn’t given a speech. I was as apathetic as they come. But the system got to me anyway.

Besides drawing the ire of the detective, the article also won me ‘props’ in student activists circles. Once people found out that I’d stood trial for an act of civil disobedience they looked at me differently. I hadn’t been caught stealing a car or selling drugs; I’d been trying to stand up for my people, in a sense. No matter that I had come in through the back door, I took to my new identity as an activist. I stopped cutting my hair and shaving. I quit my job in the mall. I started smoking cigarettes. And I joined a "revolutionary" study group. Our bibles were Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, and Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. We read the CIA’s COINTELPRO documents, we discussed Assata Shakur’s autobiography, we listened to Malcolm X speeches, we watched the MOVE documentary over and over, we attended weekly Black NiaForce meetings in Amiri Baraka’s basement, we protested against police brutality at City Hall, we wore "Free Mumia" t-shirts, and we participated in local food and clothing drives.

Eventually, I started writing for the school paper. My first piece was on Tupac. I wrote it the night he died, the night of an ominous thunderstorm, Friday September 13th 1996. People read it and said it moved them so I wrote another article on the Iran-Contra/Crack story, then one on the Nigerian oil crisis, and another on the Ebonics debate. Then I started writing a political editorial column for the Daily Targum. Until then, I hadn’t known that I had so much outrage bottled up inside. Words like "fascist", "the masses", "working people", "dialectical materialism", "alienation", and "exploitation", all became integral parts of my increasingly militant vocabulary. The shift came as a surprise to everyone who’d known me. One minute I was selling dockers and flannels at the mall and the next I couldn’t watch the news, read the paper, step outside practically, without laying into capitalism as the beginning and the end of world’s ills. Every problem in our society, from poverty to drugs to prisons to war stemmed from a corrupt economic system that required the exploitation of the many by the few. There wasn’t a single issue I didn’t take the radical line on. For instance, Johnson & Johnson, which was headquartered in New Brunswick and was a perennial bedfellow of the Rutgers establishment, was one of the city’s most potent landlords, owning property throughout downtown New Brunswick. Since New Brunswick fit Marable’s picture of the underdeveloped city to a tee, Johnson & Johnson became the object of all of our anti-capitalist scorn. It was solely to blame for the city massive unemployment, high crime and rampant drug use. Later, when Rutgers signed one of those multi-million dollar exclusive distribution deals with Coca-Cola, I was among a group of students who demanded Lawrence’s ouster on the grounds that he was running the university like the CEO of a multinational. He’d sold us out for $10,000,000 and suddenly all we could buy on campus was Frutopia and Pasani. Talk about outrage!

It didn’t stop there. I got into more than my share of altercations with New Brunswick and Piscataway police. When my buddy Rameck and I were pulled over one night he wound up behind bars in part because I wouldn’t shut about the police being pawns for the capitalist State. I told them that they were propping up a capitalist regime that ultimately oppressed them. I said that they were working class people and yet they had allowed themselves to be manipulated into oppressing people of color when we should have been on the same side. I told them they were confused and that if they simply stepped back and looked at the bigger picture they’d see that I was right, that they were really just bitter and they needed someone to take their anger out on.

I enjoyed being a rabble rouser. I liked seeing myself in the vein of the revolutionary tradition. Indignation gave my life the meaning it had always lacked. I had been a pretty lackluster kid. I was an average student, and an above-average basketball player. I was a late bloomer with the ladies. Most of all, I didn’t have any real direction. I was perfect prey for radical politics. On the political tip, in the face of state authority in particular, I could finally achieve the Alpha-Male vitality that I had failed to achieve in every other arena. In this light, my politicization had as much to do with me satisfying my need for validation as it did with righting the wrongs of the world. In fact, I wasn’t all that interested in making the world a utopia. I was too busy enjoying the moral superiority I felt towards capitalists. Damning the government and multinationals at every turn, undermining the west’s global agenda whenever, however, that was all that mattered.

At the same time, I wasn’t really ready to burn my passport. Neither was I willing to move to a commune and take up an aesthetic life. My buddy Brendon never failed to remind me of this whenever we got into an argument about capitalism. He’d say that it was easy to write about a cause, but when it came down to it there wasn’t one to which I was willing to give my life. Looking back on it now, it was that search for a tangible enemy to stand up against, an adversary to fashion my identity in opposition to, that might’ve helped manufacture my rage against the parking authority. It makes sense in a way. At the same time that I was developing a more sophisticated idea of the market economy and the capitalist State, I was beginning to rack up tickets. Capitalist greed became an optimal scapegoat for my contempt. Rather than take responsibility for my carelessness, I could point the finger at a corrupt system. I was the victim, and I liked it that way. Being a victim allowed me to tear up my tickets in good conscience. I could shred them, lose them, stuff them in the glove compartment, under the seat, in the trunk– wherever. They were irrelevant because it was unjust. And it was unjust because the entire capitalist State was immoral. It was simple logic. After a while the idea of paying a ticket seemed not only unnecessary but unprincipled. Paying a ticket meant I actually acknowledged the merit of the law; it meant I was capitulating in my own oppression. If only for the sake of my own conscience, I was engaging in a continuous act of resistance by not paying my tickets.

Indeed, the parking authority provided a perfect illustration of the modern totalitarian state I was reading and talking about. Not only were the lowest level employees mostly women of color, they were mere functionaries without any power other than enforcement. The legitimacy of the authority itself didn’t rest on democratic principles, but on the money it generated for the State. Moreover, the impersonal nature of the authority was Kafkaesque, meaning that if you were lucky enough to gain contact with a live human being chances were they’d say, "You gotta see the judge." Otherwise, all correspondences were dealt with through the mail at which point some semi-juridical agent would review the matter and issue a determination.

Ultimately, I racked up enough tickets for the city of New Brunswick to take my Mazda RX-7. I still remember coming out of class to find someone else’s car parked in my space. After I went through the requisite period of disbelief, of telling myself that maybe I had parked somewhere else, I learned that the car was being held in lieu of the $1,000 I owed in tickets. I weighed the value of the car versus the money I had to pay and figured it was about even. Then I factored in the principle. I didn’t see where the city got off ticketing students on school property in the first place. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t park on residential streets during the day. In order to salvage something of my integrity, I felt like I had to stick to my guns. Keep the car. Auction it off for all care. Just don’t come knocking on my door asking for the difference. I never saw that car again or heard from the New Brunswick Parking Authority.

Having my car auctioned off rather than pay $1,000 I owed made me think better of myself. It meant that when it came down to it I had stood by my principles. I didn’t break down and succumb. Giving away my car proved that I didn’t give a damn about material things. It evidenced how high above that kind of stuff I stood. When I told people the story they looked at me like I was crazy. They said I had to be joking. I liked being considered crazy, though. Doing crazy, perhaps even stupid things, and then writing or talking about them as if they didn’t matter made me feel like a radical. I was breaking the law. And then I went to law school.

George Washington should’ve marked the end of my career as a non-conformist. I should’ve started paying my tickets and following the law and maybe I would have had I not had two more run-ins with the cops. Once I was ambushed by an unmarked police van in broad day light on Broadway and 145th while visiting a friend in Harlem. The cops suspected I was a drug dealer and that I had brought the long-haired white boy in the backseat of my ‘87 Acura (my buddy Derek) uptown in order to score. All I remember of the event was a gun pointed at my head, a frantic search of the car, and then a van pulling away, no apologies. The second time my friend Peter and I were drubbed with billy clubs by a dozen officers, again in broad day light. They said we were resisting arrest and they charged us with assaulting a police officer. All I wanted to know was why I was being told to get on the ground when I hadn’t done anything illegal. That question earned me three nights in jail and a considerable amount in legal fees. Again, I managed to avoid jail time. On the other hand, the tickets kept on coming.

The idea of sending money to a governing body that employed people who trampled on my rights at their leisure appalled me. I had read my Thorough. I didn’t have to take that kind of abuse lying down. But it was also much deeper. An integral aspect of my identity had been formed in college. I had come into my own there. Much of what I liked about myself stemmed directly from the emergence of my political perspective. I had started writing because of my politics. Camus and Sartre and Fanon and Baraka and Wright and Robeson and Lao Tzu and Marx had all shaped my idea of what a writer is supposed to be and law school was the antithesis of all of that. Almost as soon as I started classes I stopped writing and reading independently. I started hanging out with a kid from Miami who wore loafers without socks, colorful golf shorts and put gel in his hair. I got my loan check and I went out and bought myself a brand new wardrobe. I went out to social events with my classmates, got ridiculously drunk, and whooped it up.

The indignation I felt when I got my parking tickets was my one connection to that person who had really blossomed in college. Throwing the tickets into the backseat of my Acura Legend made me feel as though I was still that brash 20 year old who once called a detective a snitch in print. Ripping up tickets and leaving them in the gutter made me feel like I hadn’t totally abandoned those ideals I thought I stood for before the end of college and the beginning of the anxiety about what I was going to do with the rest of my life so rudely intruded. Frankly, I felt like a sell-out and telling off a meter maid allowed me to feel as though I still had a shred of principle left.

My mother was the one who finally convinced me that I was acting foolish.

"You’re throwing money away," she said one afternoon.

I said, "dammit ma, it’s a racket."

She said, "I know, but you’re only hurting yourself. Every time you don’t pay a ticket, it doubles, then it doubles again and again."

"But it isn’t right," I said

"There’s a lot that isn’t right," she replied.

"I can’t just accept—"

But before I could finish my high-minded tirade she was showing me a copy of the title which read "Evelyn Ross." See, for insurance purposes I always registered my cars in my mother’s name. That way I could attach myself as a driver and instead of paying the young black male surcharge, I paid the greatly reduced 50 year-old mother of three premium. It worked out well for me, but for my mother it was one headache after the next.

I got my act together after that. When I moved to New York and my mother handed me the keys to the T-bird I promised her that I wouldn’t get any more tickets. I was going to follow the rules and park only in legal spaces. I was going to feed the meter and diligently move the car from side to side. And for the most part that’s what happened. Then this past spring I got a parking ticket for $115.

My first response was to ball the ticket up and dish it into the backseat. I flat out wasn’t going to pay it. No way was the city getting that kind of money out of me, not for what I perceived to be an honest mistake, a harmless one at that. How was I to know that I was parking in a bus lane? There wasn’t a sign that said ‘no parking.’ There wasn’t a yellow paint strip on the sidewalk. And the bus stop was at least fifty, maybe even a hundred feet away. I was livid. Whoever had written the ticket, a cop by the name of Collangelo as far as I could make out, probably needed one more before his shift was up. That’s all. I just happened to be the unlucky one, again. Well, he could forget it. It didn’t help matters that I’d just seen Sin City, arguably the bloodiest, most violent vigilante flick ever released for public consumption. I was so hopped on indignation that it took watching another movie to guide me back to my senses.

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The documentary/ narrative What the Bleep Do We Know!? investigates what quantum physics is now telling us about the human mind. In layman’s terms (and because that’s the only way I can begin to describe it), it poses the question: what if reality isn’t necessarily ‘Reality’ but what we create moment by moment through our thoughts and actions, conscious and otherwise. It then postulates an alternative story about the nature of existence, one in which our notions about who we are and what the world is may not be true, at least not in any objective sense. If there is such thing as an objective reality, so says quantum mechanics, it only exists to the extent that we’ve accepted the limits of classical Newtonian physics, as it is evidenced in the notion that reality exists independently and absolutely, that objects are only influenced by direct contact with one another, that all effects are the result of causes that precede them, and that space and time move in an uninterrupted forward flow.

In contrast, quantum physics (or mechanics) begins with the premise that nothing is certain. Therefore, reality need not exist independent of us, especially since science has been able to prove that our brains don’t differentiate between a memory of an experience and the experience itself. This is reminiscent of the scene in the Matrix where Neo first discovers that humans are being used as an energy source and that they only believe they are living in the world, which is really the matrix. Quantum physicians suggest that information can literally travel instantaneously rather than at the speed of light, that the law of cause and effect is conditioned by our perspectives and that space and time are not smooth and continuous. These last two insights might explain why ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ and why the same
amount of time crawls when you’re not.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? asks a lot of the novice viewer, which is why I watched it over the course of four days. And naturally, since the theories proposed by quantum mechanics present a radical departure from the principles we’ve operated on for the last 350 years, it’s bound to be met with skepticism, mine included. That being said, when the Amanda (the narrative’s protagonist) is assigned to photograph a wedding in the same church she was unhappily married in, What the Bleep’s message resists easy dismissal. There, Amanda’s flash back to when she caught her husband eyeing another woman at the alter starts an unconscious chain reaction that leads her back to the agony of catching the two in bed. Since the human brain generally does not distinguish between what has happened and what is happening (and since the brain builds its concepts through the law of association), it relies on what it already knows– in this case pain – to form its responses to a situation. Put another way, rather than experience the present moment as unique, fresh and open to an infinite range of possibilities, Amanda unconsciously chooses to re-create the old emotions leading her back into the cycle of disappointment and despair.

These aren’t new ideas; in fact many of them are rooted in Eastern philosophy, particularly the concept of karma, and later, in the west, with Freud’s ideas about the unconscious origins of pathological behavior. What quantum mechanics brings to the table is the neuroscientific data to back these intimations up. More succinctly, it takes us inside the brain . There, nerve cells attach to one another to build "neuronets" which in turn build concepts, which we then use to operate in the world. Not only do we learn through certain nerve cells repeatedly "firing" together, but our very identities our built this way. And in order to keep those identities in tact in an unstable world, quantum mechanics argues that we put ourselves into situations that will allow those cells to continue "firing" together. Just as a junkie’s habit becomes biochemical over time, so too does our need to reaffirm our identities drive us to re-visit certain critical feelings. The suggestion is that our personalities are merely the socially constructed layer of our beingness below which looms a potentially bottomless "rabbit hole". Taking this proposition one step further, Amanda’s unconscious submission to feelings (anger and hurt) that have no essential basis in her present reality illustrates addictive behavior. In this way, Amanda, indeed all of us, are biochemically addicted to the emotions that tell us who we are, good and bad.

The objective of all of this study and research and hypothesis is to lend the human species yet another tool with which to break free from the chains that hold our collective and individual growth in check. Where religious and spiritual practices tell us to meditate, to chant, to do yoga, to live mindfully, and where psychoanalysis helps us invoke our past experiences under clinical supervision, this latest scientific revolution actually tells us that those intentional actions work by interrupting and then untangling those nerve networks that produce the chemical response we are addicted to.

It took several go-rounds for my brain to register what What the Bleep was conceivably telling me about my parking woes, longer for me to take a hard look at the possibility that I was hooked on moral outrage and the only fix that seemed to satisfy me is the one I got from haggling with the parking authority. Imagine a dog fighting its owner for one of those plastic bones. The dog engages in the same behavior with the same vigor and experiences the same outcome each time. He fights and fights and when he finally gets what he wants, he gives it right back to his owner. In a way, it’s a form of play, but in my case it was also masochistic.

Here’s what I think happened. In college I found a way to vent my anger through political dissidence. I saw myself as having been singled out, victimized, made an example of by the law. The study groups, the writing, the organizing, the protesting: those were all ways to deepen and broaden my sense of being persecuted, and to fuel the indignation I felt toward the system. See, it wasn’t enough to just feel persecuted, the actual "high" came from feeling I was in the right. Unconsciously I sought out different ways to continue re-experiencing the feeling of being persecuted . Enter the parking tickets as well as my run-ins with the law. I got "high" of those encounters, so too did the people I hung with. Challenging authority was almost erotic in the sense that we all got off on it, celebrated it. But whenever we came down, we’d need another pick me up.

Once I lost that identity (or abandoned it or grew out of it) I didn’t have a tangible way to achieve catharsis. I was an outrage addict and the only way I could express my anger was by finding fault in the mundane goings on in my life, getting tickets for instance. This likely explains why whenever I’ve felt I’ve been issued a ticket unfairly in the past, I’ve been quick to write a scathing letter to the parking authority. Once I came outside to move my car before the 8:30 street cleaning deadline only to discover that I had already been issued a ticket. The time on the ticket read 8:32 when in fact it was only 8:28. I stormed back inside, sat down at my computer and punched out an angry letter punctuated with explanation marks, question marks and bold, capitalized letters. Then I found a stamp and by 9:00 I had mailed my reply, along with the bogus ticket, back to the authorities. The rest of my day was a letdown after that.

At the conclusion of What the Bleep Amanda finally steps outside of her entangled mind long enough to realize that she is the one who is destroying her life. The implication is that by grabbing hold of her unruly thoughts and accepting herself, she can begin the process of healing, a process that may ultimately lead to a re-creation of her identity and the transformation of her life. By the same token, I had to acknowledge that I knew perfectly well that the space I had parked in was in a bus lane. Just because there wasn’t a sign. Just because there wasn’t one of those yellow strips that usually indicate a no parking zone. Just because there was plenty of room for the bus. I knew. A part of me even wondered if I had deliberately parked there because I was looking for a fight, because I wanted to see what I’d get hit with just so I could write a letter pointing out the fact that there was no sign that said ‘no parking.’

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What I’ve learned is that as an outrage addict I don’t necessarily seek out tickets so that I can in turn fly into a rage. That’d be defeating the purpose. What I do is make choices that I know can lead to unpleasant outcomes. I mean, I always know when I’m parking illegally or when the meter is about to expire or when I don’t have the change to feed the meter, but I disregard all of that. There’s also the flip side, which is that whenever I manage to avoid getting a ticket I feel a sense of relief that borders on the orgasmic. Walking back to my car, I’ll feel myself tighten up inside, but as soon as I see that there isn’t a ticket in the windshield, I’ll pump my fist, and do a little dance. If it so happens that I beat the meter maid by mere seconds I’ll look at them and wink knowingly. Beating the system makes my day. It’s a kind of gamble, a thrill, something akin to pulling a Vegas slot machine only there’s the shadow of principle behind it that makes it more satisfying. It proves that the system itself is arbitrary, inconsistent and therefore flawed. It allows me to maintain a critical perspective on the system as I grow older and become more complacent with the way things are, have always been and always will be. It permits me to feel momentarily victorious in my reality.

The thing is I don’t want to get rid of my outrage. Outrage be it moral or social spins the wheel of change. The history of social upheaval is inextricably linked to outrage, people getting fed up with the status quo and doing something about it. From abolitionist movements to women’s rights movements to labor movements to anti-war to movements to movements against global exploitation, outrage was there. People couldn’t believe the way they were being treated and after a while they got angry enough to give their lives for the cause. If I find anything fascinating about the evangelical movement it’s that it’s tapped into the most potent source of anger today: religious faith. Evangelicals may in fact be naive, but no one ever questions the sincerity of their beliefs. By the same token, anger is what’s missing from the liberal movement, if there is one. The main criticism of John Kerry (and Gore before him) was that he appeared too unflappable, too poised, too polished. People practically begged for him fight back when his war record was being questioned, when he was being called a "flip-flopper". They wanted to see what he was made of, but he wouldn’t budge, not until it was too late.

What ‘umph’ he did show came off embarrassingly unconvincing. If liberals had more fury and less phoney, if they didn’t belittle opposing viewpoints, if there was some real passion in their action, then maybe George Bush never gets elected.
At 30, I’m as close to petit bourgeois as I’ve ever been. I’ve been happily married for a year. For the last two years I’ve had a steady source of income. I’ve published my first book. As far as I can tell my health is in order. I have friends and family who I love dearly. I often don’t mind where I live. It’s been almost five years since my last arrest. The last protests I attended were the IMF/WTO protests in Washington, D.C. in 2000 and the Presidential inauguration in 2001. Last year I meticulously saved thousands of dollars in receipts so that I could itemize my tax returns this year. Every pay cycle I put ten percent of my gross income into a retirement account. Banks send me home mortgage offers all the time. Radio Head’s Fitter, Happier provides the appropriate analogy for my existence: "an empowered & informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)."

There really is no reason I should be angry and I imagine that’s why most people positions similar to mine aren’t. Our economy has managed to create a middle class standard of living that, albeit leveraged to the helt, is bountiful. Not only that, I don’t see the wars, the suffering, the people dying. And when I do, I’m so numb to most of it that if it does affect me it’s happening on a subconscious level. For the most part, though, my life is lived inside a work-a-day world that demands my cooperation, my attention and my time. When I’m not at work I’m being seduced by advertisements telling me I should be as happy and sexy and of course wealthy as everyone else. And if I’m not I only have myself to blame. Just to get through it all I put myself on auto-pilot and drift through the days. A sense of ethical and intellectual responsibility requires me to submit to the dull NPR reporting on the drive to and from work. However, rare is the occasion that I register any emotional response to the horrors taking place in the world, nor do I believe I’m expected to. Car bombings, food shortages, sweatshops, I should be angry about all of it, but I never am. Instead, I’m just overwhelmed with more information than I can put to use.

A writer’s only salable commodity is their vision. If it isn’t tinged with a sort of dissatisfaction with the way things are in this world, if it doesn’t reach for some sense of profound meaning or subtle insight, then it tells us nothing we don’t already know on our own. It’s no coincidence that the writers who’ve had something interesting to tell us about ourselves have lived somewhat apart from the mainstream. In one sense it is in the writer’s nature to find fault with society, to criticize it and therefore retreat from it; in another, writers need solitude to test their hypotheses and formulate their theories. The moment a writer accepts society for what it is, accepts its rules as just, its people as healthy, becomes comfortable with their standing among their peers and fearful of losing their goodwill, they cease to be visionaries. What is the art anyway but an attempt to rescue moments of life from the passage of time. Nietzsche says, "No artists tolerates reality" therefore the writer who is satisfied, comfortable, at peace, has nothing to say worth listening to. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens offers a possible solution to my dilemma, one I find particularly attractive not only because I have come to view myself similarly, but because it’s what I should have been doing all along. Hitchens suggests that someone dissatisfied with the status quo live "as if," meaning they ignore those rules of society that defy logic or that are unjust. Using the example of Rosa Parks to illustrate his point, Hitchins writes that she "decided to act "as if" a hard working black woman could sit down on a bus at the end of a day’s labor." Similarly, instead of wasting my time getting angry with an irrational, anonymous and unbeholden apparatus like the parking authority, I can simply choose to act "as if" it doesn’t exist.

At the moment, my $115 ticket is past due and sitting in a bowl on my coffee table along with all of my other unopened mail. I haven’t thrown it out or tossed it into the glove compartment. I want to keep this last one as a reminder of the last time I bothered giving a damn about a parking ticket. Ten years, four different cities, three cars, I’ve had enough. It’s time to move on from bantering with meter maids to something more worthwhile. And while it’s good to know I’ve still got a little fire in me, this time I need to do more with it than just watch it burn itself out.