9/22 Practiced parallel parking maybe a hundred times. Slowly getting better, slowly building the instinct. Even more exciting are the different parts of the city I get to this way. It often takes only a single block and you find yourself in an entirely different part of society. Streets where people sit in front of houses all day. Dilapidated facades, or a home remarkably well kept, and elaborately decorated, way beyond the rest of its neighborhood. Warehouses. Fences. Satellite dishes. Corners where loners slouch across the street like scarecrows, giggling. Flower decorations on doors. That precious moment when, having stopped next to another car, I send a quick dash of a look over my left sideview mirror to pick a point at a 45 degree angle, a point which can be anything: a fence post, an air conditioning unit, a stairway leading up to a porch, a tree, or the tail end of another car. To find this spot in just a tenth of a second, to name it within the inside of my mind, and then look away from it for a second or two as I turn the steering wheel (I don’t know why it’s necessary to look away from it, but I do), and then watch the spot move across the windscreen until it is right above the center of the steering wheel, at which point I straighten the front wheels, and start backing into the space.

Parking J’s blue jeep with the funny row of ducks across the entire windshield, parking 5 times in a row on a single block, always wondering whether this is one of the areas where all the shootings happen, but then you tell yourself that civilians aren’t targeted in shootings, but then again, you only know that from The Wire, and then again you only know that because a civilian was in fact – in The Wire – targeted in a shooting, and everybody agrees that this is something that should not have happened.