This Saturday I parked my car at a meter on Ventura Boulevard for my monthly haircut. I fed the meter enough quarters for an hour and fifteen minutes. The same woman, now semi retired, has been cutting my hair for nearly thirty years. Sometimes we get to talking and I’m usually her last customer of the day, so I always hedge with a few extra coins to insure against a parking ticket because I’ll probably forget about it or procrastinate over until it triples.

I emerged coiffed, shampooed and replete with pleasant smelling hair elixirs wafting, contemplating lunch, only to witness my car on a flatbed on its way to an impound.  My tags were expired.  Months earlier, when registering my car at Triple A, I learned that my insurance had yet to appear in the DMV data base so they issued me a sort of temporary certificate of registration.  Proof that I was paid up.  It goes without saying it wasn’t good enough for the department of transportation dickwad who’d initiated the whole miscarriage of justice.  After a brief and heated exchange where I made sure he understood that I was indeed not in arrears with documents in hand, after I precipitated a definitive end to the conversation by congratulating him on his career and remarking that his parents must be proud, he rolled up his window and sped off and my car did the same on the flatbed truck.

It was really nobody’s fault but mine, but still, because it was a Saturday and the bureaucracy with authority to release my car was closed for the weekend, it ended up being a nearly $500 mistake.  Three days of storage fees.

Over expired tags that I had actually paid for.

Fuck me.

I’m lucky.

I could take the hit.

I’ve been in a position where it would have sunk me.

But I’m confident that most people with expired tags simply can’t afford the fees yet need their vehicles to get back and forth from their shitty jobs, pick up their kids, go to the grocery store and the doctor.

People need their cars in Southern California.  They don’t neglect due diligence when it comes to livelihood.  In Los Angeles, you need a car.

I thought about how this morally absent kind of fuckery results in people becoming homeless.

There are European countries that base fines and penalties for minor infractions on income.  If you’re income is modest, it’s like ten bucks, if you’re flush, it’s like $500.

Makes sense.

I read somewhere recently that American banks collected about $300 million in overdraft fees last year.

That’s bullshit.  These huge, outrageously profitable financial institutions preyed on the people who can least afford it.

That’s America goddamnit.

Love it or leave it.

We just hate the poor.

You’re a loser in America if you’re poor, even if you went broke because you got sick.

You’re a loser in America if you can’t afford a college education in America despite the fact that housing and tuition have risen by something like 800% in the last couple decades.

You’re a loser in America if some greedy asshole CEO outsourced your job to another country, not to save the company, but merely to further line his and board member pockets and you need unemployment compensation and food stamps because they fucked you over amounts of money they’ll never even be able to spend.

This is why our middle class is evaporating.

This is why we have record rates of poverty, homelessness and child hunger.

This is how unchecked, unregulated capitalism is a slow motion catastrophe.

This is why America is well on its way to becoming a third world country.

Be sure to check under your bed for Muslims and root for your favorite team.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

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