As I was leaving for Doug's bachelor party on friday afternoon Richie dropped the atom bomb on me. He is no longer going to have parking available in the Brookline autobody. He gave me until I could find an alternative parking space.

This wouldn't be a huge problem if I weren't parking my car, Sarah's car, and any woman who happened to be visiting Jeremy each night. Richie's lot is a small haven supporting the lifestyle of many people. Closing the lot is akin to having a unique animal go extinct and disrupting an entire ecosystem.

Sarah was the first person that I told the unfortunate news to. Although she was in disbelief at first she immediately posted that we needed parking an Craigs list. I told Jeremy and he had a minor panic attack. For me parking is a slight nuisance and I don't even drive my car more than two or three times per month but Jeremy's entire life is enticing women over the Internet to visit him in his room. Without parking his existing stable of women would stop coming over and he would be set back six months to a year.

So, Jeremy switched his massive appetite for online posting, searching, and chat to finding a space for himself.

Under the heavy weight of my surreal household's future I also sprung into action. I went to the Town of Brookline web site to look at the various available lots and to try to get on the waiting list for one of them. The web site said their was no availability in almost any of the local lots. I called the number to get onto the waiting list and was surprised to find a helpful person on the other end of the line.

The man on the phone let me know that there is parking available in multiple city lots.One lot at the Pierce school is only a block past Richie's and the other one at the Courtyard Marriot is indoors. At about one hundred dollars a month they seemed pretty good. The only problem was that they require a permit so they can't be used with multiple cars at once. This doesn't solve Jeremy's problem at all.

The helpful city man also gave us two numbers for private parking. Jeremy called one and the person who answered the phone was astonished. He had only one space and it hadn't been available for four years. Well that two grand in city taxes must not be enough to get the city to accurately update their database of people with private spaces.

Jeremy also located a web site “parkingsearch.com” that had two spaces located in Brookline at $150. Neither space was anywhere near us. Since we were desperate we decided to do the most scary of all possible options - to put posters all around the neighborhood with my phone number on them.

So Jeremy hashed together a makeshift poster with lots of copies of my number on them cut with a scissors for easy tear off. Within a day I had a call from a local woman living across the street who no longer needs her 24 hour space down by the church on the corner. I snatched it up immediately.

Meanwhile Sarah has become suddenly aware of everything evil about our former affiliation with Richie's lot. She was embarrassed that we had regularly been parking three cars in the lot despite only paying for one spot. Then she backed into a car parking perpendicular to her and the owner looked ready to charge her a couple hundred dollars as if she had totalled his car. So now that there is another space it is time to put her car in the new space. Jeremy went over to plead with Richie to stave off a precipitous collapse of his sex life and Richie held strong to his no parking plan. This has made Jeremy very unstable and may lead to a deep long term depressive state.

Now this upsetting of the ecosystem continues. We don't need two cars in the first place because I don't drive often. But neither car works well for the both of us. I can't drive a stick shift car and Sarah's Jetta is manual. Her car doesn't work well as a tail gating vehicle. So now I need to learn how to drive a stick shift and then we will both sell both our cars and get a more appropriate big car like an SUV. Once we have one car who knows what that will mean for our financial ties together?

Anyways -- the basic point is that in Brookline you don't have to worry about someone going to take paradise and put up a parking lot, paradise IS a parking lot.