In the dream I was trying to return to my car with Jeremy. The car was parked in a dark garage up a number of flights of stairs. I kept having trouble figuring out how the stairs in the garage were oriented and kept needing to look backwards as I walked up them and it was almost as if my whole nervous system had switched me my left and right or up and down to the point that I was completely disoriented. Jeremy kept trying to explain the right way to go through the garage but I was still wandering in circles up and down a staircase that could have come from an Escher painting. On one floor I got off on near the top I saw a small thin child scurry past me but the child faded in and out of my vision because of the darkness. I was frightened by the sight in the same way I might be startled by a leaf on the ground that for a moment looks like a severed body part, or to find I was about to step on a dead animal on the ground only to find I was stepping on a stone or log. The child wasn’t as scary as the Chucky animatronics but kept moving past me and appeared and disappeared until finally I become so agitated and freaked out that I suddenly awoke.

I thought about the dream and realized that I had gone to sleep without having moved my car from the space in front of the condo to the parking spot down at 2 St. Paul Street. I had parked in front because Madeline had been crying and sweating heavily on the ride home from Bedford fighting through the rush hour traffic. When I had pulled her out of the new Britax car seat that we finally installed she was soaked in sweat and her hair was as wet as if she had come from a bath tub. Sarah and I discussed how we should post an ad on craigslist to see if we could find childcare for Thursdays and Mondays to try to avoid some of the crazy driving that needs to occur to make sure Madeline has around the clock care.

I had gotten further bad news on the parking front at 9:15 when my cell phone had ominously rang. It is the call I am ready for at all times but I dread. The Bar—ch family from 2 St. Paul Street was giving me the 20 days notice until June 1st to leave the space and find a new one.

So after parking the PT Cruiser at 1 AM wearing dress shoes, sweat pants, and no socks I returned home in a bit of shock only to slam the door just loud enough to awake Madeline to the point where she was unable to get back to sleep without being brought into bed with Sarah. Sarah was about as pleased at my door slamming antics as I was about having to get up in the middle of the night to move my car.

So I posted two ads on craigslist, one for a new parking space, and the other for a two day a week baby sitter. I’ll probably need to poster around the neighborhood since it is the most productive way to find parking in the past. There is always something within some distance and I may end-up like last year in a space that is half a mile away and requires a bicycle to reach. With a baby that won’t be acceptable or possible though.

Sarah and I say we are well adjusted and prefer city living but on a night like this the advantages of a little bit of your own pavement becomes apparent as the lack of it reaches into my subconscious in scary dreams. One thought I had was a vision of what will happen if gas (or equivalents) prices reached so high that it was cost prohibitive for people to have personal transportation (cars). People would all move to citys and urban sprawl would become ghost sprawl. More people would telecommute whenever possible. Partnerships would become more geographical in nature as people from Burlington would have trouble meeting people in Cambridge. Public transportation would become more extensively used and services like Zip cars would become the way to acquire personal transport only when necessary. These car seat manufacturers would go out of business. Bicycles and self-propelled vehicles would come into style as the ideal way to travel. Roads would become optimized for self-propelled travel including long time periods when traffic would be unavailable to cars. People would become thinner and get diabetes and other chronic diseases that are tied to obesity at lower rates. Wars over oil and energy might become unnecessary and peace will fill the planets and love will fill the sun.

Well maybe I just need to find a new parking space.