Private Places and Parking Spaces

Mar 4

In many areas of Portland, Oregon, without a private Parking Space included in the design of your new building, your Private Places – your car and your home – are isolated from one another. You park one of your Private Places many blocks away, in front of the somebody else’s house in an older, established neighborhood – pre-empting a Parking Space in front of somebody else’s Private Place – and you carry your groceries home through the rain. Because of the loss of Parking Spaces, the sense of invasion and strangeness for residents in a neighborhood where they have invested their lives is strong.

In Nye Beach in Newport, Oregon, the future of a house without a driveway is isolated Portlandishly.

If you have an RV, wherever you go, you pay for a Parking Space for your Private Place – or else, you park catch-as-catch can somewhere on the street or along a highway where you are laying there in bed at night in your Private Place wondering what form invasion is going to take.

Joe Smolen

Joe C. Smolen, AKA L.W. Smolen is an Oregon Coast writer of insufficiently exaggerated notoriety. Never having been arrested, he lives with his wife Sherrie and the ghost of their black, Standard Poodle Rico Suave in a really pretty good, Prairie Style house they built themselves. Since the Literary Magazine Fleas on the Dog of Kitchener, Ontario has permanently stopped accepting submissions, in order to read L.W. Smolen’s 2021 short fiction, A Real Guy, you are referred to joecsmolen.com. Some of L.W’s other, subsequent short fictions are archived at Olive Tree Review, Ginosko, Cardinal Sins Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, Wilderness House and etc. Kirkus reviews once interpreted his work favorably.

https://joecsmolen.com

Private Places and Parking Spaces

Donuts

Passing Strangers