2/23/05

The Cone Zone

Digging out your car is just the beginning

When I moved to Southie, I knew that eventually I’d be confronted with a wintertime dilemma: to cone or not to cone. For those of you fortunate enough not to have personal experience with this particular cultural phenomenon, coning is the practice of saving your on-street parking spot after a snowstorm by marking it with a cone, chair, or any variety of psychotic-looking detritus. The idea is that if you shovel out a spot, you should get to keep it. This premise is so flawed that if it were a shirt, it would have three sleeves and get rejected by Marshalls.

First, let’s deal with the issue of ownership, or, more accurately, conership. You’re not shoveling a space out of a sense of civic duty. You’re shoveling because there’s three feet of snow on your car and you want to go somewhere. People are always quoted in newspaper articles saying stuff like, “I shoveled eight hours and I’m not having someone come along and take my space after I did all that work.”

By this logic, only plows should be allowed on the roads after it snows, because everyone else is unfairly enjoying the fruits of the plow drivers’ labor. Where do you get off driving on Route 93 if you didn’t plow anything? Next time it snows, I’m getting a plow truck and plowing the roads on my way to work, then I’m coning them off so I can have a nice quick drive on subsequent mornings. I plowed them, so they’re my roads.

When spring rolls around, I’m going to mow a patch of grass on the Common. Then I’m building a three-bedroom Cape. My house-cone ought to be immensely valuable given its prime location on historic Boston Common. If anyone tries to picnic on my house lot, I’ll slash their baskets.

In my apartment, I’m putting a cone on top of the trash can after I take the trash out—if Heather didn’t do the work to take that bag out of the can, she should have to throw her trash on the floor. I’m coning the toilet, too, because the Toilet Duck certainly didn’t dive in there by itself. And if I make the bed, from now on it’s off-limits until I un-cone it. Don’t think I won’t slash the duvet cover on your side if you move my bed cone, woman. Then again, if she makes dinner she could cone my plate and starve me out, so maybe I need to call an uneasy truce on intra-apartment coning.

Coning is like wearing clothes. Back in the day, everyone used to run around naked and it was all good. But somebody started wearing a palm frond over their junk and then everyone had to do it, or else they’d be the naked ones. So it is with cones. The argument that someone is “stealing” your space falls apart if nobody cones. You leave your space, then you come back and take another space, the same way you do when there’s no snow. But if one person cones, then everyone cones, then there are no spots other than the one you started in. It’s the circle of cones.

Worse, most Southie people take a decidedly broad interpretation of cone etiquette. For instance, before the big blizzard in January, one of my neighbors pre-coned a spot in front of his building before the first snowflakes hit the ground. I saw this and immediately had several sick, violent cone-destroying urges, since I was looking for a parking space at the time. At the other extreme, and making me meat out even worse, are the people who continue coning until the Major League Baseball All-Star break. If there’s so much as a dirty ice cube from a spilled Big Gulp in the street in Southie, there’s probably a cone sitting next to it.

And I’ve got a neighbor who apparently coned a space and then went into the Witness Protection Program (not uncommon in Southie), because I’ve never seen anything but two buckets parked in that spot. Maybe I’m wrong and the buckets are actually Transformers that turn into a car. Transformers, more than meets the eye. Transformers, buckets in disguise.

So with all my animosity toward cones, you can guess what happened when the blizzard hit. When I had to move my car, I simply shoveled it out and drove out into the street... Then I stopped, got out and carefully set up the most mental-looking space-saver I could throw together in my basement: a two-by-four stuck in a Christmas tree stand. If I can’t change people’s minds, I can at least make them worry that I’ll slash their tires.