The Chicago Tribune asks

"Is your junk street-ready?"

Damn right it is. In fact, I have a special workout regimen just for that component.

Now I can actually balance an unabridged OED on…

Oooh. You mean “junk” junk.

No, I’m not of that school, but staking out your newly-shoveled territory with your Malasian job-lot stick furniture or that busted baby Habitrail you were going to toss anyway is as purely "Chicago" as Spring indictments or the annual August collapse of the Cubs.

A very common practice here, but I haven’t heard of it being done anywhere else. Except Pittsburg.

Anyway, John Kass -- local dimbulb, rightbending shill and poacher of the hallowed column inches formerly graced by Mike Royko – nonetheless does an adequate job of sketching out our quaint local custom here…

With Judge Dibs, justice is snow-blind

Published December 14, 2005

With more heavy snow predicted, readers make ready their broken chairs and other junk to stake out street parking spaces and wisely call upon Judge Dibs to interpret the common law of snow.

JUDGE DIBS: Your judgment is most welcome here. A street parking space near my Avondale home was "secured" with four lawn chairs. This was hours before the last snowfall. Is there such a thing as "pre-dibs?" Edward B., Chicago.

Dear Humble Petitioner: Pre-dibs? There is no such thing as pre-dibs. The Dibstitution makes no mention of it. Pre-dibs is a cynical political fiction, engineered by elites who seek unfair advantage over their commuting neighbors. Happily for you, I am a strict Dibstitutionalist. So here is my decree: Dibs may only be invoked after snow has been shoveled, preferably by your wife while you're sitting down in the living room having cocktails, since health experts on TV insist that men should not combine stress and snow shoveling. Anyone who dares claim "pre-dibs" will have their broken chairs tossed onto their lawn.

JUDGE DIBS: You're right. Hizzoner the mayor needs to declare the end of Dibs, let's say 2 weeks after a heavy snowfall. (Only he has the clout to make such a declaration). Thomas O., Baton Rouge, La.

Dear Thomas: You're correct. The mayor and Judge Dibs will decide on a case-by-case basis. But you have no standing in this court, since it doesn't snow where you live.

…

ONE WINTER I dug our car out of its plowed-in spot. A neighbor dug out his car behind me. We pulled our cars out and marked our spaces with lawn and card table chairs. We drove off to do errands. When I returned I saw my neighbor in the middle of the street, staring. A huge Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible with a western suburb vehicle sticker was taking up both of our spaces. The chairs had been tossed near the sidewalk. Without a word, we each got our snow shovels and completely buried the Cadillac. It was below zero out. Then my neighbor said, "Wait a minute" and returned carrying two buckets of water. We ended up using six buckets of water on the car. The Caddy remained entombed in ice for weeks. After a thaw, we never saw that car in the neighborhood again. Tom P., Hickory Hills.

Dear Tom: It wasn't me. I swear.

So how ingrained is this tradition?

Well a few years back the Mayor announced on teevee that if you had shoveled out a space and marked it as your territory, that spot is yours. Period.

And the sound you heard off-camera was his legal people jumping into their tap-shoes like firemen leaping into their boots, and scrambling the get in front of some microphones and explain that, no, you don’t really own that 32-square-foot slab of potholed asphalt and you cannot, therefore, treat other people that park there as if they’re burglars you just discovered despoiling your wife’s panty drawer.

It really is a tribal custom, and anywhere you go on Earth – in any culture -- you transgress the local, unwritten rules at your peril, so frankly the thought of icing down a car that has mooched off the work you sweated over doesn’t bother me overmuch.

Not nearly as much as, say, classist parking restrictions on residential streets in the various archipelagos of Upscalevania.

Now in Wrigleyville, for example, I don’t see a problem with restricting parking during night games. That seems a fair accommodation to residents who have to cope with a sudden influx of 38,000 visitors on specific dates and for a limit amount of time. But on block after block of once-Volvo-and-now-Escalade-packed streets in swank neighborhoods you’ll see the signs that warn that you will be ticketed and/or towed of you park there after sunset.

Well fuck that. If these people want to gate-off their streets and go out-of-pocket for their own resurfacing, curb-repair and sink-hole-filling, fine. Great. Have at it.

But as long as these are public streets, paid for at public expense, then you can damn well circle and hunt like the proles.

Who knows? Maybe the landed gentry might stop treating “public transportation” as a pejorative if free, priority parking on the public thoroughfares stopped being gifted to them as a prerogative?