Greetings, you secret knowledge seekers! Last week, we shrouded ourselves in secrecy to provide space for our creativity to break out into the world. Secret sharing is a good way to clear the air inside and outside our creative selves. Did you break a secret down into its many parts and discover the whole is greater than the sum? It’s one of the many life secrets I’ve learned over the years breaking down trash into useful parts of new sculptures. Was there a new narrative hidden in what was previously unspoken? How did a secret look after exposure to sun and air—like rusted metal, or a single drop of rain, or a crow heading toward another horizon?
Here’s something that is not a secret: our next creative nudge is a trigger to shoppers, city planners, and business owners alike, so consider yourself warned! This week we’re using parking meters to inspire our creative activities. Pay for parking and free your mind. Are we up to the challenge of overcoming our bias against civic infrastructure and finding a place to park and ride our creative side?
Downtown Riverside, with its kaleidoscopic arts scene and blocks of historic architecture, is a frequent destination for many of us. And for better or worse, it’s awash in parking meters, so I encourage you to grab your coin purse and get outside. Maybe you have a favorite—perhaps a broken meter that provides a loophole to stay ticket-free on that Main Street shopping spree? If you can complete your art excursion in 90 minutes or less, I recommend the gratis spots along Lemon Street, between the Riverside Municipal Auditorium and The Cheech.
Think about the characters the parking meter plays in the sitcom plot of our lives. Parking meters are the boring bosses telling you where to go and how long to stay. They literally help the government keep tabs on you like a nosy neighbor. Despite acting like your BFF (look, I saved you a space), they are the worst at covering for you when you’re busted.
They are public works puzzles to decipher—the blinking lights, the cryptic and detailed yet incomplete instructions, the ever-evolving payment choices. Coins, cards, apps. But which coins, which cards, which apps? They reinvent themselves more often than an aging pop star diva. Maybe the city of Arts and Innovation will allow me to submit a haiku poem in exchange for an hour of downtown parking when I attend ArtsWalk?
Our city’s parking meters offer a narrowed perspective through which to examine our relationship with time, our dependence on commerce, and our innate ability to navigate and circumnavigate the systems we create. Let’s pretend for a minute they’ve been placed at regular intervals with us in mind. Space out with one or more of these creative exercises until your time is up:
Time Lapsed: Observe a parking meter closely for several minutes and photograph it at regular intervals. What comes and goes around it? Experiment with different perspectives, or stay in one place and let the world come to you.
Rhyme and Meter: Find a parking meter in a visually interesting setting. Capture its POV in a poem or flash fiction. Focus on the sensory details: the color of the meter, the sounds of the street, the way the light hits the metal.
Unpaid Absence: Make a chalk drawing in an empty parking space. Or imagine yourself as a free parking anarchist and draw out some free parking spaces for future visitors to ponder.
Meter Monologue: Perform a monologue or dance from the perspective of someone desperately trying to add more time to a meter—perhaps for a crucial appointment or a lingering moment of joy. Explore their emotions, their desperation, and the ticking clock. Maybe our downtown carillon can add some diegetic sound to your dramatic interpretation.
Until We Meter Again: Design a futuristic parking meter that addresses a different concept of time or urban space. What new functions could it have? How could it interact with its environment or the people—or the robots—using it in unexpected ways? Sketch your vision.
By engaging with the parking meter in these ways, we move beyond its transactional function and see it as a focal point for observing our culture, our relationship with time, and our own creative impulses. Not a bad way to approach most things we will meet in our travels today.
This column was written with the help of Google’s Gemini Advanced, a powerful generative AI writing tool.
