THOU SHALT NOT COVET MY PARKING SPACE

I got my copy of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" from Amazon in the mail yesterday.

No...not the famous album by the Beatles.

The DVD of what is arguably one of the worst films ever made.

When I was 16 and this film was released, my best friend Junior and I went to a midnight showing of the film.

Yes ... his name was Junior. His real name was Harold, but everyone called him Junior. This was Tennessee, mind you.

Anyway, we went to the theater and were seated in the middle of a drunk and rowdy theater crowd.

The audience ate this movie up. Sang along with the songs. Cheered every time another famous musician first showed up on the screen. And went nuts when Aerosmith finally appeared as the meanest villains of the film.

Keep in mind, the film came out before MTV did. So this was the first time many of us had ever seen Aerosmith and other artists perform.

I fell in love with the film.

But I was young. Hell ... I was in love with a certain little redheaded cheerleader too at the time and she broke my heart. So obviously my priorities were a bit wack.

I now know that I didn't love the film. What I fell in love with was the experience. The energy that audience had. The joy of seeing Alice Cooper and Aerosmith and Earth Wind and Fire actually do their schtick.

Because when I put the DVD in and tried to watch it, I was clawing at my eyes after five minutes.

I watched the Aerosmith song ("Come Together"...duh) with Andrew and explained to him what he was about to see made his Daddy squeal with joy all those years ago.

Andrew wasn't impressed.

He kept telling me to turn the TV "down! down!"

Then he ran out of the room.

Maybe the kid's smarter than I thought.

My buddy Wendigo basically voiced our collective opinion on this whole Ten Commandments debacle on her site the other day.

I feel the same way as her. This is all one big joke.

This ignorant judge thinks he's above the law and two years ago, he secretly put a 5,300 lb. monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of our judicial building without asking first.

He's hellbent on displaying the Ten Commandments anywhere and everywhere that he can.

And obviously, a few places that he can not.

For two years now, he's been told to remove the monument because in the bylaws of our constitution, church and state should be separate. Or something like that. I'm not sure if that's the actual reason, but man ... it sure sounded good when I wrote it.

This building is about a quarter mile from our offices.

It's fair to say that our city has been inundated with religious zealots from all across the world. They have come here to form this giant protest that has traffic at a standstill downtown and news trucks taking up valuable parking spaces.

We need our parking spaces. About 13,000 people work downtown and we've got 5,000 parking spaces.

Every morning, commuters are all willy-nilly all over the downtown streets, parking where they can.

Some people...no lie...park in the middle of the street and expect us to drive around them.

I'll take a picture sometime to prove this.

Anyway, this judge is an idiot.

And now our state is getting fined $5,000 a day for every day that he doesn't remove the monument.

He doesn't care. He's not moving the monument. He doesn't care that he's now a lawbreaker, even though his job has always been to uphold the law.

He's got it in his thick head that just because we're in a city where people have always stood as courageous and rebellious visionaries that he wants his name on the list next to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

His stubborness may eventually change the constitution and allow church and state to be one.

That's all well and good.

But dammit ... where the hell am I supposed to park in the meantime?