Third Tier Religious Holidays

Every religion has First Tier Holidays -- these are usually the founder's birthday and days of repentance. Everybody knows about these holidays.

There are also Second Tier Holidays, that very few people know about -- obscure holidays celebrated only by the most faithful and observant. These less popular holy days celebrate harvest festivals and the pilgrimage of some imam or the appearance of a saint in a graveyard.

What most people don't realize is there are also Third Tier Religious Holidays, which no one has ever heard of. These extremely obscure and difficult to pronounce Third Tier Holidays are celebrated ONLY by various governmental agencies of the the Five Boroughs of NewYawk.

They are always placed back to back on the most inconvenient day possible to the General Public, whose citizens never realize that the bank is closed today to celebrate the birthday of St. Flavio of Newark, or that the passport office will be closed until Thursday due to the congruence of the Islamic Day of Weeping and the Aztec Summer Sacrifice Sale.

Further, let us remember that you don't drive your car in The Big Shmapple or The Big Bagel. You park your car. You don't travel, you creep. That's all you do. You raise your mileage no more than 40 or 50 blocks each week, schlepping your car from one part of your neighborhood to another, waiting for a spot to open up, which they rarely do.

UNLESS IT'S A RELIGIOUS HOLIDAY! On religious holidays, The Street Cleaning Department does not clean the streets, and you don't have to move your car. This fall, all the imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, shamans and zxolotls who work for the Department of Street Cleaning declared that one or another obscure Third Tier Religious Holiday would fall on every single Tuesday. Certain people must have known in advance and made sure to park in a Tuesday zone some time around the Fourth of July.

So there are cars parked in Tuesday zones all through Park Slope that haven't been moved in months. They have trash piled up to their hubcaps and are surrounded by fallen leaves. Their hoods are stained with squirrel shit.

Meanwhile, the rest of us crawl up and down, up and down, up and down and up and down again, up St. Marks and down Prospect and up St. John's and down Baltic and up Sterling and down Lincoln and up Carroll and down Bergen. There are NO available spaces. What there is is a small flotilla of half-buried Volvos and Hondas, snoozing in Tuesday zones, surrounded by garbage and bathed in the Blessing of the Holy Boombah.