We live in an urban area. For most of the people who inhabit places that are not Maine, that description might elicit a snicker. Ogguster Maine is the state capital, but honestly, it’s a tiny town with slightly taller buildings than the hinterlands. Fewer than 20,000 Oggusticles inhabit the place.

Still, it feels urban compared to the far-flung western Maine podunk we recently left. We live on a street lined with turn of the (twentieth) century brick and stone buildings. The street we’re on is a mixture of shops and restaurants and apartments, with a few disreputable establishments like tattoo parlors and government offices mixed in. Mixed use, they call it.

We’re up off the ground, with big windows that overlook the street. We sit by these windows and eat our meals. We’re treated, if that’s the word I’m looking for, to a steady stream of passersby, and car and truck and motorcycle traffic. There is a large state gummint office close by, so the majority of the foot traffic comes and goes from that direction. You can always tell who works there. They wear lanyards with their name tags depending from them. If you made them pin a name tag on their clothing, they’d all quit en masse. It’s not a name tag! It’s a lanyard! Don’t call it a name tag!. It’s one of those weird tics a certain kind of person favors these days. The same kind of people work in office parks, but will come at you with knives if you call it that. It’s a campus! I wouldn’t work in an office park! It’s a campus! At any rate, the supply of humanity on my street makes me think B. Kliban was an optimist.

Back to the gummint building. I’ve been involuntarily watching for months now, so I’m sure it’s not a small sample size, or a fluke. I have never seen such a bizarre aggregation of people enter and exit from anything short of a tent flap on the back of a carnival sideshow. I could try to describe them for you, but I’m afraid my descriptions might accidentally concatenate into some kind of incantation that summons devils from another dimension. Then again, by the look and the number of them, it appears that the incantation is already known, and widely used. My personal favorites are the legions of morbidly obese women who no doubt work in the health department, dispensing eupepsia advice to the rest of us. I have made a solemn pledge to listen to this sort of nutrition advice the moment it is offered by someone who is not the same dimension in every direction, and not a moment sooner.

Meh. The parade of porcine pedestrians isn’t nearly as interesting as their parking predilections. Parking is free and easy everywhere around here, another indicator that it’s a city in name only, and the street I live on is no exception. But you have to parallel park. And man, oh man, no one can do it.

I got curious and wondered if Maine requires you to demonstrate parallel parking technique to get your license. Indeed they do. I found a video where they go through the various steps with an examiner and a victim license candidate. I couldn’t help noticing that the parallel parking portion was performed against miles of curb with no vehicle behind the spot you’re pulling into. I also noticed that this was the only maneuver shown from a bird’s eye view. I could also tell by the color of the shirt and the shield on the sleeve that they’d thrown the driver candidate out of the driver’s seat, and the test administrator performed the maneuver. I also noticed the driving inspector casually spun the wheel with the palm of his hand, which would have got you a hard fail back in the mists of primordial time when I took a driving test. Six and nine, and hand over hand, or else.

My wife and I amuse ourselves by rooting for people when they try to parallel park on our street. Come on, you can do it! We’re looking down on them (every which way), so it’s easy to see why they’re going to come a cropper before they realize it. Pull forward! Too Shallow! Turn the wheel! Straighten it out! Throw out the gangplank, the curb’s over there! Of course our encouragements and advice fall on deaf ears. They’re in their cars with the windows up, and we’re in our apartment with the windows closed. So they’re all on their own. A solid minority leave after several failed attempts. I assume that they’re going to pick up their driving test administrator to bring him back and park it for them, but I might be wrong on that account. I don’t have the kind of attention span to wait that long.

So I remember when the majority of people who drove could parallel park a car. My mother could do it in car made with more sheet metal than a battleship, and smaller parking spaces. Hell, when I was a kid, many cars didn’t have power steering. Let’s see you spin the wheel with your palm when it’s not moving then, tough guy. So I guess the ability to parallel parking is a lost art, now. That’s a paradigm shift of a sort, but it’s not the paradigm shift I referred to in the title.

You see, because we’re up a floor, we can look down into cars as they pass by. It’s a two-way street, so we get to see 50 percent drivers and 50 percent passengers. Of course like everywhere else nowadays, it’s a very rare person, driver or passenger, that is paying any attention to their surroundings. They’re all fiddling with their phones. I’ve recently gotten used to this new normal, but as is often the case, by the time you inure yourself to the New Stupid, it’s superseded and becomes L7, daddy-o. My wife spotted the coming new normal yesterday, and I recognize a coming trend when I see one. A fellow drove by, piloting a large U-Haul truck. He was driving with his knees, while holding a huge bong in his left hand and lighting it with his right.

He drove right on by, so I have no information whether he could parallel park. But honestly, I doubt he could do any worse.