the Nuck ambush: Subsidized Time in the municipal grain

The founding's fiscal crisis reaches all the way down to a parking ordinance: "metro Boston's serious fiscal troubles in the third year of Subsidized Time" produced "this hellish municipal deal" of the nightly side-switch that forces the whole car-moving ritual — and thus puts the residents in the street where the ambush happens. The Reconfiguration's unpayable costs (091's Triple Bind) are felt here as a broke city's petty revenue-and-towing scheme; Subsidized Time is not only a calendar auction in Gentle's cabinet but a texture of daily municipal life, the fiscal squeeze that stages the scene.