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April 1

Yesterday was the day when everybody finally got it. They opened their eyes and minds to the world and saw the complete car situation, and noticed how crazy it was. Everybody finally saw for themselves what a brutal way of life it was, and they made up their mind. The wave of decision spread like a tsunami; the wave of decision was absolute and world binding.

Today is to be the first day without cars. Today is to be the day when everybody just leaves their automobiles to rust. Today is to be the first day of a whole new quieter world, a safer world where people live their transport life according to their own abilities, and will leave the oil down where it seeps, and will let the air calm and give their lungs a break.

It is going to be hard but everybody made that strong decision. It is going to be toughest on the folks in the suburbs, but they made up their minds like everybody else. Some of the suburbans will walk to the city to begin a new life there, while some will do their best to form self-sufficient small towns in their peripheral places. No more twenty mile commutes, no more ten mile commutes, not when you have to do the walking for yourself. The construction crews are beginning to build rails and wires into every freeway and major road to convert them to rail transit, but they will not be finished for quite some time. Someday there will be a huge network of trains to get us around, but in the meantime we must simplify - this is the choice that everybody made yesterday in a moment of brilliance, in a moment of absolute clarity.

No more freeway noise will shake us all day long. Everybody realized that living that kind of sickness was living like shit. They just pledged to shut it all down today. No more cars running into buildings or over children. Everybody simply saw the cruelty and decided no more, and thought it was high time to change these habits.

No more war for oil. The troops are coming back. Global warming is thundering forward, but it will eventually catch up with the huge decision of March 31st. In time the world climate will stabilize, and species will survive, and plants will not have to wander across changing climate zones, and the melting ice on the poles will stop melting, will no longer threaten the coasts.

The streets are already filling up with bicycles. Until the transit system gets built up, a bike will get you around pretty well. In a few hours the streets are going to look like those old pictures of China, they will look like a critical mass ride, with hundreds or thousands of bicyclists making their way and breathing the air. As we adapt to this new way of living, we will make the streets much narrower to let the rain seep into the earth, to let us use their space for play and life. Pedestrians can swagger in the streets now, the streets that are suddenly way too wide, the streets that will let you make your mighty exaggerated freedom walking steps with no cars running to run you over, to steal away your life with their speed.

Because so many folks are moving in from the edge suburbs, we will welcome them into our city communities. They are moving in to be closer to their jobs, they are moving in to be closer to a traditional way of city life. They are making carnival camps in reclaimed parking lots. They are making houses out of abandoned cars - that's what cars were good for, after all. In time, new permanent dense cities will rise up from these formerly wasted spaces, from the wastelands of the old parking lot prairies. The fabric of the city will take them over, and where asphalt once clotted the land, new life will rise, and flowers and trees.

Some of the biggest cars will make nice housing of a permanent nature, but most of the others will have to be taken apart and recycled. But we need to be careful that no part of their toxins will fall to soil the earth as we tear them apart, rationally, critically, and with introspection.

In the meantime, the cars that are not housing will just have to sit and rust. A few will get pushed out of the way so folks can set up camps, so folks can set up life. A rusted old car is nothing like a McMansion, but it makes some sense in this new world that we all decided was the best thing to do, the best bet for everybody and everything the whole world round.

Yesterday was the day when everybody finally got it, and decided to end their slavery to the brutality of the car.

April 2

I sense a certain testiness, impatience, intolerance in the car world as of late. Last night, for instance, as I was bicycling back home from the film festival opening night party, two cars passed me at great speed on a city street. The second car had its horn on, the sound long and steady, the driver with hand pressed down hard in fake mad electric shouting. This was at 11 p.m.

The car in front had obviously done something to offend the car behind, and the car behind was taking its out-of-body revenge. The car in front was going fast, over the speed limit, and the car behind was following it far too closely. When the car in front changed to the curb lane, the car behind followed exactly. Both ran thru a red light and as they crossed a bridge, the car behind ran up abreast of the first car. I imagined some yelling thru rolled down windows but I had to imagine it, for the cars were now far beyond what I could see or hear.

A week ago, I was on a bus and watched a car bear-bate the bus. I think the bus had pulled in front of that car when the stoplight turned green. It is the right of buses to do that. But this act offended the driver, who was not one to let buses pull ahead of him. He sped up and passed the bus and then got in front of the bus in the bus's lane and then slowed down abruptly. The bus driver rolled along with the new slow speed. When the bus rolled up to its bus stop and people got on and off, the offended driver got out of his car and yelled at the bus driver thru the door while people paid their fare.

I see one example of this kind of strange behavior after another. Car drivers are especially testy lately. It is as if they realize that their time on earth is brief, and they must act out aggressively to deny this coming reality. Acting out like this is all that they can do, is all that the car has trained them to do. They deny this buried rage and frustration and the rage comes out in violent moments, in a car running into a building to destroy it, in a driver going crazy at the slimmest act which is taken as an insult. This is the behavior of a crazed endangered species.

Even tho car drivers outnumber nearly all other species on earth, even tho their habits endanger and have eliminated other classifications of animal and people, they are the ones who are truly endangered. Car drivers are killing themselves with their failure of restraint. They are killing out their species and taking the whole planet with them.

Wouldn't you be mad if you had the repressed twitch of understanding that you were a dinosaur and your twilight world would be brief and bitter. The rising oil prices make this clear to the gut even if the brain will not adopt that theology. The driver acts out that rage on other drivers only to insure the truth of the prophecy. The age of car is not much longer; that is why they get so darn mad.

April 3

This is the time of year when I turn into full-time bicyclist. The International Film Festival is going on, and I can ride my bike easily from one movie venue to another. I can ride on the edge of the busy traffic street and not worry too much about all the cars passing so heavy metal beside me, but they are there, and they are threats, but I make it to my destination alive for another day of movie viewing.

I am not a strong and brave one, I am not an absolute bicyclist. If I lived in a city with a transit system that suited me better, I would be a transit rider more than a bicycle rider. I like how I can read on transit, and pass that time with a book or a magazine. I like how on transit that I get to my destination and I have no load to store and to worry if somebody will try to steal it. When I get somewhere with my bike I still have my bike and have to spend some time and thinking figuring out what to chain it to. Also, on my bicycle, when I journey, I have to have all my adrenaline turned up, I have to watch out for cars, and ride for my life, and hope that I do not get squishy between tons of steel like pancake man.

On my bike, which I can lift, I have to share the road with cars, which are so much heavier. There is nothing fair about this equation. If it comes to fisticuffs I would be the clear-cut loser. My only slight advantage is when there is a jam-up. I can weave my way between the congestion, and pull out ahead, and take the lead from my bike's skinny dexterity.

A bike would be so fine if I was not up against the metal invaders that line each street with their fascist steel, which run down the road like an occupation army. How could we even have opened our gates up to them in the first place, how could we have been so naïve, how forgetful, how stupid to let the cars take over the way they have.

But I can move thru the warming air, I can take my time, for I am not the fastest cyclist. I can move my body and my soul without selling it first - I can do it with my own breakfast energy, I can succeed because I am my own motor. I can share the sound with the birds, and not kill them and their message. I cam move thru the air like I am of it, and not its murderer.

April 4

I (dream) am one of a small trio of bicycle superheroes. We three are friends, another man and a woman, all of about the same age and type. We have our special superhero courier uniforms and souped up bicycles that we can pedal fast when the emergencies come.

When we get the secret call to do our duty, the streets have to clear for us so we can get to the rescue in time. There are these bicycle superhero lights along the roadways, and the lights look like little bicycle superheroes, complete with spokes, up high on poles. The lights start flashing and rotating when we have to leave our clubhouse and take to the street and cross the bridge over the river to get to the place where the bad things are happening.

The cars know to cower and pull to the side when the bike-hero lights flash and rotate on each side of the bridge. When we ride across on our way to the rescue, we ride right into the camera, elongated by the wide angle lens so that our back tires seem to go on forever behind us.

There are acts of car cruelty perpetrated by car villains on the other side of the water, and only the bicycle superheroes, with balaclavas for faces and tight shorts, can put an end to the misery. We pedal as fast as we can, and we certainly take care of the danger, but next we cut back to the clubhouse, where we discuss the imperfections of the system.

There is a bit of sexual tension among we three bicycle superheroes, but that only makes us stronger. We love each other, but all at varying degrees, and the vectors of our passion are arrows rotating around the triangle. The diagram of our passion is the symbol for recycling. I love the woman and the woman loves the other man and the other man loves me. This makes things just a little awkward, both during clubhouse times when we practice relaxation, and during duty times when we race to our bicycle rescues.

The villains we vanquish all have cars for heads. They terrorize with their grunts and bumpers. They roll over small things like children and only the bicycle superheroes have the power to thwart them. Some times we come to the rescue in time, and sometimes we do not. One time the rescue lights along the street and bridge do not flash and rotate, and we bend our heads back at what is the matter. The lights do not do their duty, despite the emergency status, and we have to weave our way among the dangerous car traffic, which does not have the sense or decency to pull over for us despite our superhero uniforms, despite our colorful rescue bicycles that shake the road, but not as much as the regular cars do.

We get there too late. The car villain has succeeded and driven away. We will never catch him.

The people do not cheer for us. They are in a bad mood because the cars got the best of them. We are not so super after all. We are only on bicycles. And then the sexual tension kicks in and we have a little lover's spat right there on the sidewalk.

April 5

One image from my journey to the Wim Wenders film: on the bike lane downtown during rush hour with tremendous buses making slow-moving valley walls on one side of me, and roaring cars driving into my direction on the other side. I traveled the small eye of this storm. I felt tiny and alone but brave in a sad way too, for I was making my way despite the absurd odds.

This took me to the train, which took me to the Riverview Theatre to see the Wim Wenders film, "Land of Plenty," which has no distributor. Wim Wenders was there to present it.

The film was so much about riding in cars, something that I have not done now for months. Riding in cars to witness skid row, riding in cars to build conspiracy explanations and to see the nation. Faces trapped inside rear view mirrors, bodies trapped behind dashboards. And how two people in a car carry on a conversation facing forward, only taking quick glances at the eyes of the other, a conversation of avoidance.

How in a car you face forward. You are looking directly into the future. But the future is nothing but more highway, and road signs.

On a train you are saved from the view of the future. You look out at the sides and share your time with the present all around you. Car drivers and riders are forced to confront the future at all times, or something approximating it, or an illusion that life as a car goes on forever ahead of them. They leave the present behind. They no longer live in the present. They abandon it and their responsibility to it.

How this nation is like the character Jeffries in the film, a shell-shocked veteran, so obsessed with making failure into victory that everything is war. War is the metaphor thru which all stories are smelled and touched, war is the only way to negotiate the tension and high wire complexity life, the act of existence in this changing nation of faces and bodies and color and language. It is the conspiracy theory that our illusions translate into daily existence. It is the paranoia that lets us live inside safe cars, and witness the sidewalks from behind closed windows and surveillance cameras.

Even when they try to listen to the city all they hear is a pop song, like the music in headphones. One more mediating factor to protect our souls, to deliver us from contact with the bias that we have made out of life, to keep us from direct knowledge of the earth, the dirt, the air.

April 6

The price of gasoline is going up. There was a story about it on the news, and how it is affecting the tight pocketbooks of many people, particularly truckers. It is a hardship for many to fill their gas tanks, and I feel bad about that, but I also realize that oil is a limited resource, and that price is going to rise at some point, so preparing for that rise is more important than complaining about it.

The next story on the news was about the start of road construction season once again. There were quite a few road building and expansion projects planned for the next few months. There seemed to be no connection at all between those two stories.

To me this lack of connection is a complete cognitive dissonance. Of course these two stories are related, and beginning an aggressive campaign of rebuilding roads for fossil fuels vehicles seems a little silly in light of the preceding story, which told about how prohibitive it is to use those fossil-fuel vehicles.

Today I went to a transportation funding rally at the state capitol. There was a sea of yellow and orange vests representing labor interests. Most of the rally had to do with the necessity of rebuilding Minnesota roads, but there were also many voices asking for greater funding for mass transit.

I was doing some video taping for my "On Transit" show. I glommed on to the group of people from the Transit for Livable Communities group and interviewed them. When I caught the bus back to downtown Minneapolis, I saw one of the TLC volunteers I had seen earlier lobbying the driver and riders in the front row to contact their state legislators to tell them to provide more funding for transit. So I asked him if I could do and interview, and we did a Talking Transit extended interview the whole ride back to Minneapolis.

Putting more and more money into building roads seems a bit short-sighted in light of those rising gas prices. What good are roads if you cannot afford to drive a vehicle on them. We need to get so serious about building transit that runs on electricity, if we want to continue living lives all over the place. Or else we will be doing a lot of walking, which is not necessarily bad either.

April 7

Holding so tightly to the practice of car driving is holding onto selfishness despite what obstacles might come our way. Selfishness is strong when it turns into a pattern of living. Selfishness has becomes something that fits well in our gloves and hands. And selfishness seems to come easier from a car than it does from outside of one.

Because it is spring, I have started working in my garden. I see what happens in the soil when the sun warms it enough, when the sun shines to melt off the snow and the rains come to soak in the ground. I see what happens to the ground that seemed so brown and inert under the cold of winter, how it absolutely erupts with green things, how life breaks its surface, and races up to the sun.

I can turn the soil with my shovel, I can plant seeds and plan out the arrangement of plants, and yet the earth always beats me, does its planning as well, starts before the weather reporters tell me to and thus gets to the finish line earlier. I can try my best to turn my garden into something in my mind, but what it turns into is what nature wants to do with it, what happens in the ground, what happens despite my efforts.

But that is what makes it most interesting to me. That is what I enjoy about it most. Gardening is a collaboration between you and the ground, and the ground is the most powerful partner, and the ground is the real boss I work for. I need to think about myself as a creative consultant, and then I will not get so worked up if my ideas do not bear fruit.

When I garden I feel a strong connection to the ground. I respect the ground, I worship the ground we all walk on. That is why I could never drive on it. I could never bring myself to stomp on it with all those tons of metal. I could never ask for more of it to be covered with asphalt to make my ride smoother. I could never ask for more blacktop lanes to roll away the water falling that the ground so wants to drink up, thirsty. I have too much respect for the ground to be that selfish.

April 8

My transportation life has changed markedly in the last few weeks as I have made adjustments for the changing seasons here in Minnesota. And then the International Film Festival, and the 13 films I have seen the last week, has turned me into a transportation machine, going between films, home and work, with a few stops in between to get food. From early in the morning to late at night, I have exploded in the last week into transportation madness, riding the rails and the bicycle trails, making do my best on the busy street, both in the bus and on my trusty bicycle.

The weather is so much warmer. My bike gets me around so easily for the film festival. It is when I am outside of one film venue or another, unchaining my bicycle for the ride to home or elsewhere, that it strikes me how my transportation life is now so different. How it changes like this every year before the flowers even start to bloom. How different it is from just a couple weeks ago, when I only took the bus, when I would not attempt to go so many places as I do now, and at all hours of the day or night, because it would have been so much more difficult.

When the threat of rain came on Tuesday I left my bike behind and took the bus. This suited my agenda. On Wednesday morning I took the bus for the long trip to downtown St. Paul, and then back home, where I got my bicycle out for the rest of the day as the sun cleared from the clouds. On Monday and last night I took my bicycle on the train to get to a theatre in south Minneapolis and back, to see the film and the director, to smile at people I know and meet new people, sitting in tight seats with the crowd.

This will continue for the next week or so as I plan my ambitious movie agenda, and then the film festival will end. At that time my life will slow down a little into gardening and work, bicycling and transit, which keep me seeing the world I walk on, which help me whoosh thru the stars and the still night air.

April 9

I was chasing the trains, and the buses, for a couple hours yesterday afternoon. I needed to get some cut-away shots of transit to go with the video of the rally and the interviews I got on Wednesday.

I was riding up and down on my bike on the bike lane along the Hiawatha Line train. I had some images I had seen on earlier trips this week when I did not have my camera and I wanted to try to approximate those images. I wanted to get them back, but the look today was different, the sun was too even, less interesting than what I remembered.

I knew how much time was between the trains so I would ride and then I would expect. The trains going north and the trains going south. I had to stop on my bike at a likely spot and wait for the train to come. When it came from a dot in the distance I would hold the camera still and let the train go by my video, or I would follow it from left to right, or right to left, depending on how it was reading. The train came by for just a few seconds, and then my shot was over, and then I biked on to the next vantage point.

I also rode my bike down the bike lanes downtown, but I was riding them earlier in the afternoon than last time, than the time I wanted to see them in my camera. That was when the buses were like a mountain range, and this day there were fewer, and I had less powerful images to get than I could have gotten when I rode earlier in the week when I did not have any place to put them.

I still have the other image in my mind, the one I cannot film. I have to keep it in my mind, for that is the only place I can keep it, or lose it. I could not recreate it to show to others, but the buses came, less interesting, but they went by, today just as then.

The best pictures, as usual, are always the ones that I make in my mind. I am alone and no other person can distract me, no talking or pointing or shared boredom can frame my field of vision in some other skewed way. These images I get alone are the rising body experience, that sunset sunrise tornado of being, when I turn for just a look because something happens and I cannot say why, I cannot say how, but suddenly I am so much more.

How the train turns that corner in the sunset and the shadows of the people inside make a picket fence movie on me. I can get back to the same place, but the image is not the same as I remember. The light is too tired today, and it makes shorter shadows. I repeat the picture and made it less; I make it less by turning on my camera.

I will never put on tape or film the greatest images that I make. These are the ones in my mind, and only to be seen when I am the only one there.

April 10

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