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April 10

Bicycle, train, bus, long walks, that is how you make a multimodal day. Yesterday we got around on all these forms of transit, and what a rich day of experiences and people it was. We visited art in several places, we saw and talked to people in the places in between, we pressed flesh with the world around us, and saw our city as we always do, up close and in the shared air of it. The only form of transportation on the ground that we did not use was the car. I have not been in a car for three and a half months. That is why I am writing this, to say that it can be done, that it is easy, that it is better. It might be called insanity in this desert island of car culture, but it can work and it can be better. When I live this way, when I live without a car, I live the best life I could ever comprehend. Car is king in these United States, but I am better off without one, I am better off completely avoiding them.

In the late afternoon and evening, back to movies.

"Kontroll" is the word on the armbands of the metro fare inspectors of the Budapest subway system. It is also the name of the movie. A fare inspector and his crew ride the trains and ask for tickets or passes to make sure that everybody is complying with the fare regulations. People hate them and try to get around it, but it is their job and they do it.

One of the fare inspectors lives his life completely in this world of transit. Something has broken down in his life and he decides to never leave the underground world of the metro system. He sleeps on station floors when the trains stop running and the lights shut out. When the day comes according to the overhead neon he chases people once again for their fares or passes because that is his work.

The film takes place completely in the underground world, in the tunnels for the trains and the stations for the people. There are all the people he knows and meets in the underground, a whole world of lives under the rock, and there is something bad about it in a way, that we should feel bad or seedy about it because this world lets in no sunlight. But there is also something romantic about it, about some characters who seem to be always riding the train without a ticket, about this social place of mass transportation, about this underground dance hall world of corridors and overhead lights.

A subway world is supposed to be seedy, but the seedier world is the one trapped inside cars all the time, the seedy world we are forced to live in these United States because we have so few metro systems, because we don't have the kind of transit world I could live in for two hours in this movie.

When the fare inspector tells an old acquaintance that he has been working and traveling, he is correct.

When I come out of the movie, when I come out of the subway world of dark theatres but also so many people, the world where I spent so much of this past week, I come out to the street, to the world of my city Minneapolis. The street is dark but bright and filled with the Saturday night of Hennepin Avenue. Suddenly this city of drivers is full of dresses and suits and tshirts and shoes and walkers on the pavements and sidewalks of the shining night. There are so many people outside and walking on the sidewalks on a Friday or a Saturday night that this must be a different place, a different city than the one I know and live in.

They do not do the social life locked in their cars - they walk the sidewalks without the car so they can brush up to other people, so they can see and be seen, so they can take a chance in the vulnerable world of their feet and their bodies. The street musicians cannot play their tunes inside a car- they have to be out and standing with their backs to a building or nobody will ever hear them or throw them money. There is the saxophone player and the fiddler and his dancing girlfriend, there is a whole night of people on their feet to hear and be amused.

I am just walking from the movie to my bicycle, but I see so many others at least for the few blocks of this bar district. There are many cars too, the streets are full of cruising, but the streets are also full of pedestrians and this makes me want to take my time unlocking my bicycle just to take it all in, just to spend a few minutes amidst all this human culture.

April 11

I have always liked to be on college or University campuses. When I was young, I lived half a block from a college. In my adult life I have always lived near a University. When I have visited other cities, I have always liked to go visit the campus of the local University and walk thru it, and investigate it, and feel it out. In my own city, I am always most comfortable when I am on campus. Saturday we went wandering and most of our wandering was around the university campus to visit things, to check out the place.

Just walking thru a college campus feels somehow to me like intelligence. But the overwhelming reason I enjoy being these places is that they are where you will still find many people on feet, many pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users all grouped together in one compact place with their lives and their tangents of transportation.

The architecture of campuses is usually also very interesting. It has to be, for pedestrians are noticers. When you walk you see things, unlike when you drive and have to ignore everything but the safety of the road ahead of you. Campuses are full of interesting architecture because the people who use them have to walk thru them and see it.

I once lived this life; I once lived this place or one like it and lived this place with all my peers. When I was twenty years younger, when I was still at University, I had pedestrianism in common with most of my friends, with most of the people I knew. Only a few of us had cars, only a few of us had that superior state. The rest of us were equals, and when we went somewhere we walked together, or rode our bikes together, or rode the bus together. Sometimes a big group of us would gang up on someone with a car and we would all ride in the car together.

Then everybody else slowly changed, and I did not change. Everybody I knew got cars and I did not get a car. Suddenly things were not so equal. They were all drivers and I was not a driver. And when you are a driver, you pretty much always drive. This meant that we were no longer going to walk together or take the bus together or bike together. If we were going to do something together, we were going to drive. Because I did not drive, I would always have to be the rider - I would always have to be the slave in this master and slave relationship.

After some evolution I was no longer the equal of my peers. I was inferior to them because I did not adapt the car style that they all adapted. It was now uncomfortable to ask people if they wanted to do something because I knew that a ride would be offered, that master to my slave aspect, and I would be uncomfortable, and we would not be equals. I was from the lower classes and I was trying to hobnob with the nabobs far above my class. We were not equals, so I started doing more things alone, so I stopped asking before if somebody wanted to do something, and they started stopping doing the same.

I once lived in a land where we all were pedestrians. We lived in this pedestrian place, near the campus, and we walked together or we biked together, but we were all transportation equals in this place. Now everybody has moved on to global warming transportation ideologies and I was left behind to my feet and to transit. It is now more convenient for me to do things on my own rather than suffer the embarrassment of my motor shortage, for I have no steel chassis, no contraption to chain me to its tires.

April 12

Tap tap tap the spring rain is tapping on the roof and on the gutters. It is falling down, it is trying to fall into the ground and sink its way down to the center. The ground is waiting, is thirsty, it needs it. The ground wants a drink of the water that is raining. The ground says thank you and sucks it up and drinks it. The ground appreciates the good moist work of the clouds, the wind, the precipitation.

But some of the ground, but much of the ground, is sealed off, its lips are sealed, its pores are sealed with roads, with parking lots, and not the porous land that should be there. The rain taps and taps on the asphalt like a mirror. You can see yourself, your ego body, but you cannot see the ground lying somewhere under. The rain sees itself in puddles and gutters, it goes for a ride but not the ride it was made for. Instead of going further down to its home in the great seas of the underground, instead of down it goes laterally, it goes on a ride on the gutters and the pipes. It rides the concrete down the sewer river and then out of the pipe into the river and down its early way to the ocean, an unexpected diversion, or back to the clouds even faster with evaporation.

The world is sealed with asphalt. The water cannot seep its way into the ground like it should. The ground below the street is thirsty, is thirsty and angry, is trying to beat its unfair prison. Is expanding the road to cracks and plants, is tying to grow, to break free from its dark jail. It hopes for a crack to let the water pass down and thru, to let the tap tap come on in for a drink. For a plant, for a grow and more beating back the prison on top.

My house had a big asphalt parking pad in back. It did, that is, for I de-paved it years ago. It still is a mess of broken asphalt and gravel, but now things are growing in every footstep of it. We de-paved our small bit of parking and made a garden of it so that the rain of spring could seep back in, so it could keep on falling all the way down to its reunion seas far below. So it could end its brave fall from the sky by falling into the bed of the ground, with its friends the roots and the worms and decomposition.

Now is the time for others to raise their sledgehammers and break up more roads and parking lots. We need them like we need more jails. Now is the time to break up this prison of roads and parking and return the raindrops to their rightful migration, and free ourselves as well from the tyranny of asphalt.

April 13

My writer friend Ann Rice (not her real name) was in town reading from her new book at the University bookstore last night. Kristine and I were there, as were a whole lot of other people who none of us knew. Every time I get to the point where I think I know everybody in town, I go some place and run into new people. Who knows what woodwork they came out of to get there.

Ann was going to have some time to hang out with us after the signing. But first there was a long line of people waiting for her to mess up the title page of her book with her name. There was also a big pile of books that the bookstore folks forced her to sign at Sharpie point.

While we were waiting for her, Kristine and I noticed that there were skeletons for sale at the U Bookstore, and skulls. One skeleton in a box was called "My First Skeleton." The skulls had their bar code prices stuck right on their foreheads. I knew that if I were ever to buy one of those skulls, like maybe if I was trying for the Albrecht Durer look in my scholar's study, I would keep the bar code on the skull's forehead as some kind of commentary about the impact of consumer culture on our frontal brains.

After she finished signing all those books and her hand did not fall off, we met with Ann and her driver, Pierre (not his real name either, but close). She had her own driver to take her around town, which is good because she is not a driver either. Pierre said he would be responsible for taking us where we needed to go.

Then came the awkward moment. The plan was to do something near Ann's hotel, which was downtown. Pierre was going to drive us there. I brought up my issue that I was trying to go this year without riding in a car. That made everybody a little bit uncomfortable and impatient.

To have a goal of trying to go a year without riding in a car is not as intense as having a goal of living the year in a tree, but it is also more intense than avoiding candy bars, or peaches. It is kind of an absurd goal to have in a country where cars are often the only line between two points. And it is only a little more than three months into the year, so it wasn't like I already had 364 days down and only one to go so I needed a little help to make this last one.

Pierre suggested that Kristine and I could take the bus downtown and he and Ann could meet us there, but then Kristine said she was going to go in the car, so I would have to take the bus alone and Kristine and Ann would have to talk about me as they waited for me to get there. But being that I only had a couple hours to spend with Ann anyway while she was here, that did not seem so appealing to me.

To keep a short story short, I caved, and I caved rather quickly. I rode in the car, in the back seat, from the U Bookstore to the warehouse district. Ann had to give me some instruction as we walked up to the car. She explained the physics of the door handle, and told me that I should use the seat just as I would use a chair. She also suggested that I change her name if I were to write about this incident, so that if anybody ever did read this they would not know who corrupted me, and would blame the wrong famous writer. Pierre also suggested that I change his name as well, for reasons of company policy. His company drives around famous writers when they are in town, and he wouldn't want any of the fall back from this little incident tarnishing his ability to work with future clients.

Pierre added that, if it was any consolation, he had recently driven around the lady who spent two years in a tree. We kind of talked about what he meant by that, but I took it that Pierre was suggesting that maybe she did not really spend two years in a tree completely. She might have gotten down a couple times to check her e-mail or have sex or something. But she did spend the vast majority of those two years in a tree, she lived in that tree just like I live in my house but I don't spend all day there. A five minute drive downtown would only be a tiny percentage of all the days I have already gone car-free, so I could say that I was still virtually car-free this year, despite this one incident.

Anway, I rode in a car last night, if only for a few minutes, but I must disclose this fact in this journal that is now tainted by a certain amount of non-compliance with its lofty mission and goals.

But when the first place we were going to go was closed, Pierre offered to drive us the two blocks to another place. We all said no. That was enough car for me, and I think Kristine and Ann could tell that I was still suffering a little from the embarrassment of abandoning my year's goal as early as April 12.

After spending some time in an Irish pub with Ann, we said goodbye to her as the doormen at her hotel watched. Kristine and I took the bus home. It came right away.

April 14

Because car is king in this country, other forms of transportation have been suppressed. They have been given few opportunities to shine, to show off how useful they can be. But when they do, they do, they shame the dominant car.

There is nothing like a good transit system for getting around a compact town quickly and smoothly. Unfortunately, my town is not a Paris and it does not really have a good transit system. The system is mostly buses, and buses always seem to come in second or third behind the cars and trucks, so a trip is often slow going, so transit does not really get a chance to show off how really useful it is in my life on a regular basis.

The Midtown Greenway is an off-road bike trail down the middle of south Minneapolis. Only part of it is finished, and even part of that is closed now, but enough of it is open to demonstrate to me and to you how great bike transportation can be if given the opportunity.

Getting around by bike makes real sense when you have something like the Midtown Greenway. It is really a bicycle superhighway, a bike and pedestrian path in a trench and separated from the streets and the city.

The trench was built for freight trains one hundred years ago. It is probably twenty or thirty feet below the level of the city. It is kind of like an open air subway. Someday the trains will come back, or at least a streetcar line will run there. But for now, that half is waiting grass, but the other half, for bicycles and walkers, works great.

Yesterday I went to Uptown to see more movies in the film festival. I rode my bike on city streets, actually on the bike lane on Portland Avenue, but I was still sharing the roads with the metal dinosaurs and that is always dicey.

But then I got to the Midtown Greenway right at about 29th Street, and then I was off and running. I rode down the incline and into the trench, and then I was speeding and smooth and safe for the whole rest of my ride. There I was making good time, probably much better time than all the cars up on crowded Lake Street, a block away.

On the Midtwon Greenway there are no stop signs or stop lights. Just the lanes in the trench, and ramps up and down every ten blocks or so like freeway ramps for bicycles.

With that off-road trail, with that bicycle-only safe world of the trench, my little bike shines as powerful transportation. It is so easy to get somewhere, so fast and direct and pleasant, and you just know if there were more of these, or far fewer cars on the streets and if bicycles outnumbered them and got the first right of way, what a good deal bike transportation really would be.

After the movies, it was night and dark and my plan was to check the Uptown Transit station for the bus that goes by my house, the 17W. I thought that, even tho the night was nice, I would take it easy and put my bike on the bus for the long ride home. But as I got to the station, the 17W was pulling out, and the next one would come in half an hour. So I rode down the street to the Midtown Greenway, and sped to the east and my eventual destination.

Downtown by the post office on the river, that same 17W bus passed me. I had kept up to it, speedwise on my bike, from Uptown to Downtown, thanks to the Midtown Greenway.

April 15

Because I rode in a car on Tuesday and broke the spell of this whole dang reason, after I rode in a car after only 100 days of not riding in a car and kicked myself and my little resolution, maybe I can relax a little about it in these daily reports from the field, maybe I can be just a little less strident and angry and just say my words, and not get so outraged all the time. It is not so serious any more. It is not so serious, even if it ever was.

Last year I set a goal of trying to take no more than one car ride a month. A few months I had more than one ride, but having that goal was always an excuse to bring up my annoying habit of getting all in a huff about people using cars too much. It was also a good way to avoid some situations that I wanted to avoid.

The problem is that cars are so much the connective tissue between people in this country. Not eyesight, the line between where you are looking that ties you up in your pupils, not the vibration on air of words, but a mutual ride in a car staring straight forward at the shit that is coming, with the radio on or off but mostly on, doing that talk like you are talking to somebody that you do not see, doing that phone kind of talk that you have to do when you cannot connect point to point with eyes. That is our dominant connection, that car is, that long or short car ride, at least it is in this town and overall nation.

In many ways, cars take people away from each other, but they also connect, and staying on the sidelines of car culture can also mean staying on the sidelines of much of society. It could be a little of watching every else laugh and enjoy the bounty of the land while I sit with my notebook in my own solo seat in the movie theatre. My coat and backpack are piled on that seat beside me instead of the other person who came with me in my invisible car.

But I also do not thing that it is really all that bad, and keeping flexible too, that is important. And altho I can feel at times an outcast, I think others sometimes look at me with some envy in this place where cars are their own kind of flypaper. As I walked out of the movie Thursday night, I ran into my friends the Julies, and they were with a guy who was a friend of theirs. When they introduced me to him they explained that I lived without a car, and he said he would like to be that way too but found that he could not. He asked me how I did it and I just said that to live without a car you just need to have no car. That is all that is to it, and it is as simple as that. If you do not have one, you find that maybe you do not need one. I think that is the way it is with everything in this ideology, this nation and land is our land of things.

April 16

Riding a bus, riding my bike, I do not often see how really bad cars are. I get into a certain insensitivity to the absurdity, to the outrage of it. On my bicycle, I am in the traffic and with it and concentrating so much on trying to preserve my life that I do not really pay much attention to the big picture, to the weird picture that is going on all around me.

But when we are walking, it become so much clearer. It is easier to notice, it is easier to step back from the particular oddness of everything around us. Like last night when Kristine and I were walking to a local restaurant to have dinner. Cars ran in front of us as we tried to cross the street in the crosswalk. The drivers inside looking so insensitive in their vinyl indoor universe. The smell of the cars in the street. The noise of them. The threat of them as they roared by mere inches from us on the sidewalk.

What an absurd and ugly situation for people to subject themselves to. But that is the way it is, and the reality is that few other adults were going to notice it because we were almost the only ones walking. All the other adults were in those vicious cars, even tho it was a nice night and we could barely contain ourselves from taking a walk. Because the adults have abandoned the sidewalk, the teens know they have won that territory. They walk like masters of that domain, and they give you these looks, like what are we doing in the kid land of walking?

Because of an indoor smoking ban that went into affect just a couple weeks ago, some of the local watering holes have been quick to build outdoor patios. The bar down the street, Mayslacks, built a nice patio with a wrought iron fence around it that looks out at, guess what, their lovely parking lot. The diners sit right next to the curb cut so they can enjoy the fine variety of odors of all the exhaust pulling in or out. They can sit and look out on the sea of front and back bumpers, all that inconvenient steel and broken asphalt that is so much the garden we have built for ourselves and our crazy lives.

We went to have dinner at a Lebanese deli that has a little outdoor dining spot under a tree, but also right next to a busy street. We did enjoy our dinner, but it was a little difficult to concentrate sometimes on our forks and napkins when a fifty ton mack truck roared by with its gutter talk.

How can anyone enjoy living in this world of cars? How can they have let themselves be so lobotomized by this lobster soup of automobile life? I just keep hoping that the price of gas keeps climbing so that the whole thing becomes so distasteful and impossible. I know it is mean to think that way, but also also do not think that anything less than complete chaos will stop this illusion.

April 17

If it rains and you ride your bicycle you get wet. But it is only a temporary condition. That was my story yesterday. Riding my bike thru the rain to my Third Ward convention. Wet, then drying up. Drawing faces at the convention. Riding my bike from the convention site to Bell Auditorium for the last day of the International Film Festival. Very wet upon my arrival, but I did completely dry sometime during the second movie. Drawing movies in the dark for a total of four films, and then riding my bike back home, dry, at night (the rain had stopped earlier in the day - sometime during the third movie).

I saw four movies yesterday on the last day of the film festival for a total of thirty-one in the last two weeks. The official festival time is over, so I am also done with my film festival flash obsession and can get back to my ordinary life.

There is a thick fog outside this morning and inside, I have a headache. What does this equal? Short blog for the morning.

April 18

Yesterday I got out my bicycle trailer out of the shed for the first time this year for a couple trips for big things. I got some pansies and potting soil and did some work in the garden. And then, because my bicycle trailer was hooked up after all, I made another trip to the big box mall to buy some cat litter at the super large pet store. We were out of cat litter and that is a product that does nothing but weigh pounds. My bicycle trailer can come on strong then, hauling two forty pound boxes all the way home, easily. We are set in cat litter for some time now.

When I have eighty pounds in my bicycle trailer, the ride feels a little different. I can twist the extra load in my torso every road I go, but once I have those pedals rotating, it is not like I have to chug that certain weight. I just drag the pedals round. It could be a little extra wind, that is all, but I got my miniature trucking rig to get the big loads from one hammer down to another.

Who needs a car if they have a bicycle trailer? They make the things in Eugene, Oregon. Two wheels and a strong nylon bed with some bunjees and a quick set hitch to strap it on the side of my bicycle frame. I can hitch the whole thing up in a matter of seconds, and then when I ride, I can just ride with it behind me empty (to the store) or I can carry the loads (like back to home). Up to 100 pounds, the literature says, and I got those trailer tires pumped up for some efficiency.

I am biking on this nice day with my bicycle trailer in tow and I notice my usual thing. It is a perfect day but there is hardly anybody walking, and only a very few fellow bikers. There are kids playing, on the sidewalk and on the street, but all the adults have disappeared, as if a neutron bomb were dropped that killed only all the grownups.

There are all these dangerous cars, which means that the streets are dangerous for playing kids and for bicycle trailers that are looking for the smoothest part of the road to avoid an eighty pound cat litter big bump. All those adults must be so addicted to driving that they even are forced to drive on a beautiful bicycle and walking day like this. They are so junkied into spending the sun in their dark motion caves, even if the day is nice, even if bicycle trailers exist and so few of those car hounds are carrying any kind of load heavier than mine, so that is no excuse.

It is all such a bad joke, the total addiction to those two tons or more of steel. I got my big load hauling with just my 150 pounds of bone and brain to make the ride for me. I got it all covered with my bike and my simple wimpy strength and my bicycle trailer, while all those others have to crowd the road with their balloon car bulk, have to sicken the air with their evil exhaust, have to make susceptible young folks go to war to protect the oil, have to make the whole world dangerous with their heavy steel speed and greed, and what a weapon way of life that is. What a pity.

April 19

Because of budget shortfalls, rising costs of gasoline and health care, and political spinelessness, the Metropolitan Council, the appointed governing body that operates Metro Transit, the transit agency, is proposing massive service cuts along with a fare increase for later this year. Those cuts hits every bus line in my neighborhood. The cuts are draconian and just terribly unfair.

There was a hearing yesterday at city hall. This was just one of the public hearings the Metro Council has held to get citizen comment on their proposed service reductions. I went to the hearing with my little video camera to shoot an episode of my On Transit public access show. One after another person got up to the small box podium and talked about how the cuts would affect them. Several others suggested in their 3 minutes that the Metro Council was not doing enough to get the state legislature and governor to get them the money they needed to operate the system. There were also people who had specific complaints about transit service - bad things that had happened to them while waiting for transit or on a ride.

There were several blind people who testified and several people in wheelchairs. There was a group of homeless transit riders, and there were people who had some range of developmental disabilities. Many of the people who testified were the people you do not hear from every day, at least you do not hear from them from the power of the political rostrum, you do not hear from them on the mainstream media. The well-spoken people in suits were there too, but were the minority in this assembly, just like they are a minority of the transit riders in this town.

What seemed to be particularly absent was the media. I had my little camera, but I saw no other cameras. I looked around the room and did not even notice hands writing down notes for the print media. The Metro Council had some cassette tapes, and a Metro Council staff person was taking notes, but I wonder how much of that was a show. Several speakers suggested that the cuts were going to be made no matter what was said today. The Metro Council members said that this was not the case, but that is also what you expect them to say.

I signed up to speak, and I said a few words. I was amazed at the extra power I felt with my voice amplified by the microphone into the room. I was amazed at the power that I felt added to my weakling strength from all the people listening, and who seemed to be agreeing with me. This kind of power disturbed me a little. I see how public speaking can be addicting, just like the power you get when your hand can steer a big beast car is addicting.

I left the hearing as the speeches still ran on. I left fifteen minutes after the hearing was supposed to have ended. I got a couple shots of buses and trains going past City Hall, and then I went back to work.

April 20

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