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| I raise my right hand to try my best to not ride in a car this year 2005. In this diary I will try to explain why and how. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 April 20 A co-worker forwarded an article to me that is actually an excerpt from a new book by James Howard Kunstler. My co-worker was pretty freaked out about what the piece had to say, but not so freaked out that he did not take his car to the shop to get it fixed so he could remain dependent on it. I saw Kunstler speak a few years ago at a Bicycling Convention here. I have read his nonfiction books about car culture and the shape of cities. His new book is about the coming end of the petroleum age, and what that is going to mean. Mostly, it is going to mean the shaking asunder of our entire system. Our culture, and particularly our U.S. culture, is an oil culture. We eat oil for oil is what supports our gargantuan industrial agriculture. We build our cities on addictive dependence to cheap oil, we shape them so that oil is the only fuel that can tie them together, from work to home to recreation. Oil has seeped into every small crevice of our lives, it lubricates our culture, our leadership is made of oil. The cheap plastic products we buy are made of oil. We might as well just say that we are made of oil. But oil is a nonrenewable resource. Oil is something that is going to come in smaller and smaller quantities in the coming years. In his article, Kunstler suggests that this year, 2005, is the year of peak oil production. This year, more oil will come out of the ground that any year before this year. More oil will come out of the ground this year than any year after 2005. That is called Baggert's curve, and it is named after a Texas petroleum engineer who developed it in the 1950's. He used this tool to predict that the peak year of oil production in the U.S would be around 1970. His prediction was accurate. U.S. petroleum production fell after that year, and we dig out less and less of the oil we use all the time from our soils. Baggert predicted years ago that the year of peak world oil production would be around 2000. He is looking pretty close on that one too. After this year of peak petroleum production, we are on the downslope of the curve. The remaining oil gets harder and harder to pump out, and more expensive. What this means to our culture, so dependent on cheap oil that we might as well be made of the stuff, could be total chaos. Could be collapse. That is what Kunstler writes about. What will the future be like if we have built the present on an unsustainable infrastructure? He paints a not so rosy picture. Our leadership knows about this. After all, our leadership is made of oil too. They have their illusions that the year of peak production is twenty years down the road, rather than now, but they know about Baggert, and they probably believe it too. They are just mum about the whole thing because the whole thing is frightening, because the whole thing means the end of things as we know them. That is why you need to join me in my carfree 2005. That is why I need to get on to planting more vegetables in my backyard garden. That is why we need to stop building roads and build rail instead, which can get things around even after the oil gets too expensive. That is why if we keep doing what we are doing at this moment, we are so screwed. My friend Jennifer, who used to host the original On the Bus show that I made with her and my friend Mustafa years ago, now works at a program called Interact, which provides arts resources for artists with disabilities. I had mentioned to her one day at a bus stop that I wanted to do an On Transit show about the public art along the Hiawatha Line and she suggested that she could set up something with the clients in her program. Yesterday we took that ride. I met my friend Trevor at the Warehouse District station and the Interact people were already there. We rode the train out to the Bloomington Central station and then back to downtown and stopped at several stations along the way back for art critique and experience sessions. I also asked some of the people from Interact about their art, and their thoughts about the Hiawatha Line ride. Several of them had never ridden the train before, and had thoughts about this first experience with light rail transit. Two of the people on the tour had walkers, so we were sometimes a slow group getting off and on the trains. The train drivers like to keep the trains going on time, which means opening and closing the doors quickly. We had a couple incidents of loudspeaker rebukes from the drivers to not hold the doors open. The train has such great big windows to see the art at the stations and the landscape all around the train passing by. The train has wide hallways that encourage a kind of communal space, and our ride was as much a social event as it was a trip that actually took us somewhere. I took some interviews with the people from Interact, shooting with my small camera and my long shotgun microphone, while Trevor got B-roll shots, just generally taping things going on, train images, reflections and people. Together we shot almost four hours of video on a trip only a little longer than two hours. In a couple weeks I will be trying to edit it all down to a half hour On Transit show. The people on the ride loved the ride and really were amazed at the art. Some regular riders had not noticed some particular pieces of art on previous rides. One of the common themes was that there were no explanations for most of the art pieces, and some kind of gallery signs would have been appreciated. One rider told me that she had not ridden the train before because she had some security concerns about it, but was hoping that after the ride we took together she would have the confidence to ride alone. I think she got that confidence on this wonderful Rolling Hiawatha Art Review, a beautiful blue sky morning train ride for art. I visited the newly expanded Walker Art Center yesterday. I missed the grand opening on Sunday, but I had to check out the beautiful new building some time, so I visited it to see what it was like. The Walker is one of the institutions that keeps me here - it is a big city amenity that we are so lucky to have in this not so big city. It is here because of the communal pride of earlier generations of rich people. It is here because local business leaders cared about art, and were willing to put money into the public enjoyment of it. These days, unfortunately, many of those rich people moved out to the suburbs, where they learned not to be so generous. The City of Minneapolis put money into the new Walker Art Center as well. The city's contribution provided the base of the new building. The city's contribution is what the new building is built on top of. The city contributed the parking garage. Pretty much every newly constructed building these days comes with a parking ramp. Usually the parking ramp provides the base of the building. There is an underground ramp to provide the bedrock for the building. The place itself is simply superstructure. That was not the case just thirty-five years ago, when the old part of the Walker was built. They made a building, and parking had to be somewhere else. Maybe they tore down another building and built a flat parking plain with the space. Maybe they just figured people would get there some way or another, or park on the street. Now every building must come with parking. An underground labyrinth of parking is the usual gold standard of modern Minneapolis construction. When I did take my one car ride so far this year a couple weeks ago in the car that my friend Sarah had at her disposal, the first part of our ride was down the spiral of the Coffman Union ramp, down the side of the riverbank. The great stone walls of the Mississippi were just to our left. Now they were the back view of a parking facility built into the cliffs. Now the majestic rock faces were a part of the ashtray, something for the extra exhaust to stick on. When our little house was made in 1894, they built it on top of a root cellar. Living on top of food makes a little more sense to me than living on top of fossil fuel depleters. We are holding ourselves up with waiting space, with grey temporary jails for our jumbo cars and trucks. That is the Metropolis basement upon which our gleaming new cities of art and knowledge and life are constructed. Parking is what holds up our planet of cars. It is also in the same place that we usually reserve for hell. On Earth Day there are always a few editorials on the radio or in the paper about how you can have a gentler impact on the earth. They will tell you to get rid of your SUV and drive a small car instead. They will tell you to drive a more fuel-efficient car, or maybe even get a hybrid car, because that is a way to help out the old earth. They tell you that instead of one kind of car, you should get another kind of car, but how can any kind of car be friendly to the earth. I do not think that anybody can call themselves an environmentalist and drive a car. Driving a car is the harshest thing that anybody will probably ever do, environment wise, in their entire life. It does not matter if it is a small car or a big car. If it is a car, it will do great hell to the earth. Even a small car puts sixty tons of CO2 gas into the atmosphere every year. That is tons of gas, and it takes a lot of gas to make a ton. Every car spews out pollutants. Even so-called green cars are as toxic in their manufacture, and almost as toxic in their daily use. But what worries me most about cars and what they do to the poor old earth is the infrastructure that they require, and that we are giving to them on our bankruptcy gold platter. Cars require that you seal off the world with oil or concrete so that they can run and park. We have done this for great stretches of the planet. We have done this to a major percentage of our land. We need to do this, because if we did not do it cars would be too bumpy to be useful. Roads are the great earth problem. They are the curse of our century and time. Animals get killed on roads, millions of animals every year get killed on roads. Roads interrupt animal migration patters. Roads are linear slaughterhouses. Roads kill people too. You can not be for the earth and be for roads. Roads seal off the lips of the earth so that the rain cannot get thru. Roads need to be slathered with chemicals so that the slippery wheels of cars can drive on them in the winter. Roads are meant for cars, which are inefficient metal monsters. Roads are as anti-earth as you can get. Just owning a car means covering up some of the earth, and if you have a car you should be spending your whole year asking forgiveness of the earth for you have sworn at it with your entire garage of living. Railroad tracks are far more earth friendly. The frequency of vehicles is far less than on roads. This makes it possible for animals and humans to cross them with dignity and life. Water can seep down because tracks are permeable to rain. You do not need to chemicalize them for winter travel because the train's wheel's grooves just fit inside the rail. Roads are engaged in a war against the earth. The earth is battered down, but it still is winning. The earth is destroying the roads as fast as roads can be set down on top of the earth to smother it. Lay down a road, and soon there will be cracks. The cracks are the first step in the earth's mighty revenge. The greatest Earth Day will be the Earth Day that we take sledgehammers and jackhammers to disintegrate all the roads. We will get to all the road destruction spots by taking trains or walking. When we smash up the roads, we will be freeing the earth. Then we will really be doing it a favor. Then we will have a day we can really call Earth Day. In my dream, I noticed that at one local gas station the price of gas shot up over night to $6.87 a gallon. At the other local gas station, the price accelerated to $7.28. This was not so much a dream as it was prophecy. When the price of gas gets that high, more people will be having the kind of day that we had yesterday. In the morning, for example, we hosted a block club meeting in our kitchen. A few people from the two blocks around us came to talk about safety issues on our blocks. In the evening, we walked six blocks to an old church hall, Pulaski Hall, for "Hotdish Revolution." This was an event put on by the three neighborhood groups around us. At the Revolution, people brought hot dishes, local celebrity judges sampled and judged them, and then we all ate, sitting packed close together in long tables in a room the size of some living rooms. But we had oh so much joyous community fun. Our Sheridan neighborhood cookers won several of the top awards, and we basked in our haughty neighborhood superiority over the cooks of Holland and Bottineau. In other words, when the price of gas accelerates like it did in my dream, it will be the best thing in a century for the notion of community. Here in Minneapolis, we already have the underlying infrastructure for that, we already have the community groups in place. These groups will only get stronger as people will not be able to afford to drive to things farther away. If you want to do something on a Saturday night in the future, you will be doing it at a church hall six blocks away, and not at a night club on the other side of town, or at a casino down the freeway after driving thirty minutes. The whole idea of a Twin Cities metropolitan area will pretty much fall apart into a bunch of individual adjacent cantons. The city of Minneapolis, about fifty square miles, will really become a city in itself, and not some amorphous part of a larger complex of parking and lawns, the metroplex of six or seven counties. Minneapolis is about the same geographical size as Paris and San Francisco. It is about the perfect size for a compact regional powerful city in itself. St. Paul will become a different place altogether. The suburbs will become places as far away and remote as Duluth is now (they are already essentially equally remote to us because we have no car). This scenario I am painting is pretty much what our lives are like now. We will have to help everybody else cope with their new local community lives when the dream becomes reality and the gas turns to $8. It was not m intention originally to make an entry every day in this journal. For the first two weeks of this carfree year I did not. I did not know what to say. I could have explained my purpose. I could have said it all in one set of words and paragraphs and have been finished for the year. Then I could have gone on with my life of mornings and back to the fiction fantasies that I usually work on writing every morning of my usual carfree life. But instead I kept on going with this diary, even if it means that some days I am repeating myself. Some days I wake up and just do not know what to say but I feel now that for some reason I have to keep the daily thread going. Last year it was my goal to ride in a car only one time each month. I kept to that plan, to some degree. On some months I rode more than once. I knew that later in a month I would need to take a ride for one reason or another, and yet I consented to a trip by car at the beginning of the month. Sometimes it was just the socially easier thing to do. And that was also the case the one time so far that I rode in a car this year. I knew from the beginning that it would not be hard to go almost all year without riding in a car. As long as I keep to the confines of my usual life, it would be no problem at all. But I share the world with others, and sometimes that involves car transportation. It is not a challenge for me to do without a car, but it is a challenge for me to be social engaged with others who live their lives in the sea of thought that defines cars with transportation in almost every case, in every case. My plan was never to starve myself from cars this year and then gorge myself with rides come next January 1st. Altho I do expect that come January 1 I will be back to writing my usual fictions rather than this daily journal of no account. All I am doing is expressing my usual life to a slightly more fuller degree, and stating the case for it, tho I expect that nobody is reading my little soliloquy here. The peace of this morning has already been disturbed by cars. The night itself was cut into pieces by their roar. The river of University Avenue traffic has already set in a steady stream of noise tedium, the sound of souls commuting themselves away from themselves. I will have no reason to get in a car today. I had no reason to get in a car yesterday, and so I did not. But I did do things. I traveled on my bicycle and I got around quite easily, tho I did have to fend off earth-destroying monsters on every street and corner. It is not impossible for me to do what I am doing, it is only natural. It is necessary for me, and it is the easier way to go. Cars are much more difficult. It takes a lot of propaganda to make people think that cars are easy, and that they are appealing. It takes a lot of brainwashing to make folks think that, and the car companies have paid for such brainwashing. This is my flimsy sword to their mind-control. This is my tiny brainwashing. It will change no lives, but it keeps me feeling fresh. George Bush meets with his old friend the leader of Saudi Arabia crown prince Abdullah, but this time the crown prince leaves the bush waiting for half an hour before he shows up. The crown prince shows up real late, but the bush is willing to wait. Bush asks the crown prince to pump up his oil production and lower his oil prices because the high prices of oil (as if they were actually high) are making the bush's people unhappy. The bush tells the crown prince that he should lower his prices because high oil prices might just drive people away from the crown prince's product. As if. That is like a junky saying that the high price of heroin might just drive him to lemonade. Price might slow him down, but the only thing that is going to make him quit is the desire to improve his lot. And that is the only thing that is going to get us to quit or even slow down in our runaway oil addiction. The crown prince does not have to be democratic, he does not have to be nice, he does not even have to be a friend any more. He just needs to have oil. That gives him the power to make the bush of junky nation wait for him for thirty minutes because the price of junk is too high and it is making the junkies in junky nation nervous. The horse dealer has these giant flowing robes, and under the influence of oil addiction they even look a little like flowing water which reminds you of oil which makes you itch a little for that good stuff that you have that hankering for. The crown prince scratches his beard, his face. He will see what he can do, like a good dealer should. He will step up oil production, not this year, not next year, but when he feels like it. He already knows that his power is only going to last as long as the liquid junk flows out, and that day will wait until his children and they will have to cope with the crazed giant in withdrawal. His kids will have to face off with the dizzy wounded beast on the other side of earth, bonkers mad, but that also cannot go anywhere because it built all the wrong infrastructure. "It is great to work close to where you live!" said Denise yesterday as I dropped off some things for my neighborhood volunteer work at the local Housing Resource Center. She walks to work, and I was on my way by bike to work after I dropped off those things. And one of the secrets for not needing a car is making a life where you do not need to commute great distances. It is fairly easy to live without a car if you work someplace not too far from where you live. My commute by bike or bus is about ten minutes. The walk takes about half an hour. When we were looking for a house to buy ten years ago, one of the first decisions we made was the neighborhood we were going to move to. We decided on that neighborhood based on ease of getting to our jobs at the time. Location was the first priority, but the overwhelming location factor was proximity to the things we needed to go to. We do not need a car because of the lives we have built up over the years. Having a car for us would be overkill. But so many people build up lives that become dependent on cars because they build into their lives these vast commutes. They conquer geography every day, and then they take it back. They are explorers every morning of the exact same vast wilderness, and then they de-explore it by going back home in the evening. This kind of lifestyle is the height of folly. This permanent waste of energy to go back and forth will have to go down as one of the most stupid harebrains of history ever. Roads are filled with cars, air is filled with pollution, precious fuels are burned and lives are lost only for the long trips back and forth by those people who made a name for themselves by their very poor planning. Each morning they make a trip that will be obliterated by their evening trip. It all adds up to meaninglessness, and it is taking the whole planet down by the madness of this repetition. Commuting is not living. Commuting is a way of dying. Commuting is a way of bringing the whole house down with your miserable mistake. I make my short bike hop from work to home and repeat it in the evening. It is a short trip, and I also get a little exercise. When I ride the bus, I get a couple pages read, not much. The light rain on my bike rides to and from work yesterday even felt nice on my face and glasses. Sure it is a commute I make, but it could also just be a neighborhood stroll in disguise. That is the secret. The creatures and the places that we kill in our carelessness and heedlessness, the lives and stillness that we scratch to extinction have a way of coming back, have a way of haunting us. When we destroy a species, when we destroy a background, a set of nation or of soil, these things move into our dreams and then they live there and they inhabit us. They turn us into haunted house. The animals that we kill with our roadways and our roadhogs, they have a way to get inside our heads and hog us into cracked thoughts to free them. The landscapes that we pave over with our craziness of asphalt, that we try to tame their spirits by saying their name on the emptiness with which we replaced their ancestry, they move into our bodies, they move into our heads, into our headaches and our pains. The things that we kill off turn us into their own voodoo dolls. The things that we ignore with all our cars and all our malls, they find a way into our ignorance to haunt our gas prices and our memory of the future. The things that we roll over on our way to our next appointment, they have a way to contaminate our speed. They find a way to worm into our freedom, into our passion. They have a way to tranquilize it when we thought we had the gun. We are not careful, but the things that we kill are careful to find a last restingplace. We try to fill up the earth with our mistakes, but the earth remembers them with its powers of rotting. We might be smug and shiny, but the shininess, the sharp edges of our man-made death, will stab us in the back with some kind of new confusion when we are slightly less than aware. The pain we cause will migrate back to us. The pavement misery we bring to all things will return in the spring to peck away our confidence. Maybe it will come in the form of gas prices, maybe it will take on the shape of some other kind of mortal force field. Maybe it will just wash our dreams with our harriedness. Maybe it will just turn our fine minds into a fog that can only repeat its violation, that can only remember our last bit of brainwashing. Riding my bicycle thru downtown at rush hour I get the strong impression that I am witnessing an entire civilization practicing its own annihilation. Despite the rising prices of oil, the streets are still packed from side to side with automobile pachyderms all containing the tiny seed of each one person. One small carbon element surrounded by plush seating and accessories while the bush pleads with the Saudis to lower the price of oil, and they say no. The crabapple trees are blooming white and pink. Sometimes I can smell them, when the odor of exhaust recedes a little. Sometimes I seriously wonder if I will make it home alive negotiating my bicycle past the steel combustion shooting aiming pounding behemoths of car. I am hearing the term "Peak Oil" whispered and written more often. There is some awareness of the phenomenon, of oil being non-renewable, of the run down date approaching or already past. There is some chatter about dribbling oil, that perhaps the last days of oil, or at least the last years of oil, may not be all that far off, and yet the nation is too arrogant to take the hint, to take it seriously. Car drivers get too sedated by their car stereo, too strapped in their seatbelts to think about change, to consider that they might alter some of their earth-eating habits. Any change will not be voluntary, will not be easy. Any movement away from oil addiction will be one drag kicking and screaming. As long as there is one driver, everybody else will still want to drive as well. Even if they are bleeding for all the money they send to oil, they will do it, until they turn to sticks and stones, until their eyes are oil caps too. Even if they have to mix their modern bodies with the dinosaurs to get the right octane. Even if they have to smuggle their arm in past the nozzle, and cut off their teeth and ears to burn them for the night's commute. Even if they have to wriggle their night club body in itself, and blow up their hair and brain to make the internal combustion when the oil runs out. I have a feeling that they will not let go of their cars easily, they will not let go of them like mature human beings who can realize a wrong done. They have practiced two tons of annihilation for too long to just let go. They have rehearsed their uneasy exit for so long that when their cue comes it will be very very messy. April 30 Walking on water Was made with a car You too can be Jesus Behind the wheel Of your large automobile Practice the death drive Now roll over Those old things It is as easy As forgetting This is your mission Mein fuehrer the car pilot Gobble up the Crust of man Eat the wind up Too, it is flavor enhancing Keep on munching Until you are As fat as car Sometimes you are Just so hungry That is because you eat for two You and your car Cannot change Despite the Dissonance A rut is a rut Even if it means Annihilation I am happy I am car I am stupid I think road No more oysters No more animals Just stripes to follow Your leader is dotted Inside the parking world Yesterday's roads Will be today's cemeteries The actual photo albums Of our time |
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