August 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

August 1

My original goal this year was to not ride in cars at all. But I have done that, so my new goal is to ride in cars as few times as possible. Last month, for a trip I took to a place where there was not really mass transit, I rode in cars. It was the social thing to do. It was the easy thing to do. Mostly this is a record of how I get around without owning a car and the reasons why I try to avoid them, even avoiding rides in them because of the war and the global warming that they bring about.

Of one thing I am proud: in my life I have never been the only one in a moving car. Being the only person in a moving car is something of the national past time these days in the U.S., and that is one practice that I have never shared, ever. I did drive a few times, and that was when I was taking driver's training classes in school. I took the class against my will, but I had the will then only of a sixteen year old, but I suppose my will these days is not much different.

I remember once after driver's training class I was riding in the car with my mother and she said I needed to practice driving. I had not been practicing and the class was months away. She said I needed to practice and said that I was going to drive the rest of the way home. It was just a few blocks, but I did not want to do it. I got into the driver's seat and everything felt wrong. I did drive the last few blocks home, but I drove too close to the curb, like a bicyclist would, and was not sure of my steering. The car did not go where I looked it to go. I was only three blocks away from home but it seems like I almost did not make it. I went far too slow, because I did not want to move this thing, I did not want to cause any harm, so I barely made it go. I must have been sixteen or seventeen. That was the last time I drove a car. I am forty-two now.

They tried to teach me how to drive in a class at school. They might as well teach us all in school how to murder and commit crimes. Taking driving class in school was one of the most uncomfortable sequences of times I have ever had to tolerate. I just felt so out of place. It all just felt so wrong. And tho I got my learner's permit I did not practice driving. I did well in school, but I did poorly in driving class. I did not want to be there, which was the opposite of everyone else, who wanted their driver's license more than anything else, more than a good job and family, more than world peace and stability, more than love or hope or food. They all wanted it, and I wanted to avoid it. And here I am, and I am still who I am.

August 2

Today is National Night Out and tonight we will have a block club party to celebrate that. I get to block off the street in front of our house with police tape so we can have a potluck and get to know each other. Over a month ago I went up and down the block to get permission from the people living here. That means that tonight I can block off the street from cars, and we the people can gather in the street to have a potluck food and I can grill up my Chicago and coney dogs and we can talk and chat and draw chalk pictures on the street, and then, if it does not rain, I will take out the movie projector and show some movies.

Streets used to be where these things happened, where people met, where kids played. The street used to be the thing that built community. They used to do that, before some fool decided to surrender them completely to cars.

With smelly loud dangerous cars on the street, who even wanted to get close to the street? When the streets went to cars, the people hung out in their back yards. They lost touch with each other, until t he whole city turned into a city of strangers. Seeing your neighbor was now startling and a little unnerving. Does that person really live near me? There are so many houses whose people I have never even seen, houses on my block. Those people come and go thru their back doors. But I should talk, with my house behind tall hedges to screen my yard off from the noise and smell and hell of cars.

Tonight I will ask some neighbors to help me carry our picnic table into the street. I will take my grill down into the street and get it going. I will take out lawn chairs and other people will take out lawn chairs and scatter them from sidewalk to sidewalk. It is sure to be a hot night, but we will stay cooled with the growing darkness of evening. There are no longer boulevard trees on my block to shade us. Those were all removed half a century ago to make the street wider for cars.

We have got to take the street back. Not just today, but everyday. We have to throw the cars out of the house. It is not decent to live with all their footprints. They do not act like guests, they take the whole place over. First step is tonight. Next step will be all the other days.

August 3

Last night we had the street blocked off. Last night we strung the police tape from one side of the street to the other so we could stand and sit and be there, in the place where you never seem to ever see your neighbors. Some people came out of their houses to eat and chat and watch movies but so many others did not. Some of them were just inside their houses. I could tell from the lights that were turned on and off.

As the party went on, we occupied the street with our picnic table and lawn chairs and grill and bodies. As we stood there, tiny in the street, cars would come up to the tape with their mean headlight eyes and brutal car bodies and look they wanted to drive thru the tape, like big hungry animals thwarted by that strip of plastic. They could not go there now, but just wait, they seemed to be saying, just wait.

The Mighty Mouse cartoons unwound from my movie projector, and because of the wind, Hank, a young teen, sat under the screen and held it in place. It was dark all around us but there was one streetlight overhead. Uneaten food was on the table and a few last brats cooked on the grill. Soon the party was over and we had to clear out the street.

After we carried the picnic table back up to our yard and put the chairs and the grill away, we also had to take down the thin strip of yellow tape that signified our block event. After that tape came down, it was almost as if the cars had been lined up and waiting to take over their domain once again. As soon as the tape was down, cars were back in the street, making it dangerous, re-making it into their no man's land. They were hungry for that street. They were ready to devour it.

A few hours meant a little, a little peace in the on-going street drag race of the car lives of the city. It is too bad that we cannot have that community every night, that we cannot have that street all day long to build that community, to make into our real planetary living room, to call our own for our legs and hands and faces. We have to give it to the cars 24/7 almost all days of the year, and it is hard to build back feelings between people, it is hard to build back handshakes and nods and glances when the mission of the day is drive past quickly, and fear the street for traffic.

August 4

Fourteen Marines were killed by a bomb in Iraq yesterday. Who knows how many Iraqis were killed in the day. The U.S. government, led by a squad of zombie oilmen, continues on its war folly even tho it is looking more clearly, day to day, like the quagmire that it is. It is a quagmire over oil. It is a quagmire for the U.S. right to be wasteful of limited resources, a quagmire for the will to live in the second and not think about a minute later, excepting the future thinking required in get rich quick schemes.

Soldiers are dying and people are dying and a nation is falling apart all for our greed for oil. Oil that is just blown away forever, burned for going back and forth, for transportation that is not transportation, for a kind of vibration, for a pointless way of standing still by back and forth. This commuting way of life, this commuting by burning oil in a solo car, the most wasteful of our wasteful ways, and we need a whole war to support it, to support it for the next few seconds, to support it when it is so pointless in the first place.

The war is the best and latest reason to steer clear of cars but nobody seems to be steering clear of cars. This country drives like a zombie, back and forth, living the wasteful unsustainable life of suburb and begging for more oil, for lower oil prices that cannot stay low because the crude stuff is running out, and even a big fat war will not keep the prices down, even the sacrifice of young men and women to the oil god will not appease that crude oil face when the whole thing is so wrong in the first place, is so frantic with incorrectness, is so brazen with error.

Here we die in our lives in North America. Here we take down the whole sinking ship with our oily back and forth. No signs of guilt. No signs of real life. I am reporting from atop my two feet as I look upon the wreckage of car civilization. There are no brains but gears. Here is no hope but utter incomprehensible last drops for last drips.

August 5

The price of gasoline shot up twenty cents yesterday at my neighborhood gas stations. It might slide slightly down again but the trend is up. And still people talk about cars as if they will be around forever.

I have been biking back and forth between work and home. That has been my week. I have been too busy at work and too tired from it to do any other excursions. I have been leading a media camp at work, teaching ten year olds how to make video, and they have so much energy that it wears my energy down. Future drivers might have to tap that kind of energy to move their cars. They might as well be burning ten year olds for their oil addiction. The car addicts are certainly burning up any easy future those ten year olds might have.

The nights that I have not had to work, I have just spent around home. Last night we walked two blocks down to a neighborhood restaurant, the Modern Café, for dinner, and then after dinner walked down 13th Avenue, where some of the small galleries were open and we could take a look and get a crepe. The walk was calming, and good for us, and the same place that we usually walk, but it was still an adventure because of all the subtle things we can notice only from that repetition and familiarity. We noticed some of the slightly decayed pedestrian infrastructure. We saw the weeds that had shot up between sidewalk cracks and between property lines. The people with the weeds on their property must not walk much. You only really notice those things if you take walks. If you only drive by them, you only see it all as a blur.

At our block club party on Tuesday, some of the road people there were complaining about the quality of our roads and streets. All I could think about was how the roads and streets have gotten all the money for decades, while transit and pedestrian infrastructure have gotten the shaft. And still, despite getting so much public money, the roads and streets are crumbling. The car transportation system is still a mess, despite so much money thrown at it. Big trucks and the seasons are splitting it all apart. Spending for car transportation is like throwing money out of the window. Burning oil is burning the whole world up, is certainly burning up the future that today's kids will have to build back from scratch.

Can you exhaust the novelty of a small patch of earth or city? Do you need to drive great distances to find the latest cabin attraction? There is so much in my small backyard, enough butterflies and flowers to occupy me for years and years. Even going to work some days seems like going much too far, and it is not very far.

August 6

Mind and geography, geography and thinking, are so closely twined. No wonder people think they cannot give up their cars. They know the whole world only thru a windshield. They cannot think without a rearview mirror and a window to roll down. A place is not a place unless it has street signs and direction arrows. They cannot find their way unless there are dirt roads or paved roads.

A house is not a house unless it has a garage attached. A place is not a place unless it has on or off-street parking. You cannot discover your own inner landscape unless it has at least a four lane highway. The only way to go, inside or outside, is by car.

If the only directions you can give are car directions, no wonder you cannot figure out how to walk to the grocery store or take a bus. If you have to burn gas to visit your family, you have to burn gas to know addition, subtraction and history, as well as to discover who the heck you are.

My mother arrived in town yesterday after a cross country road trip. She drove from Portland, Oregon to here, but once she got here, all she wanted to do was walk. We took a long walk to the St. Anthony area, about a half hour of walking, and had some dinner, then we took the long way back, along the Mississippi River and across the Stone Arch bridge, which is for bikes and pedestrians only. There were many other pedestrians there on the bridge, at the bottom of our walk, but few on the sides of our walk or at the top of it near home. But many cars passed us, many cars with people who only seem to be able to see geographical distance as the thing you cross with cars. Only short distances, a block or so, or across the pedestrian bridge, are geographies of walking.

Tuesday night, a friend, who had just biked about five blocks to our block club party, told me that this was the first time she had ridden a bike since high school, and now she was in her thirties. We all need some first times, some first times and first steps and first things every day. We all need to discover our geographies, inside and out, on our feet, and maybe even on a smaller scale, on our hands and knees. That is how we will know that we can still think without machines, that is how we will know how we can think our way out of our car disaster.

August 8

It is amazing how quickly a car cuts across space. If you are inside it you do not feel the pain or the adventure, you just press the elevator button and you wait. It is amazing how quickly space falls in surrender to you when you are in a car. I forget about this because I ride in cars so infrequently.

I went riding fifty miles and back this weekend, and rode it in a car. K and I rode in my mother's car with her driving to a couple of farms for a family reunion. I got inside the car and let myself get moved across the countryside. All I had to do was sit there. All I had to do was doze off and wait for the world around me to change.

Almost all the times I end up riding in a car are when family is around, and when I have family destinations, family trips. I always feel a little helpless then, for I do not drive, for a do not have a permit to drive, for I do not know how to drive. All I can do is sit there. I cannot take an active part, I cannot drive myself around, so somebody else has to do the driving work and I just sit there like a deadbeat. My only other option is to not participate. I could have ridden my bike down there this weekend, but it would have taken a day to get there and a night to get back. If I did that, I would also have to make more of a spectacle of myself than I care to.

Someday it will not be so easy to get around so easily. Someday soon cars will not cut it, and then, perhaps, I will rise to the occasion. I have much experience getting around by walking and biking and transit. I have experience living my entire life that way, so I will have advice to give if anybody wants to listen. I will have suggestions that might be just a little worthwhile listening to.

But for now, while cars still have that grin on their faces, I have to sit back like I did when I was nine. I have to sit back on my seat and watch the world go by, riding in the car on Saturday, riding back to my home on Sunday. I have to sit there and let somebody else take me, somebody who is a car adult, for I am 42 but still a car child, still an infant as far as the big brutal bully world of cars is concerned.

But when the cars start to breathe their last, I will rise to the occasion and be the walking adult. So many others will be walking children, and I will have to help them grow up in the ways of non-car transportation. For the time of cars will be over soon, and the time of feet will return very quickly.

August 9

Last night, after work, we rode the bus downtown to see a move in Loring Park. Our trip there and back were both made much more difficult because of the nightly summer bus reroute, the experiment to take buses away from the diners at the expensive restaurants along the transit mall, Nicollet Mall.

On our way downtown, the bus driver started down Nicollet, even tho it was past the time that the bus reroute began for the night. None of the passengers pointed out to him the error, but I kept on seeing all those signs that say that from 6:30 to 11 p.m., buses do not run on Nicollet. We were hoping that something had changed and he was correct, because the run down Nicollet, the bus's usual run, would take us closer to our destination. But after going several blocks down the wrong street, he announced his mistake and made a turn. We asked if we could get off the bus, but he would not let any riders off until he was back on the correct rerouted street. The bus was already quite late, and his loop made us even later than we were hoping to be. He was actually quite close to where we wanted to be when he discovered his error, but we had to get out later and much farther from where we had to go.

The movie was great at the park, and we talked to friends we met there on our blanket on the grass, but the movie showers had to stop the movie before the end for rain was starting to fall. We had to head back to our bus but once again we had problems, because we were not sure exactly where to catch our buses with the reroute and ended up going on quite a long walk to find a bus stop we were sure it would stop at.

City leaders have no problem putting transit riders thru all sorts of inconveniences because those leaders do not ride transit themselves, or at least do not ride it very often. If they rode transit more often, they would not agree to this kind of reroute nonsense.

Once we were on the bus, we were fine, it was a great ride. The air conditioning felt very good on the hot and muggy night of 10:30.

I rode the bus to work earlier that day, and then back home after work. At the bus stop in the morning, I waited with some neighbors and we had a nice talk about all kinds of things. The transit system carries many people to their jobs, and it works very well for that, but most of those people, when they get home and want to do something social, they take a car instead. Using transit for social things and for shopping and for everything other than working can sometimes be quite frustrating in this town. But we did get from here to there and back again last night. We just had a little more of a puzzling adventure to take us there and back than most drivers would have.

August 10

The price of gas is up to $2.45 a gallon at our local gas stations. It shot up twenty cents in one day. It is hard to miss the writing on the wall, but many people are. There is much talk of oil companies profiteering but little talk of the approach of oil depletion.

The truth is that any investment in car infrastructure, any investment in roads and highways, has to be seen as a short-term investment. Any money spent on a car or on the system to serve them has to be considered the same as just throwing money out the window. The system of car transportation will not be with us for much longer, but still most people act as if it will be forever.

The transportation bill recently passed by the U.S. Congress spends 80% on car transportation and 20% on transit, walking and bikes. That is about as stupid as you can get in light of world oil supplies and how they are pumping to nothing. And our economy is changing in ways that will make it impossible for the average American to even afford to buy a car in a few years. We will be too poor to be able to afford that up-front investment in the expensive car transportation system. We will not be able to even get on the entry ramp of our well-appointed roads, but neither will we have a fall back to serve all those new folks who will no longer be getting around with cars.

Your mind has to be blocked pretty hard, fogged in very thick, to miss the obvious signs. Your mind has to be pretty contaminated with car addiction to think that all this folly can go on much longer. There are little bits of aha moments poking out from the sludge of contemporary transportation thinking every once in a while but mostly the sound and speak and pictures ignore the elephant in the living room, and pretend that our wasteful ways will serve us forever. The thinking is that our absurd car condition will continue despite the abrupt end that it is easy to see will soon hit us like a brick.

If your eyes are open and if you are not clouded by car addition, this brick is so easy to see. It is so simple to see it all a-coming. If you walk for a living, and to breathe and to get there, you can see it coming like an express train rolling fast down a mountain.

August 11

Sloppy BooksContac

t: E-mail me