August 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10

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August 11

I have been teaching this media camp for ten years olds the last two weeks, and ten ten year olds can really run you down. It takes quite a bit of mental and physical energy to make it thru the day, and I am feeling a little haggard, a little ragged, and mostly tired. But even tho I'm feeling a little worn out, I always have the energy to bicycle to work. As long as it isn't stormy in the morning when I need to get going (then I'll take the bus).

I just roll my legs on over the saddle and there I am, tall and prone on my bicycle. I get my balance real quickly by pushing a bit forward, and then I turn the pedals and then I make some excellent forward progress movement. I use the streets to get there, I keep to the right edge like a good cyclist should. I see all the usual sights, the houses and parked cars and trees along my way, and the buildings that I sometimes have to examine up and down, by spinning my head and eyes, and I can still look out so I do not get smushed by one of the those cars that seem to think they own everything.

It is a swift short ride, unless the wind makes a mountain that I have to climb by pumping. Then I look down to see that my feet can still make those tiny ferris wheels, round and round but slower this time because I have run into some weather molasses, because it is making me work, the wind and the air pressure.

And when I get to my work destination, I make my fancy dismounting maneuver, cross my legs back over the saddle as I am still gliding and stand on the pedal until I come to a standing stop. Next I have to use my feet to carry me, walk both my body and my bike to the door, and thru and open. Then it is the ten year olds all over again, and I go from inflated with hope and day to deflated form all that battering day long. Later I will get to ride my bike back home, but I will take it all in, I will still have the tiny strength needed to make it home.

August 12

Last Saturday night we walked down the long farm driveway road between rows of cornstalks taller than we were. We walked thru the valley of corn until we reached the dirt highway and the near darkness of there, and then we were surrounded by the sky turning sunset. The world seemed so big, or at least the sky did, from flat horizon to horizon. The fields of tall corn took your eyes as far as they could go, and the sound was all the crickets, and the stillness, and the stars.

The moon was an angry thin red dagger gouging down into the ground while the stars came out bright and pointed, and the milky way too, a spill that your eyes could barely see, that dared you to look and see it all. The world then seemed so big, all the trees were too far away for a quick run for cover. They could not protect us so far away, and the cornstalks were so crowded but their trunks looked just not so sturdy, not thick enough to save us from the sky, should it fall.

There was something in the distance, there was something in the space. Something that we could not easily conquer by walking but then we were so vulnerable to it too. It would take us all day if that is what we were doing, it would take us days and days. But cars are big enough to paint the sky with dirt road dust, and go the distance, and build bridges across the horizon stretch.

And we also heard them on the narrow roadside, we feared them if they came down the corn with their headlights that we could not look back at. They saw us with all that spotlight but all we saw was the blinding light. The people inside were nobodies to us, but we could taste their dust, but that told us nothing. The car was so much bigger, and the people were so unknown, they could have been something from the sky and not the neighborhood and we could never know the difference.

We walked back on the road. We did not even wait out the full sunset. The sky changed with such faint gradation that it seemed like we would almost have to wait for morning before it turned completely dark.

August 13

On my bike ride in to work yesterday, I looked over at the gas price sign at the station down the block and noticed that the price of gas had shot up to $2.53 overnight. That was a big jump, and a high price in Minnesota, where the price of gas usually is lower than in the rest of the country because the gas taxes are not so high. The price will probably slide down a little before it jumps up some more, but the trend is more and more visible, and has been all this year.

These are the first growing rumbles of the eventual full gas price explosion. This is the start of something that will go somewhere very fast. This is the sign that we have to change our ways, and get changing fast. In this city of Minneapolis we need to start planning a transit city and plan it now. We need rail based transit moving with electricity down every major street, or we will not be able to get this city moving. We have to quickly turn our city into a European city or else we will turn to dust.

We cannot wait and stretch out and relax. We cannot sit back and keep on building highways. Out highways will be empty if we cannot afford the cars to smash them. Out bridges might work out for donkey carts, but do we really need so many lanes? We need to get cracking on transit and other things, we need to shrink down to the great power of local, we need to get walking to build our walking nation because driving is driving us crazy, is driving us to doom.

There are some shocks and some shudders, but there is also a bit of somnambulism. We are sleep walking into the end of the age of oil, and killing off more soldiers in Iraq is not going to do the work of millions of years of deep carbon compression. You are what you eat, the saying goes, and if your culture eats dinosaurs, pretty soon you too will be a dinosaur.

August 14

We rode the bus to a hardware store in south Minneapolis because they were the only place that K could find by calling that had canning supplies. So we went there on the bus to get our canning cook pot and lids. We carried the canning supplies back home on the bus yesterday so we could be ready to can things as we get closer and closer to the harvest season.

We have a garden in our back yard that is producing food. It has been feeding squirrels and birds and us, and we want to be able to put some of that bounty aside to feed us over the winter too. As the fossil fuel age ends, talents like home wine making, which we already practice, and canning, which we hope to begin soon, will become more and more important. All these wild grapes growing on the grapevine might make some good grape jelly. We will try it out in a few weeks, anyway. We can also try canning some of the tomatoes and beans in our garden and make pickles from the cucumbers and dill. At least that is the plan, and why we took that bus ride yesterday.

The food we buy at the regular store is grown by fossil fuels. It is planted and harvested by monster machines that burn up gas, and it grows that way from pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers made from oil. It crosses the country in the back of big trucks. It is grown by oil to be eaten by oily animals.

We have to lean down and sweat and work our garden on our hands and knees if we want to grow food there. We have to plant with the most of our bodies and the sun and rain, and maybe some extra watering. Much of the food we get at the farmer's market is grown like this too, grown by human power and composting techniques. If we had a little more time and knowledge we could probably grow much of our year's needs in food in our backyard. That might be very necessary as the fossil fuel age comes to a stormy conclusion.

Now we have our canning supplies in a shelf in our pantry. Yesterday I bottled a few more bottles of the home made wine I made from last fall's wild grapes. We are starting to get ready to be somewhat self-sufficient. It might just be very necessary.

August 15

There are stories of the garden. Maybe the first story is the garden. The garden is where we came from and where we long to return. The garden is a vision of hope, the garden is a place where all the plants are ordered, and where we planted them, and yet we never made them, they are their own forms of life. They feed us and entertain us and work for us and teach us. There is a balance there and we think we know how to juggle it, but we do not force, we work knowing what to expect from gravity and experience.

The garden is not the farm. The farm is where we force things, where we know everything already and convince the world, row by row, to follow our command. We pack it tight and grow our monoculture, and trample the ground with machines and fill it full of drugs, of chemicals. The farm is hard work, and it is not very entertaining. It is a vision of conformity and ruthlessness, for everything must die if a few things are to grow. The farm ends every fall and starts all over from scratch in the spring. The farm is force and war against the world, the farm is a threat and is always threatened on all sides. The farm is living hard and stomping with heavy shoes, it is death for life, it is ultimately order thru destruction.

The garden starts with some things, it starts with spring, it starts with life and its own ideas. The garden grows up year by year, and the first thing a gardener has to do is figure out what last year left you, what last year taught you. You can see the past in its variety, you can see all time, because it remembers in its shapes and growing. The garden is all that is growing, and all that is good, is teaching and tending, is weeding and inaction. The garden is growing all varieties, companions and surprises. Some things are a mystery and we have to wait to decide whether friend or foe. The garden is not uniformity, it is delicate, it is a world.

In the garden, you work and then you rest. When you rest, you rest in the garden. You watch it carefully. All the life that grows there is your entertainment. Every new story that you could never imagine is acted out under or on top of its leaves. Eating and dying and breathing and falling. Life and regret and disease and excuses. The garden is the show, you and the wind and the sun and water are the team of puppeteers, and you all have to cooperate or else the curtain is going nowhere. You might think you contribute something to the plot, but once the spring has started, all bets are off.

The garden is inside us as much as it is outside. The garden happens when we walk with tender steps. The garden is there if we have the patience to watch and learn from watching. The garden will grow if we have time for it, if we do not race to kill it.

August 16

The world community of people is either living in the garden or on the farm. We could all live in the garden, which I think is a far better place to live than on the farm. With proper tending, we grow best with companions and diversity and twisty turning ways. We grow best when allowed some freedom in how we go, some willy nilly, like a garden, where what seems like disorder on a small scale makes a pleasant aesthetic order when you step back and view it from a distance.

But instead of a garden, we seem to grow our own people just like we grow most of our food, on the farm. We line them up thick and with plenty of chemicals to make them grow, with artificial growth aids rather than just letting some wild get in and make things interesting. Row after row of corn, just like row after row of whatever your job is. We make lines of roads, more corn rows for our lives. We have lost the ability to twist and turn like a stone path thru the garden, like a little brook that could carry our minds also. We cannot follow the twisted journey of a vine because we need our freeway exits, because we need the straightest line between two points, our roads our streets, our row on the crop field.

A garden does not always need a reason. Life is the reason, not order, not crops. But we live farm field lives, we have to grow our bodies and minds from employment and not for the pleasure of learning. Learning is about work and not for its own sake. The farm grows crops not for food but for product. We live on the farm, unless we learn a little how to live in the garden.

The first step in moving from the farm to the garden is to reject the farm machinery. If you have a car, you are a row of corn on the farm. If you do not have a car, you can meander your life in the ways of the garden. You have to lean over from time to time, you have to be able to see your feet to live in the garden, you have to wander slowly when you have a chance, like a vine might, like a flower stalk in unfriendly territory, that still keeps on rising with time. If you want to drive your car and still live in the garden, you are living an illusion, you really are farming, that is just it, you are stomping down the plants and not letting the soil grow them its own way.

I just want to finish writing this so I can visit my garden, and listen to it, and learn more. I just hope for the day when I can live the garden all day long, and in my sleep and in my dreams.

August 17

Last night I went to Seventh Street Entry, a music club downtown. Some friends of mine from college were there with their band, Kinski. They live in Seattle now, and they were on a tour. I went to see them play and also just to see them and talk a little. The music was loud but I had earplugs. It was mesmerizing music and it was fun to see them play.

I took my bike to see the show, and when the show was over, I went out to the sidewalk to unlock my bike for the trip home. I took my lights out of my bag and put them on, before taking the street to make my way.

There were raindrops on my seat and the streets were wet. It had rained at some time while I was inside at the show in the windowless venue. It was 1:30 in the morning. That is very late for me, and it is late for most of Minneapolis. There were some people and traffic and a bus downtown where I was, but once I started riding, just a few blocks on my way, up to the north edge of downtown, the traffic thinned out and I was alone with the city.

For much of the rest of my trip home, it was just me and my bicycle. I went blocks without seeing another car, without even seeing distant headlights. The streets were Hollywood wet but they reflected no luxury spy cars, just the valley of buildings to my sides and my bike and my eyes.

The distance was just a little foggy, maybe something about the rain rising, and I had the streets to myself. I was king of the streets, just my bicycle and I, and I could choose whether I wanted the middle or the edge. I could look both ways at a stop sign but not come to a complete stop. I was tired, but I could spin my wheels around, up a hill pumping, down the incline coasting. I could look up and count the buildings, or look at the black sky to check for the stains of clouds.

I was the only one on the bridge crossing the Mississippi River from downtown to my neighborhood. The river below me was still and flat and held perfect reflections of the city all around. From that high and open spot I could see the ring of fire around the horizon. I did not have to stop to make my left turn, I could sail the air like the wind was taking me, and it was.

As I descended into my residential neighborhood, the cricket sounds rose up like a slowly raising volume knob. There must have been thousands of them to paint the soundtrack of the rest of my trip home, block after block of them. They kept stabbing me in the side, but just in sound. I had the streets clear to myself all the way to my garden shed.

August 18

Having that street to myself the other night was so important and so great because a road with cars is a dangerous place, and a road without cars is a rare sight indeed. Every day I see some of the road carnage. Every day I see some of the accumulating dead.

The other day it was a tuft of fur. It was a squirrel tail glued fast to the street with the deep red stain of the rest of the squirrel's body. The tail was blowing tall as if it still wanted to live and climb trees and look for nuts and steal vegetables from my garden, while the rest of the body was just a stain, was flat on the asphalt, was not even allowed to properly decompose.

I have seen cats, motionless, dead, on the side of the road. That is even hard to think about as I feed our pet cats this morning. I have seen rabbits and woodchucks and birds galore on the street or on the side of the street. I see more carnage of the animal kingdom every day, corpses left on the street for more flattening, left to be rolled over with even more tires until what once was a body is ground down to the street level, just disappears.

I see new death and old death. I see the light red of a newly run over squirrel, the teeth and head still visible, tho flattened at some point from the car or collision. I have seen the old death, days old, the blood a dark color, the fur just tufts if there is a wind to blow them.

A couple days ago, a driver at a gas station ran over a women in Minneapolis. The victim had been trying to get back the $50 that somebody in that car had stolen from her as she stood in line at the gas station cash register. When she stood in front of the car to demand her money back, the driver in the car drove over her, killed her, drove off. That is certainly what cars do well, they driver over living things and kill them.

Cars driver over the living earth and kill it. Cars kill it with their suppressing roads, they kill it with their global warming. They kill it with their wars for oil and the chaos they demand with their rolling tires for prayer. They are the definition of death these days, so it is quite nice when the streets are rid of them, even if it is just for one late night ride home.

August 19

I do not know if I can believe the car-only fixation, the car obsession, the car-only sensation that so many people lead and practice, but I can understand it. Like some sinister cultural drug, it is fixed firmly in our language, in our brains, in the way we think out space and time.

I got an e-mail with directions to a training this morning. The e-mail said to drive to this and this place. It said drive further here and here and then park there. It did not say to drive your car or park your car. It did not say to go here or go there and let you choose your manner of going. It did not offer advice on how you might get to this place on bicycle or public transit. It said to drive there as if we had no option, as if we did not even have to get in one, as if we were not even people but cars.

Further in the directions, it said to show your driver's license to the person at the gate to get in. it did not say to show your I.D., it said to show your driver's license as if that were the only kind of identifying card.

Because I cannot drive, because I have no car, because I have no driver's license, but I do have other kinds of I.D., I felt a little left out of these directions. I felt excluded, but I also felt sad for the car people who cannot even think to drive their cars, but only to get there by driving, as if they had already transformed themselves into cars and trucks. I felt sorry for the ones who could only identify themselves thru their card identifying them as qualified drivers, as if that was the only way that they were worthy of identifying themselves, not as men, not as women, not as people or children of god or of the earth, but as beings qualified to operate a motor vehicle, a metal monster. This is why I can understand this car-only identification, I can understand it because it is deep in our language operating system, but I cannot believe it. I cannot believe that so many people with so much capacity for goodness and rightness and properness could let this happen to them. It is our own daily concentration camp, the war thru which we live our lifestyles. It is the torture that we practice on the earth and on all things.

But I will be riding my bike to that training this morning, and I hope that I can get to it, even tho I will not be properly following the directions given.

August 20

I rode my bike last night to the Bell Auditorium on the U campus to see a documentary. The film was called "Waging a Living" and profiled some working families that were not able to make enough money in their jobs to keep going. Some of the working household heads were on some government aid, but found that when they got a raise in their job they would be cut off from some of that aid and that put them even further behind. Everything that happened in their lives put them more at more at risk of losing everything, of homelessness, of despair.

One of the things about the families that surprised me was that almost all of them had cars. They had nice looking cars, new looking cars, and I am fairly certain that the burden of having that car, the car payments and the costs for gas, was a major contributor to their poverty. They could not get along with what they made because they had to keep that car going and pay for that car. I am also pretty sure that most of those families really felt like they needed that car because of the places that they lived offered them no options, but it also seemed a waste that they did not have those options. They had to support a car instead of their family. Instead of Christmas presents they had to give their car its gas and its tune up. A car can cost as much as housing, and to live on the brink of abject poverty but to still have to support all those costs of a car seems to me a major flaw of our society.

I feel very fortunate about my own life. I have a job that I really love that gives me a comfortable living for my lifestyle. I suppose that with my education many would consider me under-employed, and I could probably find a job that paid me more but that I would not feel quite so good about doing. But I do not have to do that because we bought our house before he housing bubble, so our housing payments are not so high, and we do not have an automobile. We do not have to pay for that burden, and that makes our lives so much easier.

On my bicycle I often have to deal with a street situation that is not made for me. I have to deal with transit that is not always there, and distances that I simply cannot cross. But never having had a car, I do not really know what I am missing, and I am completely fine with that. As gas prices go up more and more, many of those people in working poverty will have to give up their cars because they will not be able to afford to run them, and that will hit them very hard, for they have gotten so used to that car. If your car is the meaning of going, having to face the thought of giving that up must be pretty inconceivable.

August 21

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