August 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10

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August 21

Last night I went back to the Bell Museum to the "Bike-In," at the University. It was put on by the Bell Museum of Natural History and Minnesota Film Arts, which shows all the great movies, documentaries at Bell and classics and other hard to find films at the Oak Street Cinema.

It was cheaper to get in if you came on bike, so I go the discount, and there were bike racks all lined up where you could lock up for the evening. The racks filled and people chained their bikes on a chain link fence too. The bikes up on the fence looked a little like it could be a bike art gallery. The event took place in the grassy courtyard between Bell Museum and Nolte Hall, and you could sit on the damp grass and watch the ivy undulate on the outside wall of the Bell Museum.

Four bands played as the sun set. The last band, called Best Friends, was very fun, three women and a man playing drums. They sang about friendship and summer and sex in a Jonathan Richman way. Then they played bicycle related movies, short videos mostly, and most of the ones that I saw were locally made. The videos played on the side of the Bell Museum as the moon rose up behind the building and challenged the screen with one point of brightness. I did not stay for all the movies because it was a chilly night and I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. The least I should have done is brought a sweat shirt in my backpack.

I am very bad at meeting people and I came alone, so mostly I just sat by myself and watched and listened. I brought my video camera but really did not get much video. My intention was to shoot a short segment for my On Transit show, but I did not even get an interview.

It was great to be at an event that privileged people who did not go by car. I wanted to talk to some of these people, but I was intimidated by them somehow. I suspect that quite a few of the people there used a bike as their main transportation device, and I should have felt safe and happy in their presence, but I also felt very shy. I was one of the oldest there too, mostly likely, so maybe that was also part of why I felt so unable to meet some of the folks there.

There is nothing quite like watching movies outdoors, especially when they are projected on the side of a building and you can sit on grass and watch them play out, but my poor planning meant that I had to leave early, because I was just getting too cold. My ride home was so cold that tho I pumped and pumped to ride home fast I did not have one drop of sweat on me.

They promised a Bike-In for next year too, so of course, on my bike ride home, I planned out the bike movie I would make for next year and try to enter in the competition. I will have to start on it soon, and watch out for the deadline.

August 22

Yesterday was a cool Sunday and we canned some spaghetti sauce and pickles. We made the sauce from tomatoes and peppers in our garden and the pickles from cucumbers that we grew. It looks like we got a good seal in all of the jars, which is good news for our first attempts at canning.

I took a bicycle ride to another movie yesterday afternoon at the Bell Museum. My bike ride back home was quite chilly for August. Last year we had a cold August also. Crops were even killed by an early August frost just north of here. The weather is going a little crazy around here, around the globe. Last month was unbearably hot, and this month is quite a bit cooler. This country can complain about the strange weather but it cannot even look itself in the face to see who is causing it. The U.S. cannot stop its climate changing daily lifestyles, the cars I hear all around me and that I have to dodge when I am riding my bicycle, the wasteful energy lives, the yards for growing fields of grass and not fields of food.

Yesterday I read that 92% of the people on earth do not own cars. That gives me great hope. Much of that 8% who do own them lives in the U.S., and cannot imagine living without the car, but they are way outnumbered by the rest of the world's peoples. In the U.S., that big glut of people think they are entitled to destroy the planet to live their strange car-entrapped lifestyles. They are the ones who need to finance a war so they can keep their oil addiction, their useless travel addiction going.

Sitting in our small backyard garden yesterday I could hear the polka music from a church festival a couple blocks away. I could look off into the flowers and vegetables of the healthy garden growing in that backyard soil thanks to the sun and the rain and some care by me. I could sit under the shade of a grapevine that, up and down the fence, is full of great clusters of purple small grapes. The birds are getting to some of them now, but in the next few weeks I will make some wine with some of them and some grape jelly with some more. If I have to go somewhere, I will bike or walk or ride the bus. Our house is small but meets our needs, and can hold the cans of food that we just sealed, and all the books that I have read and still want to read. Our life is quite a bit less fossil fuel intensive than the lives of my driving neighbors, and it is such a great rich life too. I would never trade it for a car lifestyle.

August 23

I was listening to a public access commentator spewing out about the conspiracy that he sees at the heart of the rising gas prices. He blames the price increase on the Bush administration, in league with the oil companies, to increase their profits. I have heard other professional and non-professional pairs of lips mouth out such similar conspiracy theories explaining why they know the price of gas is going up. This commentator seemed to be so sure of his explanation, so positively confidently sure of it. The idea that the price of a finite commodity might go up as you start running out of it was not part of his theory, was not part of his powers of comprehension at all. It was like he could not even conceive that gas was a non-renewable resource, and that as you start to run out of a non-renewable resource, the price of it goes up. It was like he could not deal with the fact that there will come a day when there is no more oil, which means no more cars, which means no more many things. Car addiction has blinded him to the possibility that some day soon there will be no more of the lifestyle that he leads by car. Some day he will have to ride the bus, or walk, or ride a bike, and those are things that I could never imagine that commentator doing with his big car-bound body.

It has only taken a few decades for Americans to get completely strung out hooked on cars, so hooked that they cannot even see that this might just be a short-term thing. They are actually blind to the fact that this might be a bad thing, that car culture might be bad for the world or for them. It is not in their powers of comprehension to imagine that this might end some day. They are so chemically and physically transported by their addiction that they can see no forecast other than for wider streets and more parking lots, and if the forecast seems to wobble, somebody is messing with them. There is no alternative when your mind has been so squeezed by that car fix, by the car need, by the car drug.

Rising prices make their minds fill up with conspiracies. The possibility that this might all be running out makes their minds run into deadly cabals and imaginary tipster friends from the dark side. The forces are surrounding them, the ghosts of their running-out heroin. The horses of car cold turkey are dancing strange partners in their heads. The last thing they can do is just open their eyes and look at the world they are wrecking with their addiction, and see their responsibility, and see their own need to turn back from car culture, from car dependence. The last thing they can see is that their sipping up all those last drops is making the price go up, that they are the real guilty party, their life is the true conspiracy.

August 24

Pat Robertson suggested that someone should take out Hugo Chavez so that the U.S. army does not have to go into Venezuela like they had to go into Iraq and take that leader out with a war. It might be easier, Robertson suggested, to save the war effort, which would cost the U.S. too much, and just have someone assassinate Chavez.

Robertson is calling on the assassination of the elected and re-elected leader of a foreign country, a foreign country that has oil. Our oil greed has gone so far that so-called religious leaders are making fatwas against foreign leaders who have control of oil. The whole elephant behind Robertson's talk is that a country with oil that has a leader who does not agree that the U.S. just gets all the oil in the world on its terms can only be dealt with by invasion or killing. This is necessary because the U.S. is nothing but a nation of car junkies who are so fixed on feeding their oil habit that nothing or nobody will stop their oil greed.

It is not enough that we are melting the ice caps with our global warming commutes. It is not enough hat we have a mess of a war going on in the middle East already, where there still is some oil underground. Now someone who calls himself a Christian, a religion based on the concept of loving your neighbor as yourself, is calling on his fellow car-republicans to assassinate a leader to keep the oil free flowing. That is pretty fierce junky talk coming out of Robertson's forehead. He is so blinded by his car crazed car thought oil hunger that he thinks that calling for an assassination is something that might be considered the act of a Christian.

My transportation yesterday was riding my bicycle to work and back home at night. I burned no fossil fuels and I got around exactly where I needed to go to live the day I needed to live. The cars are all criss-crossing the streets around me with their death threat engines. The talk I hear in their gas rumbling is assassination talk. If you live by the car you live by killing. Robertson does not know that, but his shaking body of addiction knows it. When the oil runs out, you kill for the oil. That is the message in rising gas prices. Americans have to deal with their car drug problem now or there will be a real mess in the world when you run out of so much junk for so much junkies, and the junk is running out, and sooner than any junky really knows. Where is the twelve step program big enough for Robertson?

August 25

The day is beginning. I can tell that it is beginning because I hear a car start up down the street. If a car is starting up you know that people are starting up. If you look down and can see asphalt, you know that some people will be going places.

I hear a loud sound below. The sound is scraping the heck out of the air. A small truck is going by. The truck might be carrying bottles of beer for one of the bars on the corner, or it could be hauling something else, maybe even empty air, for every trip has a return trip empty when you are hauling things with a truck that is heavier than the things you are hauling.

I hear the sound of a car's tires on the road. It is a heavy sound. It is the sound of the frozen rocks of the road strummed or pounded by the spinning wheels rolling a burden. Each car is a couple of tons. I do not mean the people inside. Some cars are even heavier than that, far heavier than the people they carry. Cars are a set of metal and weight carrying just a person, usually. All that weight carrying just one person as if you could make the word waste into a physical presence, as if you could make the word waste out of steel and rubber and plastic and seats and market it with the right commercials and people actually go into debt to buy that waste, to buy that trash, to welcome that refuse into their life and get so caught up in it that the piece of waste is caught in their shirt, is identified with them so if you insult their big piece of metal shit you insult them. Their head is in that awful mess, their body and all are tied up with all that excess, that waste, that pity. No wonder they all seem a little agitated. No wonder they seem a little like kids who might just be completely priced out of their candy store, looking at being all locked out some time in the not so distant future, and now they will have to just sit there and let their teeth rot, yet have none of the pleasure of brand new candy rot.

If a bicycle went down the street, I could barely hear it. It would not even make a noise, it would barely make a noise, it would leave it to the wind to make the noise. A bicycle is not heavy enough to be all that loud. It is not heavy, but it still can hold and carry a burden. It will soon be carrying me on my short journey to job.

August 26

The rain is falling hard this morning. It started falling in the night. It is falling straight down. It woke me some time ago, the tap of it on our metal window awnings woke me up, and I got out of bed to close some of the windows. When I went back to sleep, I (dream) was sitting in a café with my family. The family car was parked out in the restaurant parking lot. I was eating, but then I had to stand up and ask them to wait for me. I had to get something somewhere. I left the restaurant, but said I would be back soon.

There was a streetcar, a metal, tube-shaped streetcar, that was new in town. I took it back to the restaurant where my family was. Tho the streetcar was new in town I was amazed at how many people were riding it. There were many people sitting on it on its closely packed bus seats. The people on the streetcar had baskets and chickens and children and pets. It was a hubbub of activity and sound and sights.

The streetcar made a dip down from the street and it swayed way to one side as it left the street and pulled into the parking lot that was in front of the restaurant where my family was paying for the meal and getting ready to go. As I stepped off the streetcar, which had come to a stop, my family members were all talking about how much I had changed in the last ten years.

I was wondering what that talk was all about, because when my mind went from dream back to awake I was thinking about how it was more than ten years, more than twenty years, since I lived with my father and mother and brother and sisters all together in one big house with a car parked in front in the driveway. It has been more than twenty years since I lived in any kind of situation where the car was parked out in the driveway in front. When I left for college, I left behind the daily drive. I did not get to that restaurant parking lot in a car, I took a streetcar which materialized just for me and all those other people who were taking it for a ride.

The rain is still falling hard, and some of it can seep into the ground, but much of it has to race down the street because the ground has been sealed off to make a smooth surface for cars. Now and then a lightning bolt flashes. It flashes the truth, it flashes a wake up, but most people are not watching and listening, most people just duck a little and hope it does not hit them.

August 27

Sometimes I will read when I am on the bus. Sometimes I will just sit there and watch the world go by. Sometimes I will scan my eyes over the other passengers to try to get a whiff of their stories. Sometimes I will look out at the city and try to figure out what is going on from the buildings and the people that we pass.

It was raining yesterday early so I took the bus. But the day brightened into sun and sky later on, when I was still riding on the bus. I missed another critical mass ride, but in my dream I was on my bicycle and came upon the ride. I glided my bike into the ride. The ride, the scattered bikes between, took up much of the street. The ride was already in progress, and it rode up Marshall Street. It went slower than you would expect. That is all that I remember from that dream. The rest faded out. Only that scrap came back to me just now, my head still very morning foggy.

I cannot escape from this writing about myself, this I, I, I, this I did this, this I think this. Sometimes I want to get away and write about other worlds, about other shapes that I hope will take over my mind, but then I wake up, and it is yesterday, I, or I think this and it is horrible.

I want to draw other pictures, not the pictures in front of my face, but other images of imagination. But when my pen or pencil hits the paper, all I can draw are the things before my eyes, the people or the backs of people, the buildings or reflections.

Sometimes I think that I cannot quite wait for this year to be over so I can return to my fantasy musings, to return to my novel writing, which I did every morning up to this year. Every morning I bit by bit added to another fantasy imagination world that I built up and then compiled into another novel for the desk drawer, for the hard drive eyes.

Sometimes I wonder if I can ever even get back to that, if I will ever be able to escape this imagination groove and return to my fantasy. Maybe I have left that planet forever, maybe I am trapped for life in a room with my realistic self and only that life and I can never get back to the cartoon of softer brain animation.

August 28

When the Minnesota State Fair is on, the transit agency runs hundreds of extra buses and dozens of extra routes to get people to and from the fair. The majority of these bus routes are park and rides buses from various parking lots, mostly lots at suburban malls, all across the metro. I took the State Fair Express bus from downtown Minneapolis to the fair after riding my local neighborhood bus from home to downtown. I got to the fair and back fairly quickly, and had a seat to sit on, and read a couple short stories and a handful of poems while I was on the bus and the time I spent waiting downtown between buses.

At the fair, we had to wait a while to board a return bus while a man in a big motorized wheelchair tried to steer it off the elevator ramp and around the corner by the token box and the driver and down the aisle. He backed up, then went back forward then backed up again then forward. One of the people waiting outside to get on the bus walked up to the ramp to offer a hand to try to help him pull the wheel around the corner, but the big man in the wheelchair shoved out his hand at him like swatting a fly and let loose a bear growl.

He backed up his wheelchair again, then forward, then back up then forward, trying his best in slow steps to get around that aisle corner. When he finally made it into the aisle and to the wheelchair area and the driver got up to help strap him in place, he swatted her away with his hand and let out his bear growl. He wanted to do it himself, and he did, slithering around in and out of his chair to snap the buckles like a worm.

At my downtown transfer, I stood waiting with two men leaning on a parking lot fence. One of the men spat now and then. The breeze blew bits of his spit onto my legs and foot, so I slid a little further away. Every time a woman walked by the men would call out things, strange propositions, like "let me go where you are going," pretty lame and pathetic. When the bus pulled up they picked up baby carriers that were a good seven feet away from them and close to the curb. I had thought the carriers were empty, but then I heard a baby cry. The babies had been covered with clean diapers over the top of the carriers.

At the fair, at the community TV booth where I was stationed, I talked to two women from Sweden who were just finishing up a seven week tour of the U.S. on Greyhound bus. They said that they had seen places and met people that most Middle Class Americans would never know. They saw our country from the bus and its stops, a whole wide ring of nation, from sea to shining sea.

August 29

The talk about peak oil is growing. Families are discussing it. The conversation about it grows on the streets and in the car cockpits. The newspapers are printing articles about it. The editorial of our home town paper was about it two days ago, and said that it looked to be serious, that it looked to be at hand, that it would mean changes that it are tough for us to comprehend now.

If we can see that the oil is running out, if we can see it in the way the prices are rising, in the information of the petroleum engineers, if we can see it then we have to make a decision, and we have to make it soon. If we are facing the near diminishment of the world's only oil supply, can we continue to waste it in going back and forth? Is this an acceptable practice when our very lives are so dependent on oil, from making and moving our food to heating our houses in the cold? Would we rather starve and freeze or commute daily to work in our big burning car explosions? It might just be time to face that crossroad. It might just be time to decide to trash that metal beast that wastes so much energy and oil.

I worked on three more of our windows yesterday. Many of the windows on our house are poorly glazed or the glazing is old and crumbling so I am re-glazing the windows in the hopes that this will help our house seal in more of its heat this winter, that it will make our house more energy efficient, that this will lower the strain a bit on our furnace, to keep more of the heat inside. I was up on the ladder despite my vertigo and did it, and then cleaned the windows so we could actually see nicely thru them. Then it was on to two movies in different locations, and riding the rides on my bicycle.

On my way home from the second movie, at nearly ten o'clock at night, I rode the Midtown Greenway from Uptown to the Hiawatha Line train. The bike commuter trench was lit up with streetlights and I pumped hard and fast to make it thru the silence just below the city, the darkness all around me. All the other bicycles I passed in the opposite direction were without bike lights. They were shadow phantoms silent, growing larger and then whooshing past. My own lights were fading, the batteries were dying.

I got to the train station at Lake Street, where you catch the train above on the elevated platform. I bought my ticket at the downstairs machine and then pushed the call button for the elevator. As the elevator rose up to the platform, I could see the bright headlight of a train pulling into the station. The elevator door was slow but I was fast. I pushed my bike quite quickly from the door to the train and made it thru the train door just in time, avoiding the first compartment because two bikes were already hanging in the rack there. I raised up my wheels on the bike rack and sat down to relax and read for a while.

I read a short essay about somebody in Chicago complaining about mass transit as I enjoyed my quick ride into the warehouse district. She did not like to rub elbows with her fellow humans, deal face to face with the strangeness and the urine that was sometimes at the stations. She preferred the controlled situation of her global warming car. She would rather waste the rest of the world's oil going back and forth than deal in the flesh with her fellow humanity.

At the warehouse district station I got off the train and rode the rest of the ride thru the silent warehouse district, then over the river, thru my neighborhood, and to home.

August 30

Because there is a limited amount of oil left in the earth, we must act now, and act decisively. Even British Petroleum says that there is only forty years worth of oil left in the planet. We need to decide now what we use the remaining oil for, because we are on our way to the last drops of it. Our entire food production system is based on oil. We keep ourselves alive in the winter by burning fossil fuels. Those are only a couple examples. We have to decide, do we drive back and forth every day or do we starve? Do we freeze in the winter or do we drive back and forth? The choice seems to me to be so easy. We have to stop driving, and we have to stop it now.

This is not anything that we have to rely on our slow government to do. We do not have to wait for legislation. We do not have to wait for official top down policy. This is something that every single person can do. They can use their life like they mean it, they can really do their best with just a little effort.

Sometimes you need to adjust your lifestyle if you want to save the world. Sometimes you need to make a small adjustment to your habits if you want to keep the planet spinning. This is necessary. This is something that everyone can do, if they can get the sheer mental strength to break free from the hypnosis of the car commercial, if they can escape the mental intimidation of all that car propaganda.

You do not have to drive. It is as simple as that. You do not have to live by the car if you have a brain and a body. You do not have to waste the world to get by each day. You can get along without a car. You can do it. You can stop using. You can go cold turkey, tho you may have some sweats, tho you may have to shake for months with the symptoms of your withdrawal.

You have the world to gain with your simple individual actions. You have the world to save with your daily practices. You can shed the burden of car society, you can save the oil for future generations. You do not have to unfreeze the earth and go to war. You do not have to drive back and forth every day like a stuck toy. You can save the world, but it might mean some changes.

August 31

One city

Roofdeep in water

All to keep us driving

One city

People deep in rubble

Head deep in terror

For a way to save

The driving way

Every other city

Stretched like silly putty

Into suburbs, into exurbs

To shape its face for cars

To misshape its soul for driving

All the cost

Of one more drive

All the cost

Of one more car

One planet

Creaking on its knees

Oceans much too warm

Bled of all inside

One soul

Squeezed of all togetherness

Sapped of all cooperation

Huddled inside capsules

One attempt

Call it make a gesture

Call it out by waving

Figure it in insects

Think it out so easy

One way

The only way

But it needs to take

But it has to cost

One person

Transformed by apocalypse

Having to face something

That unknown addiction

Inside

All this insanity

For four wheels

All this tragedy

For a metal skull

All this waste

To keep from walking

It is really so easy

To shuck off that

Personal wheeled apocalypse

Try it

September 1

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