December 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 20 21 22 23 27 28 29 30 31

December 17

I am running out of days of the year. I am running out of things to say. I could say that I took the bus. I talked to people at the bus stop and while riding. I could say that I walked, because I did some of that too. That was the style and shape of my own small transportation.

I could say a few things about why I avoid these cars, and why I think that other people should do the same. I could say a few things but I have probably already said them. I repeat myself a lot. I repeat things on alternating days, but that just goes to show that I still have to prove it to myself with arguments in red, because the propaganda is so thick, because the culture is so car.

I could describe the way the world looks with all its snow, and how the snowplows and sand trucks make the white snow all dirty so the cars do not skid out. I could talk about the streets, and how they crisscross us all with car danger, I could talk about what it is like to walk on one because the sidewalks are not shoveled, but I will stay quiet instead today.

December 18

When the heavy snow came this past week, the snow plows went down our street and left a thick deposit of street snow on our sidewalks. I am sure that many other people on my street had already cleared their sidewalks. I had. And then I woke up to find it covered again with street snow and dirt and ice and so I had to move what of that I could to get some kind of passable sidewalk.

Because of all that street snow on the sidewalk, much of the walk up and down my street is barely passable, or there is a single lane for pedestrians. This is the story every year. This is the story every heavy snow. This is the story whose moral is that the city cares so much more about cars than it does about pedestrians, that it has to get all the snow off the street even if it means dumping it all on the sidewalk.

I do not drive, so I do not really care how wide the street is plowed, but I do walk, and walking is a challenge on my street with all that street snow on the walking path.

December 20

Yesterday we rode a jet. We flew to Portland, Oregon for the holiday season. Our plane was late taking off. There had been ice and snow, a storm in Portland, and a flight the night before was canceled, so our plane was stuffed with all those extra people who could not take the previous night's flight. We took off more than an hour late and got into Portland about an hour and a half late.

We flew over the white snow covered plains and over the Rockies of Montana on our way. After the Rockies we rode above clouds that were continuous until just before landing, when we could see the ground just beneath us.

Flying in a plane is taking mass transportation, but it is not really public transportation. It is exclusive in its price, and tho it is fast, it is environmentally destructive. All that fuel up and out of the plane to turn those turbines, to get us across the continent in a few hours. What would take a few days overland, like by the train for example, comes in record time, in a morning, in an afternoon.

What I like about flying is that you can be in a completely different place in a matter of hours. I am fond of traveling. I like to put different ground beneath my feet. I like to spend days exploring a place, and tho Portland is familiar to me from repeat visits, there are still many new places and old places to explore, to repeat a visit to, to see for myself for the first time.

It is also warmer here, much warmer here. People here are complaining about the cold, but when we left to walk to our Minneapolis bus yesterday morning, the air temperature was –8. Here it was in the mid thirties Fahrenheit. We mostly had to face the cold to walk the three blocks from our house to the bus stop. At the bus stop we waited for a few minutes while talking to a neighbor, and then we were warm inside the bus. After getting off the bus downtown we only had to walk across the street for a short wait for the train, and from there on we were in warmth and isolated from that bitter cold on the train ride and then the airport station. But we could see the frost on the train windows, and we could feel its push when the doors opened.

After that flight I was so tired, as if I had been flapping wings to get us here when all I had been doing was sitting and reading. I was reading about how our predisposition to think about and see god is born in an infant's social sense, the sense that something before that infant's face is not an object but has something more. It is the sense that we have at an early age that makes everything else, animals and moving objects, take on this emotion. It is the things that brings us in emotional contact with adults, it is the very thing that makes animated cartoons come so to life. Infants, and us, put this social force into almost everything we encounter, not just human faces and gestures. We look to place the social breath on all the things around us, including the things we do not see. This explained to me an article about the pull of slot machines, and how their motion and action and lights can keep a person sitting at them and losing money for quite some time. It also explains a little why people are so tied to cars, which are designed to have faces and expressions in their grills in part so that adults and children connect to them like an infant connects to a moving face. We attribute that movement and expression to spirit, to something beyond and separated from an object, to something that an object does not really have. Thus cars come to life. Thus cars come to be regarded almost as if they were other people, or pets.

December 21

There once was a man, or it could have been a woman, with a memory disorder. He could not access his memories, whether memories of pleasure or memories of pain or memories of time or memories of anything, unless he was in motion. When he was in one place he was stuck inside the present. There were the objects around him, and there was him, but there were no sides of future or of past. It was only when his body was in motion that he could feel his memory crank up into action, that he could get to all those stories and songs squeezed into his sponge.

The process of receiving memory was an active process to him. Because memory never came to the surface unless he was in motion, at those times when he was in motion they hit him even stronger. It was the kind of thing that came on so strong that he would feel the need to sit down, that he would feel the need to stop the motion so he could have the memory in itself, in full. But when he sat down on the park bench to have the time and place to cope with the bursting flow of his memory, his memory would stop, and he would be there locked in the present. He would not even know what notion took him on this walk in the first place.

Driving was impossible. The memories would start up at soon as he was in motion, but they would be so strong and all-encompassing that he would lose all comprehension of the present, and this could put his body in mortal danger. He could swerve. He could kill somebody. So he did not drive.

He could sit on the bus or the train and feel his memory, but he would have to walk to the train or bus stop in the first place. Sometimes when he was walking his memory came on so strong that he would lose his way. His past would superimpose upon his present and he would confuse the two, walking the past instead of the present. He would get lost because the geography of his past did not match the topography of his present, the present that was actually street and stair and wall and crossings around him. When he would stop in one place to deal with the disorder and just stand to wait he would be so lost in the present that he could not even remember what he was to do next.

Perhaps the real problem was that the world has stopped turning beneath him. Perhaps the real problem was that motion was not inevitable, but was too special for every single moment. Perhaps this was all due to something larger than himself, larger than his own flimsy personal disorder. It could have been a problem of the whole world around him, it could be the memory of all particular minds.

December 22

I (dream) am on my next long train ride. The train is mostly empty and this time I ride with my small charge, a little boy who I do not think is necessarily related to me, but that I have to keep track of, at least peripherally. He goes from the mostly occupied train car to the mostly unoccupied one. There he hangs out with some other boys, and this makes me a little nervous. I realize that I have not yet taken my camera out this trip, and so I must do that, to do some video taping.

The trees are chopping thru the sun, and before too long, it will be dark. There are great farm yards out there and I raise up my cameras as the train slows down. A dog starts barking at us, and he really barks when he sees me and the camera thru the window of the train. He and another dog are able to jump up on top of the train, and they try to squeeze into the passenger car thru some air vents on the ceiling. I can feel their fur but they cannot squeeze all the way thru, and in their squeezing they have turned from dogs to cats. The train sets off again, after its stop for freight traffic, and I try to squeeze one of the cats out of the air vent, but I cannot get a grasp enough to squeeze the other out. The train goes thru a town. Only after squeezing the cat out do I wonder how it will get off the moving train car.

In Portland we get around by bus and Max line train. It is raining, but despite that we sought out some of the projects organized by City Repair, a non-profit group that helps people claim public space in the street. One of the ways to do that is to paint the intersection, an other strategy they have is to add benches, and kiosks with notices, to take back the public space back form the cars, which have taken over our traditional meeting space, the street, with their brute car force. You can temper that a little with some paint, with a sunburst painted on the concrete of one intersection, and a fading labyrinth painted on another. It was raining, tho, so we did not spend long admiring the projects. Instead we went to an amusement hall with movies where we were the giants sailing our way above a sea of tiny children heads.

December 23

December 23. Today is always my birthday. The anniversary of my birth, which happened 43 years ago today. I am 43, but I do not have a driver's license. That means that I cam still not an adult in auto-oriented U.S. Yet I am already an old man.

It does feel a bit strange to not have gone thru that rite of adolescence, and now I am old enough to have grey hairs, tho I do not think I have any. I do not have a driver’s license, that badge of maturity. I have the state I.D. card with the green stripe that says who I am but says also that I am not entitled to drive. I am completely happy with that exclusion, but it means also that I am not of the standard flesh and bones of the human race in this culture of cars and their people.

At many times in my life I have felt guilty for not having a car, for not having even the ability to drive one. Driving a car is set up in this country as an act of responsibility, so if you cannot drive you must not be responsible. But the way I see things is exactly the opposite. Driving a car is shirking your responsibility to save some kind of decent world for future generations. I see car driving as the supreme act of selfishness, tho the culture is strong and bears down on me with its guilt.

We are making our way around quite easily on the Portland transit system. Our transfers are coming on schedule and we have short waits between buses. Last night I tried to draw the face of a man on the bus. His face was so wasted on alcohol. He had so many cracks and crevices that it looked like his face had seen many earthquakes and plagues. He was jerking with some demon trying to get out of his body. His could have been the face of a nation wasted on cars.

December 27

We said goodbye to family members so quickly and took the Portland Max train to the airport. It was around the middle of the night and there was a long line to get past security at the Portland airport. As we sat and waited at our gate, a woman played bits of the piece of music she was working out, writing, with her guitar, scrunched over the strings and then quickly writing down an idea.

I tried to fall asleep as soon as we were seated on our jet, and I slept a kind of sleep on this three hour red eye flight back to Minneapolis. We had several bouts of major turbulence. The plane rocked up and down and side to side by some big winds over the Rockies. The crew warned us in advance about this, but still it was startling as I kept my eyes closed, to be wakened by these mechanical bursts of fists in the plane's face. How the metal stays together under such buffeting, how we stay together despite such dips over the blind mountain peaks.

I know I must have slept, for the "fifteen minutes to landing" came so quickly, and I still did not open my eyes unit I could feel the jet wheels back on earth. My gray morning vision saw me walking past the laughing flight attendant and down the airport halls to pick up our bags. As I stood at the ticket machine at the airport Hiawatha line station, and I fumbled with my dollar, trying to get it in that slot, someone walking past handed me his transfer. I looked at it – it was still good for an hour or more. I thanked him as he walked fast by.

We took the train to downtown watching the six thirty lights, and then waited a few minutes for our bus in a heated shelter on Nicollet Mall. The bus came, all warm inside, and then we walked our noisy roller bags under the heavy moving seven thirty sky until we were at our house and thru the door, and quickly upstairs to our bed to get a decent sleep, to continue that night of jet rocking into flat bed dreams.

December 28

Cars are everywhere. They are stuck so thick in people's minds. They tell us to "Drive safely," even tho we do not drive, even tho we will be taking the bus home. They do not tell us to go there, they tell us to drive there, even tho we are incapable of driving because we have no automobile.

There is no sense of space as a kind of thing you cross by walking, you cross by seeing every speck or inch of it. Space is something you gallop across with your monster, that you conquer with your metal beast, despite the cost, the woe and the problems that may cause. When you walk every inch at least in this town, in this part of town, you mostly walk alone. Yesterday, walking the couple miles from the neighborhood post office to my home, I saw exactly three other pedestrians, all at Central Avenue. I saw many cars. I walked because taking the bus from there to here would have taken quite a bit longer, because there is no crosstown bus service in this part of town.

December 29

From late September and thru October I traveled on a rail pass thru North America. When I got back home I edited down the video that I shot, the sketches and animation I drew and the diary I wrote into seven episodes of the On Transit public access show I make. I call these seven episodes the Infinity Transit Odyssey, as if they were one combined movie.

I call it Infinity because my trip was roughly in the shape of an infinity sign (left-heavy). I call it Transit because I rode and documented public transit in the cities that I visited. I call it Odyssey, because I sailed the land on the boat of train, encountered monsters, and like that of Odysseus, my own journey had something to do with war, even if it was just my own personal war against car culture.

All told, it is a bit of a travelogue. It is a bit of a documentary. It is a 3.5 hour vacation video, but that is great because home movies are the champion of all movie genres. It may be a mess, but that is what Sloppy Films is all about. Or it may be my own navel gazing projected onto the continent. I do not know. Only you can decide.

And that is why I am showing all 3.5 hours in one evening: Friday, January 20th, beginning at 7 p.m. at MTN Studio A, 125 SE Main Street, 2nd floor, Minneapolis. I do not expect anybody to sit for the whole 3.5 hours, but there will be a drawing for prizes for those who do stay until the bitter end.

December 30

It is another snowy snow morning and a plow has already come by to shove some of the thick white away. I heard its low plow motor, its scraping at the crust of earth, in the middle of the night when it drove right thru my dreaming.

The snow is thick to tuck us in, to keep us safe, to keep us sane, and so the plows have to make everything crazy, have to shovel it in big piles so the cars can come by. The cars need to drive their tires over the spring, so plow the snow aside for the sake of dishonest traction.

Before the car, when winter came, you would replace your wagon wheels with sled runners, skidders, sliders. Instead of fighting war against the snow you would just slide over the top of it, and this was a good way to get around, as was just good old walking, do not forget, which was really how people got on their way. Carriages were only for just so often, and the day to day took boots and legs. We had to turn the carriage into car, turn the special into the mundane, the disaster into the commonplace. And now we live the lie of that every day, even days when the snow is thick like this.

December 31

At the beginning of this year I made a resolution that I was going to not ride in cars this year. Being that I do not have a driver’s license or a car, that did not seem so tough of a resolution to keep, but seeing as I am surrounded by cars and everyone around me uses them for nearly every kind of movement upon this earth, it was a tough resolution to keep. In fact, I broke the resolution several times. In all, I rode in cars in about 15 of this past year’s 365 days.

I tried hard in most cases to avoid car ridership, and I could so far as work and pleasure were concerned. But when family and a few close friends came in my life, I took the car, because that was how everybody else was going and I would have seemed a real tragic sort, a real outsider, to take the bus when everybody else was piled in a car. And then there were the times this summer when we were in Montana where there was no alternative but to find a seat in that car, because there was no mass transit and the distances would have been too great to walk in any available time.

In a few cases, in very few, I was somewhat successful in changing how a few others got around, tho my capacity for changing the lives of others is so minuscule compared to the maximum impact of car culture. My little resolution was downright meaningless in the grand scheme of things, where cars still rule the minds of many, and where going carfree might be an experiment but is practically impossible in the car-drenched U.S.

But riding in a car, on a short ride or a long ride, during 15 days this year was still probably more car riding than the majority of the world’s population did this past year. For most of the world, there are no personal cars. That kind of shows you how awesomely destructive the lives of majority Americans are in contrast. We are sucking up and smelling up the world that everyone else has to walk on and breathe. We ought to be so ashamed. I am ashamed for my 15 car rides this year. I hope I can keep it from happening again next year, at least to me.

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