February 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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February 1

Our lungs are so wonderful. They have the immense awesome power of turning the atmosphere into us. They take the outside and make it into our own individual inside. Our lungs make the sky into our blood, make the world into our body.

With our lungs, we make ourselves vulnerable. We have to do this, we have to open ourselves up with breath in order to live, in order to breathe. Breathing is living, it is the link we share with the delicate world around us, it is what keeps us continuous, person to place, person to person.

We must trust the air in order to breathe it. We must trust that we do not breathe poisons into our body, or else we die, fast or slowly. Our lungs are so delicate, just look at the pictures. Those tiny veins that deliver us each day our breaths, that deliver to us each day our blood.

There is an air quality advisory today, just like there was yesterday. The air might be dangerous to breathe. Avoid exercise. Avoid breathing hard for the air has been made poison.

And who has made the air so poison, and who has threatened us with the vulnerability we need to make life out of atmosphere? What terrorist has done this to us?

All those tail pipes, low to the ground. They scream out the byproducts of incomplete combustion. You do not have to lean down low to smell it. You only need to be a pedestrian to know it, to know it in your lungs, to know it in the blood of your body, in your toes, in your head, in every pore and molecule that you call the sum total of yourself.

How can we do this to ourselves. How can we waste the world that we need to breathe into our bodies, that we need to live our bites of lives. How can we poison ourselves with transportation and not stop a second to worry at the issue. How can we do this to our delicate lungs, our delicate body and the entire delicate planet that will breathe everything that we give to it in tail pipe.

There is an air advisory out today. It is not safe to walk so many people will drive and make the air much worse. But they were never going to walk in the first place. They were only going to drive, they were only going to poison themselves and their planet.

Later this month the Kyoto Treaty will go into effect, but the U.S. is no part in it. The U.S. is particularly happy to poison itself, to poison the whole delicate world, because not poisoning itself would be bad for business. Breathing is bad for business. The world is bad for business.

Our nation does not honor this international agreement, but I shall. I have gone a month without riding in a car. I have spent a month carfree. I urge all others to make their own Kyoto, to make their own pledge to reject the cars that poison our lives, to reject the cars that poison our world and any future it might have.

February 2

I am choking. It is getting harder to breathe. I can feel an inflammation in my throat like the start of a sore throat but it is not that. It is the quality of the air.

We have another air quality alert today. Today they are saying that the air is unsafe for anybody. It is not safe to breathe. The winds are not supposed to come until tomorrow, so things will just get worse.

We have had an inversion for two days now that has trapped those two days of pollutants in the lower atmosphere, the place where we live and breathe. There have been no winds to blow the soot away. This is what it would be like if we lived in a jar. We do live in a jar, and this is what it would be like if the jar suddenly got much smaller. This is what the jar will be like in a few more years down the road, when the pollutants have grown that much more excessive.

The news has been telling people not to exercise. I have heard no appeals on the news to cut out unnecessary car trips, no reports that link driving to the problem, no reports saying that you can at least not make things worse if you stop driving. It is like you keep shooting yourself in the head and the news is telling you to hold a towel under your chin to catch the blood instead of telling you to just stop shooting yourself in the head.

On my short walk to the bus yesterday morning I saw two episodes of people just idling their cars. In one case, a couple people were loading up, packing up their car's trunk as their car idled. Their car made pollutants but it took them nowhere for that. In the other, a truck driver pulled over to check a map or something and kept his truck idling. Now we have to breathe that. That was very considerate of you. That is really thinking.

Why doesn't the press state the obvious? Is it all that car ad revenue, or is it some other reason? If you are making a problem, the best way to solve it is to stop doing the thing that is causing the mess. To cut down on driving would be a good start. Do not take any unnecessary car trips. Do not even use your car. Walk or bike or take transit. But nobody is saying that, not at all. Instead of that, they are encouraging people not to do any heavy breathing. What is up with that?

Maybe the truth is that despite our advanced sponge of brain we are collectively or culturally still no smarter than a culture of yeast. Perhaps there are individual cells of yeast that are brilliant, but collectively the yeast will continue to multiply in their fermentation jar until they have all died in the poisonous byproduct of their advanced civilization. It would be bad for business to stop before they all are dead. Both humans and yeast seem to agree on that, at least collectively.

Of course we enjoy the poisons that the yeast produces when it multiplies and does its business and does itself collectively in. And maybe when we have killed ourselves off from the poisonous byproducts of our own advanced civilization there will be another creature of some kind that will find our poisons tasty, until it kills itself off with its own need to multiply, or get to work.

Although you'd think that if you were going to kill yourself off, the yeast are doing it for a better reason. You would think it nobler, or at least more fun, to kill your civilization off from the byproduct of having too much sex than it is to kill your civilization off from the byproduct of your unstoppable urge to commute.

February 3

The air has cleared and I can breathe. And everybody else can breathe, including all the drivers. The cost of gas is still somewhat higher than it was, but not so high that you think that you might want to quit using the stuff. The price of it was up, then down, and maybe now it has stabilized, I am not sure. I don't keep track of it, but it does not seem so bad now that anybody is going to change their habits over it.

We have not run out of gas yet, so we can still burn it like it will always be there, like we do not need wars to keep it flowing, like its incomplete combustion does not cause global warming.

The weather has been strange for the last few years, but it is not so strange right now. It gets bad, but then it gets better. We might be getting more hurricanes, but as long as you do not live in Florida you do not have too much to worry about. Just because the weather is strange sometimes is not enough reason for anybody to go out and change their life.

The worst happens, and then it is over. We can read it in the papers, and then throw them in the recycling bin. You might worry for a while, but then you have to commute to your job. There is no reason to wake up in the middle of the night and worry about what we are doing to our only delicate life-support system world.

Some little sound or movement of cat or person will wake me up in the middle of the night. Then my mind will start to wander, sometimes trying to grab back at that last scrap of dream. Oh, yes, the grand hotel with the casino on the second floor, and the elevator I was on would just not come to a stop. And then my mind wanders on to other things, and it usually ends up stationed at the point where I am left to fret on what the hell are we doing to our one and only planet?

The thought is so haunting that it is almost impossible to get back my sleep. The thought is so brutal that I can not fall easily. The thought is as strong as war, as strong as night, and much stronger than sleep. I can change my position in bed, just like I can move around during the day, but those changes will not stop the thought from coming, will not let me do anything but wrap myself in an overwhelming worry.

What are we doing? Why are we so bent on self-destruction? It seems that there are many people whose religion is all about destroying the world because god will provide for us as long as we repeat his name enough in public. There are so many others who are living great disconnects, who do separate their individual actions from politics and from the weather, who do not see themselves to blame for the smallest things they do with their lives.

I get to deal with all that worry that nobody else will worry. It comes to me like a thief in the night to steal away all my happy elevator dreams. It droops my eyes the next morning after those hours of rolling and of fretting. It will not let me off the hook, it makes me think, and makes me think that I need to do so much more.

We are destroying our only home. So much of that destruction is coming from our need to go back and forth. We are farting out the chances for all the next generations every time we start up that car. We are destroying millions of years of compressed power in the most inefficient way, to do the most repetitive of tasks. We are idiots. We are our own devils. We need to change. We need to stop. We need to stop so that I can at least get back to sleep.

February 4

A nice walk clears your head and gets you thinking. A nice walk in the morning puts a smile on your head and gives you ideas, cranks up your brain. A nice walk lets you see the gentle transformation of place, the details that make up the world you live in. A walk in the morning puts the whole day and all its space and time into a relative perspective.

The dew has frozen to the sidewalks and streets and shines back in millions of suns. I have to put on my clip-on sunglasses even if I happen to look down, it is just so brilliant. It is more glittery than gold, and it is just the world on my way to work.

I walk by the gas station and see that the price of gas is $1.90. I wish it were higher. If it were higher, maybe more people would join me on the walk to work instead of bunkering down inside their cars. I will be walking for almost half an hour and not see another pedestrian until my last few blocks, until I reach almost the edge of downtown.

And it is not like it is a bad walk. Lots of grand old houses to watch over me and narrow streets to cross. The sidewalks are still a little icy, but if they are too bad, like the icy stretch of sidewalk in front of the church parking lot, the street is clear all the way down to the asphalt or the concrete, and I can walk on the street for a while.

I think about whether I will be able to think of enough things to write on for every day or so this year. I made all the blank web site months with their first initials, and most of it is empty now, but I suppose I will fill at least a few of them.

I do not think nightmare thoughts. The sun is shining and it is impossible to feel too sad. I cannot help compare how I am feeling to what I see when I look thru a windshield now and then. I see the faces of the drivers and they are locked in some kind of scowl. It seems like drivers are never a happy lot, at least not when they are driving alone. They've got these grumbles in their chins and cheeks like the sound of the car made into face on their necks. They have to be distracted from what they are doing to look fine, and it usually takes other people to get them there.

I think about a year ago this time, when Kristine and I went to Los Angeles to visit my brother and his S.O. Sarah. How the streets today somehow remind me a little of that time last year; at least the sun does, and not the residual snow on the ground.

I remember on that trip taking all the great new transit there: the subway and the light rail trains and wishing that I had some of that transit in my own home. Later last year we got our first light rail line opening and once that happened people started talking about transit as if it really mattered. A year ago today, things were much more in flux. It looked like a bus strike was coming up, and it did indeed come, and would delay the opening of the rail line, if it would ever open.

So a year ago can seem both so close and so far away. So many things happen in a year. People change their minds about things, currents and paths of rivers and thinking can abruptly turn course, and then the entire world changes in appearance.

Writing is a little like driving. It simplifies things. Only it doesn't destroy the world in the process.

February 5

The Super Bowl is tomorrow and the car companies will certainly roll out some new ads. It is an opportunity to see all together some of the new ads that they will be airing in the upcoming months. It is hard to avoid the sales of automobiles on television, or any place else, for that matter. Sometimes it seems that every other ad on TV is trying to sell you a car. They have an entire section in the Saturday paper devoted to cars, and it is not a skinny section, and most of it is devoted to advertsing.

Every year car companies spend more money on advertising cars than the federal government spends on building and operating public transit systems. Billions of dollars are spent each year on car advertising. You would think there might be something wrong with a product of its manufacturers have to spend so much to shill it.

There is something wrong with the product. It does not work as advertised. It does not bring you freedom and adventure, like the commercials say. It does not make you a better man or woman, like the slogans claim. It wastes a lot of the time of your life, it makes you fatter and addicted, it destroys the whole world. It is also very dangerous. There is a good chance that it will kill you. It is the leading killer of people in their teens and lower twenties. It is as addicting as cigarettes, or even more so.

The car companies have to advertise their product so much to convince us that the damn thing even works.

Do people use cars because they have really made a choice to use them, or do they use them because they have been brainwashed into accepting without question the car culture? I do not think there is much choice in this situation. When I talk to defensive car drivers, I can't help but imagine that I am talking to a heroin addict who claims that they just can't live without their fix. I cannot help but imagine that I am talking to somebody who has been claimed by some great cult that has programmed their mind into a pattern that looks like sheer stupidity when you can examine it from an objective viewpoint.

Sure, people love cars. They have been brainwashed into believing that they love cars. They have been brainwashed into believing that their car use has no impact on the environment. They have been brainwashed to believe that they are not doing anything wrong. They have been brainwashed into thinking that they are buying freedom while they are really buying into torture and control. They have been brainwashed into thinking that cars are good for them and for the world around them. They are just brainwashed.

Some of those car ads are pretty creative. Makes you think you might even want to buy one of those pieces of junk, at least just to live that life.

February 6

Is car transportation a good idea for a nation that calls itself free, let alone is attempting to do something ambitious as supposedly "exporting freedom?" Is it even possible to be free in the culture that grows around such extravagant car use and dependence?

Cars are so dangerous that you have to limit them. Without the limits, everybody would die. In order for car transportation to work you need to paint lines and people have to keep within them. You have signals and arrows and speed limits to put limits on people. They have to keep in their orderly line and wait their turn and keep to the posted limit, or at least to the lemming limit dictated by their peers, or else it all turns into chaos and a massive smash-up.

I have seen a Pepsi commercial at the movie theatre lately. Or is it a Coke commercial (and by the way, aren't those two of the four freedoms?) The commercial purports to be about freedom. In the commercial, people dance on the top of their desks, throw pasta and vegetables around in the supermarket, get out of the cars in a traffic jam and boogie, and go crazy. For the most part, "crazy" looks like dancing in slow motion, although it also means riding around in the office on these absurd reduced-size motorcycles, which makes the adults look like they are trying to ride around on a four-year old's Big Wheel or something. This is what freedom looks like. This is all happens while a song sings, "I've got to break free."

This must be what freedom looks like when you are stuck being a windshield in heavy traffic, or if you have a demeaning job to help pay off your car payments, or something like that. It is a twisted view of freedom, to be sure, but it must be a car culture kind of freedom.

To me, there is nothing more free than being a pedestrian. You can cross when the Don't Walk sign is flashing, and if you check both ways, you will not kill anybody, not even yourself. You can leave the sidewalk and walk on the street if the sidewalk is closed, or if you just want to. You can cross diagonally across a parking lot, and lift your leg up over the parking corral. You can walk on the grass in the parks, you can walk in whatever direction your eye wants to take you, and you don't have to keep within the lines, or walk at a certain rate. You can walk as fast or as slow as you would like. You can walk in a strange or staggering fashion, you can design your walk to reflect who you are and you can do this completely in gesture, without having to adorn yourself in any commercial products.

Cars represent the kind of twisted freedom you get from buying things and acting like an asshole. Walking represents the kind of freedom that has to come from deep within you, because that is where it is generated, and that is the only place it can come from.

February 7

Let me return to this gesture, this movement. Something that is so difficult, so different in how lives are lived that I do not think anybody has really thought this out fully, and I will certainly not go so far as to think it out fully. How revolutionary this gesture is. Somebody walks out of the front of their house. They walk down their steps. They do not continue walking down the sidewalk or the street. They get right into their car, and their car takes them instead.

Just a few steps, and then the car takes over. Even for short trips. I see all the time in my neighborhood people going just a few blocks and driving the distance. If the price of gas suddenly went up to $10 a gallon and driving was longer feasible, they would be like turtles without their shells. They would probably try to keep on driving, even if it make them into paupers. They would be completely helpless.

You walk a few steps and then you drive. In some newer houses you might walk directly from your kitchen into the garage, and never have to interface with the world outside. How revolutionary this is. How strange this is.

For thousands of years, people walked for every trip. They walked all the way, whether you were a farmer walking to town or a laborer walking to work or a shopper walking to shop. You would walk from town to town. Horses and trains came much later.

If everybody walks, how arrogant is the single person or the few who are riding on horses in comparison. How much higher and how much more powerful and how that superiority could wire a brain. If everybody is in their cars, how much more lowly and vulnerable is the single pedestrian on the street, the single walker on the sidewalk in a hostile world of people whose minds have been hardwired into the tin thinking of their cars.

For thousands of years, people walked everywhere. It is only in the last century, really the last half century, that so many people in the U.S. have converted to getting around everywhere in their car. This is powerful stuff. This whole gesture of walking no further than a parked car and taking that car the rest of the way, this is so significant. This has turned newer cities into arrangements of parking lots. In new construction, we base all buildings on the underground parking. If we base our structures on their parking lots, what does this say about us, what does this say about the quality of life that we are building inside of a stucture? If what we are grounded on is so important, how have we changed if we ground everything on its parking, on its service to the car, our shells?

How vulnerable is a pedestrian in contrast to the shell people safe inside their cars. But vulnerability is necessary in order to learn. In order to take in new ideas and new perspectives you must first make yourself vulnerable to them. This is what learning is based upon. If you are not willing to make yourself vulnerable, you are not willing to learn. You may well be propagandized into thinking in a certain way by the susceptibility of your shell life inside your car, but this is not the body motion, the movement and action that are required to actually learn.

Learning takes that familiar scissors motion of the legs. When you walk you make yourself vulnerable in such a way that you grow your mind, rather than cement it into a parkingland. When you walk it is easy to see your connection to the world, and that if you make an action on it, there will be consequences. In a car you have that shell to protect you, you body quiet to make your mind into a sponge, and all that time to make yourself angry and contemptuous of everything outside your shell.

February 8

When the future looks back at the present, the slightly more than one hundred years of travel by tire will be looked at as an aberration, an expensive century step backwards that is book-ended by the smarter and much longer age of transit by rail.

The omnibus was a transit vehicle that preceded the streetcar. The omnibus was a carriage pulled by two horses. It could carry six or seven people. Its wheels rolled directly on the street. It was expensive to run and maintain, and was soon replaced by the streetcar, which was a huge improvement.

The streetcar ran on rail. Because of the rail, a streetcar could carry up to twenty people and be pulled by one horse. That is how much more efficient rail is than tire on street.

The streetcars were soon powered by electricity, which made them even more efficient. Electricity can be generated by anything. Coal, of course, but also things that we will never run out of, like sunlight, and the power of water running downstream.

The omnibus died out but its carriage design was used by early automakers, who could barely sell their vehicles because those cars were so inefficient in comparison to streetcar operations. The cars bumped on bumpy roads; they could not compete with the smoothness of travel on rail. Streetcar fares were low, and streetcar companies operated as private businesses. Some even made good profits.

Those wheels running on bumpy streets only started replacing streetcars once they started getting massive government subsidization, something that continues today. Communities turned their streets over to the sole possession of the car. They retooled those streets and roads, spending trillions of dollars to make roadbed that worked for cars, at least for a few years, until the potholes came and they had to re-build.

Because the streetcars could not compete against all the government subsidization of car travel, many transit companies went out of business, and were taken over by the local governments that had strangled them by unfairly competing against them.

So the inefficient won out over the efficient. Cheap oil and easy government aid kick started car transportation. And when cheap oil started getting more expensive, government went to war to protect it, to keep it flowing. And when the environmental impacts of burning all that oil for transportation began to come more and more clear, government spent more and more money on studies that denied it was happening. That's when rail started taking back some of the ground that it had lost.

Rail continued providing smooth rides that were much more energy efficient in many other cities. These are the cities of the grand rail and subway systems, the metros, the Els, the commuter lines. Light rail transit emerged on the scene in the early 1980's combining the speed of subway and El travel with the cost efficiency of streetcar-like construction on grade rather than above or below. Streetcar lines themselves are coming back in many cities.

Even in an area as anti-transit as this one, we now have a rail transit line. It looks like we may be able to get a few more in the next ten years. We need to hope so. Without rail transit, we will be sunk. Without it we will become a place impossible to live in, when oil becomes just too expensive to burn for commuting, when our air becomes so cloudy we can't afford to foul it just for trips to the bar.

When the future looks back at the present, it will look back at those cities that saw the writing on the petroleum wall and went crazy building rail transit. It will see how those cities grew and became more livable places and continued on into the future. It will also look at those stubborn cities that denied all the writing on the wall and kept on building car infrastructure at the expense of transit. The future will see how those cities turned to dust, their populations having to leave because they could not get around.

The oil is running out, and the wars to keep it flowing are getting more expensive. The environmental impacts of running wheels on roads are getting more noticeable. If we don't build more rail transit, we are a doomed city. And that is that.

February 9

When the price of gasoline went up over $2 a gallon last summer, we talked about having a party to celebrate it. We decided not to have the party. We were the only ones we knew who were really celebrating the high price of gasoline.

I have to be in downtown St. Paul at seven for a transit breakfast at the state capitol to show support for transit to the state legislators. It means a long trip for me, a transit user, a bus rider, with a transfer in downtown Minneapolis. I would expect that the majority of the transit activists who will come to the breakfast will not be taking transit to this early event. It takes a long time to take transit in this town.

Car directions, car transportation, it is so hardwired into people's brains. But if the price of gasoline makes it very uncomfortable, that might spark a change. That was the theory behind our party that never happened.

February 10

Yesterday's entry was short because I had to catch a bus before 6 a.m. to get to the breakfast meeting at seven. It looks like lawmakers in the state of Minnesota are finally able to mention the word transit, but they still are much more generous to car drivers than they are to transit users.

I took my video camera with me to do some taping for the public access TV show I make, "On Transit." I taped the speakers at the breakfast and also asked some of the transit advocates in the room to give me an interview. And then I went on to the state capitol building for a rally in support of funding for the Northstar Line, a commuter train heading up into the north suburbs. A legislator who had long been a foe of funding for transit even spoke out about the importance of building transit lines.

There were many enthusiastic speakers from unions, the legislature, from advocacy groups, in favor of spending money on transit. After the speeches ended, I went around and did some quick interviews too asking people why they were here. Once again, I heard much support for transit. Transit may not be how people live their lives today but they were enthusiastic about it, and hopefully regard it as something that they will really incorporate into their lifestyle, once and if we manage to build a decent system here.

At the rally I saw an old friend of mine who was also taping with his small camera. At one point I walked by him and he pointed his camera at me and asked me what I thought was going on here. His question seemed to be begging for some kind of vaguely criminal subtext and I was a little confused about how to answer it. I said something stupid, like how I am here to support transit, and he asked me if I followed the money. Once again his question really confused me and then he went on talking while he kept the camera on a shot of me. I'm sure I looked really confused and dumb and uncomfortable while he talked with an angry edge in his voice about transportation funding at the state legislature. He kept his camera aimed at me, and because I wasn't talking I could concentrate on it more. It seemed very weapon-like as I stood there and actually looked at that camera looking at me. At one point he said, "Maybe this guy knows," and aimed his camera at someone else. Like a coward, I suppose, I walked away. I couldn't stand to do any more interviews myself after that because he made me feel so bad about aiming cameras at people.

I agreed with what he was saying from behind his camera, but he seemed to be filming in a way more set on showing off what he knows than really wanting to know what people think. I eventually convinced myself that what I do with the camera is so far removed from what he was doing, that I shouldn't feel bad about it. I ask people if I can interview them before I turn the camera on, and try to ask general questions as much as possible, and let them formulate their own answer in their own way. But just having the camera staring at you can be intimidating. He reminded of this when he aimed his camera on my expression of confusion.

The emotion I felt with that camera aimed at me was similar to what I feel sometimes waiting at a bus stop while dozens of cars are passing by me. Cars are big pieces of machinery, they can take you out in one way or another. Their headlights are intimidating, their entire big steel fronts and size are intimidating. Sometimes I just have to step back from the corner because cars just look and sound so angry as they go by. There is something heartless in cars, just like there was something heartless in that guy's methods for aiming the camera at you and talking his mind while showing how confused you are.

After the rally, I walked around in downtown St. Paul for a while to get some video of buses. Downtown St. Paul can be a horribly depressing place to be a pedestrian. William H. Whyte called it "the blank wall capital of the world," because of all the blank walls of buildings along sidewalks. I walked around just before the noon hour and saw almost no pedestrians. People were walking around inside, but about the only people outside were the few waiting for buses.

Of course, many cars were going by. The blank walls of so many of the modern buildings in downtown St. Paul were a concession to car culture, which doesn't care about shop windows or interesting building details. All car culture cares about is finding a place to park, and there were many signs pointing out where you could find a parking space. It was harder to find signs directing you to any place interesting to walk.

What is sad about all the blank walls of the newer buildings is that there are still many older buildings in St. Paul that do have windows looking out at the street. But the blank walls have rubbed off on them too, and many of their storefront spaces are empty. Sixty years ago this downtown was bustling with pedestrians. Now it could have been hit by a neutron bomb. Of course, it was hit by a neutron bomb. The neutron bomb is cars.

February 11

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