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February 11

I read in my neighborhood newspaper about the home of some friends of mine on a street near here. There were photos as well. It is not the first time that this has happened to them, but it was the worst time so far. A truck hit the front of their building. Their home is an old brick storefront building near a curve in a street. The truck was going much too fast and it did not turn for the curve and it struck their building. The cab went flaming across the street. The truck actually knocked the whole façade off the foundation of their two story brick building. The driver was not hurt.

We live in a war zone if we live with cars. We live in a raceway demolition derby-land when we live with cars. We live in a land of people-smashing monsters when we live with cars. We live with the necessity of war when we live with cars, wars against other lands, wars against our atmosphere, wars against ourselves. How can we live with cars when they can cause so much damage?

You can blame it on the drivers, but it keeps on happening, even tho the drivers change, get older, or die. Car accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 30 years. Cars are an international global health problem. Cars are the cause and the vehicle of on-going war. Cars are as close as we will come to know what a devil is, and so many of us have sold our souls to it, and so many of our cities have sold their souls to those devil cars.

It is so obvious to me, and I think it is becoming more obvious for others. I feel that many others are ready to give up on their cars but feel like they still cannot. They know that what they are doing is wrong, they know that car culture is wrong, but they cannot pull themselves out of it. A friend of mine, wanting to follow my example, was ready to give up his car for a month, but decided he could not because of his job. The job was the excuse, but the real excuse is that it is just so hard.

It is difficult to break away from cars. It is so difficult to break away from an addiction once you have hooked yourself on it, once you have let yourself fall under the sway of its repetition, its rhythms. It is easy for me because I never started, I never got hooked I the first place, I never had a car.

It is so difficult for people who have never known anything but a car to break away from that addiction, to break away from that chemical change in their brain that cars have wrought them. Cars have done to their brains what that truck did to the home of my friends. It has smashed it into something that would not have been recognizable a hundred years ago. Withdrawal can smash their brains back, but with much pain, with agony and screaming. If we are to survive as a civilization, their brains will have to be smashed or mangled back into a pre-car state, no matter how much suffering that takes.

February 12

It is February, and the temperature in Minnesota is going to be twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. The last few years have all been among the warmest on record. This winter we have gotten less snow than some towns in Texas. There is something so wrong with the world, with the climate, and so many of us insist on going on with the practices that make it worse.

One small car puts sixty tons of CO2 gas in the atmosphere every year. That is a considerable amount of greenhouse gas. That small car, in its life, in its daily use, is making the planet's atmosphere so much worse. Its driver might think that that car is an environmental choice because it is a small car and maybe even uncomfortable to ride in, but the point is not really whether it is small or big. It is a car, and if it is a car it is a global warming device.

All respected science confirms that global warming is indeed going on and that it is happening because of human activity. Our president does not respect this science, because it disagrees with his political philosophy. He shares this little quirk with great tyrants like Stalin. And so in a few days the Kyoto treaty will go into effect and the U.S., the world's leading contributor of global warming gases, is not participating.

Because our leader is not a leader, but a shill for corporate interests, to his own oil greed, it is up to individuals. It is up to each one of us to make his or her own Kyoto treaty with the rest of the world, to decrease the global warming that you and I cause.

More than half of global warming gases come from transportation. This sounds like a good place to start. If we can reduce global warming gases from transportation, we have solved over half of the problem.

The easiest way for you to radically cut down on the global warming gases that you are making is to give up your car. If you do not have a car, give up on accepting rides from others in their cars. Let them know why you are not accepting their ride. Use alternate modes of transportation instead. Use the transit that is already running, or bike or walk instead. Do not burn that Iraqi gas which comes from the burned flesh of Iraqi innocents.

The U.S. as a whole is avoiding Kyoto, but individual citizens can make their own Kyoto. I have not been in a car for well over a month. It is not at all difficult. I have not suffered at all; it is as easy as falling off a log to fall off the sway of your global warming car trips. It is time that many others join me, and boycott the global warming of car transportation.

February 13

Every morning our cats put on a little routine to let us know that they are hungry and that it is time for their breakfast. Out cat Top will step all over us, especially up close to my head, and make his little weeping sound. It's hard to sleep thru this routine, and it certainly is my morning alarm clock. On a few days I have slept thru it; those mornings I must have been very sleepy.

It seems to me that the mistake of the car culture is trying to wake us up from our dream of smooth comfortable driving. It has been trying to wake me up since I was a little kid.

One of the waking routines is just the violence of car travel, the noise of the machines, their speed, and the damage that comes from that. (Yesterday: standing at Broadway and Penn waiting for a very late bus with a handful of other people on a sidewalk so narrow and completely covered with ice aside from a small patch of dirt where the bus is supposed to pull up. Two lanes of angry cars passing so close to us. One just a little out of control would mean death against the empty brick wall behind us).

One of the waking routines is the estimated half a million deaths every year from car accidents worldwide, that cars are the leading killer of people under thirty, that many of these car deaths come to children, to pedestrians.

Another part of that wake-up routine is the strange weather we have been having, all the outward signs of global warming that scientists have studied and understand but our waking dead leaders are comatose to.

Another waking routine sign is the war for oil, that we have to fight and kill for a resource that will be running out in not too many years. Another sign is in the parkinglot puddle paradise that our cities have turned into. Another is our growing U.S. body mass that comes from an unnatural lifestyle where people never leave their house but to get directly in some kind of automobile to do all the work of location-change for them.

This waking routine woke me up years ago but so many others are just sleeping soundly thru it. Their loud car snores make this great river of sound that never stops, the brake squeal and the crash that I sometimes hear. After the cats wake me up the next sound I hear each morning: the cars starting up all around me, on the street below, from the alley, from all sides, that key turning, that roar like a lion.

Why isn't everybody complaining about how they can never sleep in because of this loud waking routine? You have got to be a pretty sound sleeper to sleep thru all this commotion.

February 14

I used to stand taller when I stood at a bus stop. But in the meantime, the world of cars has gotten bigger. The cars have grown up fat and contented and I am still the same height on the sidewalk.

What happened to cars the last few years? Someone gave them a tank of helium and steel and over-inflated them. They are so much bigger than I remember. Sometimes they even have more wheels to flatten down the landscape. Some kind of hybrid between truck and mac truck has taken over, some kind of gigantism has infiltrated the Sunday driver. All these big tanks or trucks with their rounded edges and puckered grill faces. The world of cars has turned into a world of fatties, just like the people inside.

We waited for a bus near the University. Traffic was backed up for blocks for a basketball game. I do not know whether it was the audience for the basketball or what, but the street seemed to be pocked with so many huge vehicles. They were black and white and grey and brown; they were absurd trucks and SUVs and minivans, all those rounded edges, all those balloon chassis blown up by hot air.

As all those over-inflated egomobiles slowed by me at the speed of jerks, only one word seemed capable of summing up what I was seeing, and that word kept coming back to me. The word was "evil." My valentine and I both spoke it out loud as a particularly offensive darth truck belched past us. It had two tires for each back wheel, and wheelwells that stuck out like crazy fat hips.

How could these people sacrifice their planet and their loved ones to global warming and to war, to death, to city misery, for such a passing chrome clown parade? How could they have let their trusty automakers do this to them, to their useless garages faced with cars so huge they will not fit anywhere?

The larger the vehicle, the quicker the road clogs. The larger the vehicle, the more empty air there is inside that carhead. All those huge trucks carrying nothing but one or two people, but their empty payloads take up space too, which makes everything go so slowly.

I do not think I have gotten any smaller this last decade, but I sure do feel smaller when I stand on the curb waiting for a bus. I will feel smaller when I get on my bicycle and try to joust with these cowardly steel road warriors. I feel smaller for the whole world trampled by these absurd balloon beasts.

February 15

Some of these rants might appear to be misanthropic. I hope they are not. I do not think they should be. I do not hate the people inside cars, I hate the cars and what they have done to the people inside and the world outside.

I rode the bus and the train a number of times yesterday for different purposes. I did not act socially – usually I withdrew from the crowd on the bus or train. I withdrew into a book or a magazine article but I was in the center of a social situation. I was close to all kinds of people, and I was sharing room and air and time with them.

I got to overhear conversations. Some of these conversations were profane and some were sacred. I overhead one guy trying to sell his church to another guy. He said "God" about a thousand times when he told the other guy that he doesn't talk about God all the time. I also overhead another conversation from the back of the bus that I could barely understand thru the thickness of profanity. I overheard a meta-conversation between two woman about that profane conversation coming from the back of the bus, they were judging that public act back there, they were critiquing it and the actors who played it.

Conversations and contra-conversations, it was all for me to hear, and as interesting as the book and magazine I was reading, and maybe even more interesting. It was a book of life, or fragments of a longer article that I would never know in full.

In a car, all you get is the conversation with people you already know, or even worse, the canned one-way talk on the radio. Maybe some of that is just a fraction as rich as the talk I heard on the bus yesterday, but I really doubt it.

I had a good chance to live thru others, thru proximity and vicariously. I got to enter their lives and their sense of judgment, if only for a few minutes, if only from behind my back. I got to see a little thru their eyes by way of what I heard in my ears. It was transcendent. It was amazing. It was outer body. It was public. It was public transport, and it took me places, too.

February 16

Sometimes on a bus ride I will drift off to sleep. I have a book in front of me, but the words will start to sway with the ride and I will eventually realize that I have been in some kind of half sleep state. I do not think that my eyes actually close. I think that I have just slightly left reality and gone into a place where the images crash together; the sounds and the places take me some place other than where I am at this exact moment in time.

This can be so relaxing, as long as I do not sleep thru my stop. I have never slept thru my stop, altho sometimes I wonder. The steady movement, the airy sounds and low sounds of the bus on the street, they work together like a lullaby, like a rocking in a cradle, and I can drift away. I do not really dream, but the sounds of the bus and maybe the sunlight strobes register in a lighter way on the back of my brain, and I could be dreaming but I am only slightly sleeping. And then I wake back up, with or without a twitch, and I resolve that from this point I will drift away no further, and I resolve from that point that I will live 100% for the rest of this ride.

I do this too when I am riding in a car. It has been almost two months now since I have ridden in a car, but I still can remember what it is like, the torture and convenience. A long car ride can place me in this same strange stage of halfway sleep. Sometimes it happens to me when I am just sitting in one place, like in a movie, or in a lecture. I can't imagine having two tons or more of steel and power under my control were I to fall into such a half sleep resting. And yet this sleep does fall on me almost every time I get in a vehicle.

There is nothing unnatural to my little slip of bus ride sleep. There would be something really unnatural were I to drive a car. I just know that I would drift if I were in the driver's seat, just as I drift when I am a passenger. There is something about the steadiness, the swaying, the sounds of the road that does this to me.

I can think of many other better reasons why I should avoid automobiles, but this is a good reason too. I have not driven a car since I was seventeen and forced to take driver's training class. That is twenty-five years that I have not been behind the wheel, and I am quite proud of that. Twenty-five years that I have not been a threat; twenty-five years since I have not aimed that huge weapon of car at others, at the world.

I cannot consider myself responsible for it. If I were driving, I would have to consider myself responsible. Responsible for whatever came from my driving, from any deaths or injuries, for the global warming and for the war that comes from driving. I would be responsible for them.

But instead I chose long ago to live my strange civil disobedience. I will choose not to drive, even if that gives me a social standing less than that of citizen in the city where I live. I will choose not to drive even if that makes it much more difficult for me, and it does. It takes me longer to do little tasks, because I have to wait for buses that sometimes take a long time to come, because I negotiate a city that was designed for car negotiation. I do this without a car; I do this without threatening the world and that city with a car combined with my natural body urge to drift off into a something sleep now and then.

February 17

Yesterday I ran an errand that would have been much easier to do if I had a car handy, or if I asked someone with a car to do for me, but I did it on the bus just to prove the point that it could be done without a car, even if just to prove the point to myself.

I caught a bus near my home and transferred downtown to a bus bound for the University of Minnesota area of town. There I picked up some flyers for my neighborhood work - 3400 copies in fact. They were inserts for the neighborhood newspaper. Now I had to take those two big boxes of paper with me on the bus to the newspaper office.

It was a tall stack to have to carry, two large boxes, heavy. First I went to the nearest bus stop to catch the same bus that had taken me here back to downtown. But there was a huge crowd at the bus stop. It was the University, and a class break must have just happened, so students were lined up to take the University buses across the river or the city bus back home or to a job. Each bus pulled up standing room only, and there was no way I could carry those boxes and hold them standing on a crowded bus.

I rethought my plan, and I knew (being fairly knowledgeable about the Minneapolis bus system) that another bus route starts out its run two blocks away. This bus could take me to a corner where I could transfer to the bus that would take me to the newspaper office. The rub is that this other bus does not run as frequently, so I might end up waiting at that corner a while, but, because the bus was just starting its run, there would definitely be room for me to set down my heavy boxes.

That two blocks was a long walk with that heavy load. I had to rest the bottom box on each sidewalk trashcan as I walked the stretch. But I was rewarded as I got to that other corner, for the #6 bus, the one I was hoping to take, was rounding the block and I could run a step and catch it and had plenty of room to set down my load.

My next transfer just involved crossing a street with the boxes, and I could rest them on a newspaper vending box until my transfer bus came. When that bus pulled up, I stepped on board and set the boxes on the floor before I reached for my bus pass. After I got off this bus I had another block to walk to the office with those boxes, and my arms were so relieved to set them at the reception desk after I walked in the door.

My arms did not pop out of their sockets, tho sometimes I wondered with that big load of boxes. I made my errand, and made it without a car.

All told, the errand took me a little over an hour to accomplish on the bus. It would have taken less than half the time in a car, but parking might have been an issue at the University, and maybe even more walking might have been needed to take the boxes from the copy shop to a parking space several blocks away. So I could have saved some time if I had done the trip on a car, but I do not think that my time is worth more than the fate of the earth, and driving a car creates a great deal of climate change gases.

Yesterday the Kyoto Treaty went into effect without the participation of the United States. Our government is as arrogant as a driver who thinks that his time is worth more than the continuation of life on earth. It is up to all of us to take the responsibility that our government has failed to take. We must make our own Kyoto's. It is not impossible. I did it yesterday carrying seven reams of paper.

February 18

I heard last night on television someone talking about how we will always find oil, that the well has no bottom, that human creativity is such that we will always find a way to get it. He seemed to be inferring that the scientists and petroleum engineers who talk about oil as a nonrenewable resource are incorrect. To me it sounded like he could have been saying that we will always have gaslights, or we will always have beaver hats, or we will always have papyrus scrolls.

Our world changes over time, the way we live our lives evolves, sometimes very fast, sometimes so slowly that we do not notice the changes. To think that we will always be as we are now is the worst kind of presentism. It is bigotry of the now, and it is just plain wrong.

His talk was sandwiched between car commercials. They were not even car commercials; you rarely see car commercials on TV these days. They were commercials for hybrid car/truck monsters, strange machines that went fast then slow, and the camera circled them as if it was getting ready to pounce on its prey.

You can usually tell when someone or something is cornered and ready to be taken out. That person or thing gets especially surly and nasty because that nastiness is all that is left before slaughter. I do not know if it is my imagination or have car drivers been acting like cornered beasts lately. It seems like every day a car tries to make a left turn right in front of me when I am crossing in a crosswalk, or an engine roars in a way trying to make itself seem more threatening, or another car runs a red light.

These cars, or their captive drivers inside, can sense that their era is nearing its end and they are acting like the trapped beasts that they are. The camera is circling them, the wars and the global climate change are circling them like predators, like dinner time. There is nothing they can do other than act surly, or puff themselves up so that they seem bigger with accessories or extra air inside, or more living room comfort to get back at those houses. We will always have cars, just like we will always have togas, and we will always find oil, just like we will always find more dodo birds.

February 19

The impression you are supposed to get from the advertising, the propaganda, the popular picture, the standard impression, the wavelength that we live and breathe, the impression that you are to believe is that automobiles give you freedom and independence. But it seems to me that the real freedom is to be free of the car.

Having a car is like having a huge weight attached to your butt. So it takes you somewhere, but now what do you do with it? You have to park it, and what does that mean? Lop off some city or lop off some earth and make a big ashtray for that is a parkinglot.

You say a car is freedom, but to be without one is the real liberty. With a car you are a potential killer, you must carry with you the weight of that, you are driving a car that could make a hit at any old time and make great death. You are loaded, you are a deadly weapon, you are a moving explosion and if that is freedom then I must be a monkey's uncle.

Your car makes you free, that is what the jingles tell you over and over, and so you believe it. But how are you free when you need at least two tons of steel just to go any place at all, just to do anything at all. Sounds to me a little like you have got the ultimate ball and chain locked to your behind, and you have to be a dreamer and you have to be very deluded to be such a prisoner and call that freedom.

How can anybody call themselves free if they cannot go anywhere without taking their whole prison with them? How can it be freedom when you never leave behind your jailer, and you carry the key yourself that locks you in your solitary confinement?

You call that a windshield but I say they are bars. You call them tires but I call them torture. You might say the engine has to breathe but I call it global warming. You might call it refreshing oil drink but I call it the war of great bloodshed.

As long as there is one who is a prisoner to his car, I am not truly free. I may be more free than she is, but I am not completely free. In order for me to be free, I need to help free the prisoners from their self-imposed chains. I need to yell out loudly the truth of the deception. I need to mumble these realities until they or I am stone cold silly. I just have to keep on living the truth - fifty days plus and I have not been in a cell of car.

February 20

My act of civil disobedience in this car culture is that I am 42 and I have never had a driver's license. In this culture, in this nation, you prove that you are a person, you prove that you are who you are by showing your driver's license, and I do not have one and I have never had one.

Of course, I have a state I.D. card, which identifies itself in bold letters with the statement that it IS NOT A DRIVER'S LICENSE. It identifies itself by what it is not, and it is how I identify myself. It is how is prove that I am a person or a qualified consumer, this thing that is only a thing because it is not something else.

There is something that you show to others so that they know you are on the up and up; it is something to show so that they can see that you are not guilty, and not somebody else in disguise. It is the central basis of individual identity in our surveillance system state. It is Big Brother in your pocket, and to not have it is my act of insanity.

It is a little plastic card: the driver's licenses are red like blood; the state I.D. that I have, the thing that identifies itself by what it is not, has a green stripe instead of that blood red. It shows my age and shows that I am not qualified to do the thing that means more than anything else in this culture: it states boldly that I am not qualified to drive.

The state defines me by what I am not. The state says it loud and clear in my card to prove that I am a person but I am not that kind of person. I am a person, but I am not a driver. I carry this in my pocket so that I know who I am. This is my ultimate definition. This is my table of contents and my index. This is my story, written in plastic so that all who ask to see it may see.

February 21

Great Grey Owls have been moving down from Canada and their habitat on Hudson's Bay to Minnesota in search of prey. Hundreds of them have migrated down this winter. It is possible to spot them easily, for they do not fear people. They perch on a tree or a telephone pole and wait for some mouse to move, and then they fly down to catch it.

Over 400 of these owls have died so far this winter in Minnesota. They were killed by cars. Maybe even by the cars of all the people who have been driving up from distant places to get a chance to spot these majestic birds. The owls fly low to nab their prey and will not stop for anything in their low flight path - not even a car speeding down a road. There are not many cars or people in their traditional habitat. Now they are in a land of cars, and the cars are killing them.

The wildlife kill by cars is staggering. This did not happen when we got around by foot; this rarely happened when we got around by train. Train tracks are empty most of the time, so there is a good chance that wildlife can cross them without getting hit. Highways are rarely lonely of cars, and sometimes several lanes of cars are moving fast with deadly speed on a spot of land that some animal wants to cross.

As the planet's climate changes - the impact of the combustion that moves these dangerous cars - more animal species will be migrating to follow the hot or cold, they will be chasing their own migrating climate. They will have to cross highways, and the highways will be their killing fields.

When you choose to get around by car, you take responsibility for what comes from your actions. When you turn that key to ignite the ignition, you know that your car is capable of killing things, killing animals and people, killing climates and planets. When you choose to drive you choose to be a possible murderer. This is a choice, and it is a choice I care not to take.

If you have any compassion, if you have any scruples, if you have any love for your own species and for others, you must stop this madness, you must stop this killing. You must stop this gun of daily living. You must give up your car, the dangerous weapon that is killing us all.

February 22

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