July 1 2 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

July 16

It takes a real effort to walk instead of drive. After only a hundred years it is hard-wired into our U.S. brains that when you leave your house you walk right to your car no matter how near or how far you think you are going. There is no calculation of distances, no saying, "one mile or two, so I will walk." There is no saying, "two miles to ten, so I will bike." No saying, "a few miles or fewer, so I will use transit." There is one tool for all plumbing, for home repair, for distance reduction, one hammer to hit all nails on the head, one screwdriver to twist all screws no matter their shape or slot, and it has four wheels and needs a key to turn its ignition and it is dangerous.

I can see that myself, I can see that even in myself, how easy and programmed those rhythms are even as the price of gas ratchets up over two dollars and higher. How it takes an act of revolution, of defiance in the face of overwhelming conformity, to simply leave the car behind and walk those steps, and walk for distance, for more than five minutes, to encompass space and not just for recreation or for getting to the car mission central. How daring it is to walk on the side of some highway and street, how daring it is to walk even if sidewalks are in place, because you are walking and not in a car and the car is the only way, the only truth, the only mechanism to bridge that gap in our book of motion truth.

It is such an answer without a question as long as one car is enough, is within reach of your stretching arms. How easy it is to strap yourself in senseless seatbelts, how falling down it is to accept the limited view thru the windows and the doors, how that heavy abridgment of space is your friend to hop small distances while it goes unsaid and unpracticed that you can conquer them too with less energy depletion.

But it is all the difference in the world if you have no car to fall down on, to fall back on. It is so easy to keep out of them and not waste the world with your simple transportation if you do not own one. It is so easy. It is so easy if there is no car in the driveway, it is so easy to completely reject it. If you have no car, there are only the other ways. If you have no car, there is only walking and biking and transit and hopping and sliding and crawling and walking on your hands and standing on your head and walking backwards and skates and pogo sticks and wheelbarrow races and etc. but not by car.

July 17

Despite the heat of the last few days or week, or the heat we have held since we have been back in town, getting around in this city these days is easier for those who do not have cars. There are useful bike trails and there is the train itself and I made the most of them on a twisty turning trail of adventure.

Yesterday I took quite a long bike ride, and used the train too for part of the trip. I rode my bike downtown, then put it on the train and rode the train down to Minnehaha Creek. The train was full of people speaking Spanish. I tried my best to pick out a few words. When I got to 46th Street I pulled off my bike and got on the trail along Minnehaha Creek. I rode a creek bike trail that was pretty near flawless. The path for bikes is separated from the path for pedestrians, and the asphalt is fairly recent and relatively unbuckled and uncracked from floods and time and trees and reality.

At 50th Street, I got off the trail to take over the street, and tho 50th Street is a busy street, there is a painted shoulder on it that gave me some room to wield my bike without having to joust directly with elephantine cars. I was looking for a homebrew store that I thought was around 50th and Penn or 50th and Xerxes, but I was not successful in that quest, so I directed my pedals north.

It was afternoon heat in the high nineties, but biking in the heat makes a breeze that dries the sweat from your forehead and body. It is a pretty efficient air conditioning, and I was comfortable, despite all my body movement in the intolerable heat and humidity. There were also many other bicyclists out and doing the same to make movement, to make heat and cool at the same time for motion.

I rode up to the trail around Lake Calhoun, and just feeling the lake nearby and its waters was refreshing. Many other people must have thought so too, for the crowds started on the grass and thickened on the beach and made themselves even thicker and more crowded directly in the water, where there were so many people that there was barely room in between them for the waves.

Around the lake trail I went, and up to the Midtown Greenway and the rail trail into St. Louis Park. The homebrew store I was looking for was just a block off the trail, and I could buy the yeast I needed to make raspberry wine from the raspberries drooping off our backyard bushes.

Then back on the trails and around the lakes, both Calhoun and Harriet. I stopped at Calhoun for a raspberry ice tea. I drank down that tea in a quick six sips thru the straw. Then back to the Minnehaha Creek trail down the shadiest spot in the whole world, as the creek twisted and turned, as some people floated by on tubes on the floaty hot afternoon. Just half a block off the trail was the home of the T.C. clan, where the party under the shade trees was waiting with food and drinks that I drank like a pop drunk, and I could set my bike on the side of the garage, and join the conversation, already in progress.

As soon as my ride stopped, all the perspiration left me, and I was a soaking rag from head to belt, but the wind came to my rescue to make me dry again.

July 18

Yesterday's big trip was a ride on the bus from the bus stop three blocks from our house all the way to Uptown, all on one bus, the 17, to see a movie, and then we rode the bus back to home. We went to see, Me and You and Everyone We Know, a beautiful and touching movie, but also one with so many scenes of people driving that it nearly made me carsick. The bus ride to and from the movie was direct, no transfers, but took more than half an hour, straight thru downtown. I took along a book that I just started reading, James Farrell's Studs Lonnigan, a long book that will need quite a few long bus rides to get thru.

Before that ride and movie, I spent most of the morning and early afternoon sitting in the shade of the grapevine in our teahouse and reading James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, which is a horror book if there ever was one, but also very real. It is about what will happen soon, it is about what has already started happening. It is about what the world peak in oil will mean to a world that is so addicted to cheap oil, a world that has staked everything, suburbs, the notions of continual economic growth, food, distance, everything on the fact that there is oil and the fact that it is cheap. But those two facts, those two firm bases on which our civilization is erected, are about to tumble. We can see it already in rising gas prices, and we can see it in the war headlines and the shakiness of so many things and yet we are blindly going about our oil sucking pre-peak lifestyles as if there were nothing to worry about, as if the world will always give us more oil.

Oil has been a great gift, a rare thing to have so much energy packed in it, and nothing we will find or invent will be able to be wasted quite as easily as we have wasted all that oil. So I was sitting in my quiet teahouse as the butterflies went by from one flower to another and reading this near-apocalyptic tone about bad times coming before you know it.

And then I hooked up the bike trailer to get some charcoal and food so that after the movie, as we hoped for a rainstorm, we could make a great feast from our garden and the local farmer's market. We barbequed up some free range chicken from the farmer's market and made a pitcher of sangria with our garden raspberries and some plums and then we made a big stir fry with turnips and broccoli and chard from our garden and ate as we hoped for rain but we only got dripped. And then I read some more of the doom, and then I went back to my not-so-oily lifestyle.

July 19

I (dream) am at the vertical farmer's market. Instead of horizontal shaded alleys there are tall vertical tubes in which to buy your produce and other items. All the goods are in wooden crates stacked on top of each other. You have to step your way down the tubes on the crates like uneven stairs. The last bit of ways down the tube I end up with all the boxes above me stacked on my head. This makes any movement very difficult for me. The last thing I want to do is be responsible for tipping the whole column above me, so I have to practice the most delicate balance, so I cannot even move away from this one column.

All those cars and trucks are parked on the street below me. It is the morning, and the birds are making all the songs now. They are not yet joined by the cars in sound, but there are a few cars already awake and metal. One just went by, a block away or so, like a saw cutting thru all the trees between. All the other cars are still silent, just lined up on the curbs and catching blown garbage on their tires. As the oil supplies weaken and run down deeper, these cars will be spending more and more time waiting at the curbs.

It amazes me how big all these cars are. There is an ungodly big SUV parked right in front of our house. How could anybody ever need all that bulk just to get around. It makes no sense at all. It makes no sense that a full block of houses can only park as many cars as the houses because each car is almost as long as each house is wide.

Soon I will be biking to work. In some cases I will be in close proximity to cars. There is a whole wide lane, and I will be taking up just a tiny percentage of it, but I will still keep the car from passing me in my lane unless the car gives me a wide berth and passes me in the next lane. Each car is as wide as four people even tho just one is inside.

Bigger size means bigger noise. Bigger size means bigger waste. Bigger size means bigger head means bigger ego means bigger murder. Cars are so big so they can be so threatening. Cars are so big so they can always be out of balance, always be the one to topple the deck of cards, always be the one to run over, trample over, all the brains and the delicate songs.

July 20

Sealcote is my scourge. It is a minor scourge in the world at large, but sometimes its scurviness seems major to me. Sealcote is the tar that street crews apply to a few streets every summer to seal them off, to stop the cracks from spreading. The crews lay down the tar and then they cover it with fine gravel. They leave the fine gravel there on the street for a few weeks so that cars can drive over it and smash it down. Then, a few weeks later, they come back to collect the extra loose gravel.

But not only cars drive over the gravel and the sealcote. Bikes must bike on it. People must walk on it if they need to cross the street, or if they are foolhardy enough to actually stand still or dance on the street, but that would be dangerous, and even crossing can be treacherous because we have handed over our streets to cars and to sealcote.

The little gravel rocks have sharp sides and edges and move around and make a sound when tires come in contact with them. If you are on a bike and you are not careful, you may slide on them and go from vertical to horizontal. They are gravel but they are slippery, and so you have to be an expert when you apply your brakes so that your tires stop even on the crazy moving world of tiny gravel.

The other interesting thing about the tiny gravel that goes with sealcote is that the rocks pop up like popping popcorn when you ride over them with your thin bike tires. They pop up when cars ride over them too, but it is just not the same. When they pop up with cars, they pop up into wheelwells. But when they pop up behind bicycles, they pop up to shirts and pants. I have lost several nice shirts to my war on riding sealcote. The small gravel rocks come up with their memory rubber stamp of sealcote tar and stamp it in their jump on your shirt or on your pants, and make black spots to remember them by and ruin the shirt. Sometimes the tar has been so strong that the gravel is still sticking to the back of my shirt when my ride has ended. Sometimes the little rocks hurt small like tiny insect bites. The pain goes away soon, but the black mark stays forever.

Sealcote does not come out in the washing machine. It was made that way so that rain would not wash it from the street. Sealcote likes to stay, and that is why the road crews use it, and that is why I have several shirts and some short pants with black polka dots that are only on the rear.

When summer ends, so does sealcote season. That is one reason to look forward to winter.

July 21

It is a strange headlong state of denial that the world is in. It is fairly clear that something is wrong with the supply of oil. The price of gas ticks up three steps and only back one, then up four steps and only back two, always going up. There are reports if you are listening of peak oil and of oil supplies no longer able to quite keep up to demand.

There are signs in the weather that something is not exactly right. It is hot all over the country, and has been for many days now. It is a major heat wave that is making many people uncomfortable. There are signs in the weather, and these are even big news. You cannot miss them, unless you live in a cloud of air conditioning. People have been talking about global warming for years now, and there are times like these where it is so easy to touch it, and yet it still has not changed anything.

There are people who know about these things, there are many people who know these things either in their brains or in their guts and yet they change nothing about themselves. The cars are all still going. People are keeping to them even if so many people now know them to be death and desperation. We have known it for years. Look at what is has done to Detroit. It has slowly been killing the city of cars, and has been since the 1970's. Do not tell me that the greater proportion of the people in this country do not know in their guts that the way of the car is the way of death. They worship death. Their religion is the death that comes by car.

So many people know this or feel it or breathe it and yet they keep to their cars. They hold and caress their cars even tho they know their cars are the end of everything. They turn to their cars for one more daily commute even tho it could be the last, the last for them, the last for the earth.

There is knowledge, but there is absolute ignorance and denial in that knowledge. People know and yet they do not change. There is too much momentum on the road to easy death. There is too much gambling desperation to slow down the planned chaos. It is all about ending things in a big muck mess. We all know it, we all realize. But why don't we even try.

July 22

When we were in Red Lodge earlier this month for the family reunion, I would get up in the morning and sit in the shade of a small pine tree and read. I was facing the mountain and could look up at it from time to time. I did this just as I sit and read outside most nice mornings here at home. I sit in my shaded backyard teahouse and look out at the garden from time to time, just to see it, or to watch a bird, a butterfly, a cat or a squirrel.

On some of the days in Red Lodge, while I was out sitting and reading while other members of my family were sleeping in, I would see my father walk down the street. He took a walk every morning. He had a circle that he made that took him around the golf course that we stayed near and then back to his specific condo. On some days I would see him walk by and join him on the walk around in that circle. He took these walks for his health. It is part of the routine he adapted to keep healthy, for his heart and his body. And yet that walk in a circle always made me feel a little strange.

That morning walk was a walk for health and for recreation, but not a walk for transportation, and that is why it made me feel just a little weird. I walk a certain amount every day. Some days I walk much more than other days. But all my walks are pretty much for transportation. Walking is one of my big three forms of transportation. For some trips I make I walk and that is how I get to where I am going. At other times walking is combined with biking or transit to get me to a destination.

Those morning walks were for recreation. When my father wanted to get somewhere, like down to town, he would get in his car or his truck. It took a bit of an extra effort for me to buck the system and walk down to town, to walk for transportation, because almost everybody else was so inclined to drive or ride in a car, and to think that cars were the only way to actually get somewhere. Walking was fine for recreation, but when you need to get somewhere you use the tool that gets you there, the car.

But if you do not have a car, you know that walking is so good for transportation. It may be, after all, the best transportation means of them all, because you do not need anything other than yourself to get to where you are going. That is why a walk used only for recreation can feel slightly like a futile and wasted effort to me, like an old tool on the wall hung there for nostalgia or decoration, and not because it can actually be called on to do any work.

July 23

Last night I was at the start of the events for the Art Car Parade in Minneapolis. A good friend of ours is the organizer of the event and I have come to know many of the artists who decorate their cars or bicycles by videotaping the parade over the years. I show the videos that I make at the cabaret on the night just before the parade, and that was last night. I do not have a car and I do not really like cars for transportation, but I like art, and I appreciate people who go out of their way to make a uniform consumer product into something particular and special.

I cannot really even say that I dislike cars themselves, because I do not. An old car or an art car might turn my head because I am attracted to its style and shape. I can appreciate cars as objects and as objects that can sometimes be useful. What I find it hard to appreciate is how they are so overused. If people could not go anywhere without taking and running their electric mixers I would suspect that something was wrong and maybe I would take up opposition to mixers and would boycott the practice myself and part of that boycott could involve a daily blog about why I was so opposed to mixer culture.

So do I hate cars? I do not know if I hate cars. I certainly do not like how they are practiced. But I do like what people do to them to make them their own, for there is something very taboo about messing with the factory finish of any consumer product, changing it. Of course, over time, anything you own will take on the marks of your ownership of it, the pits and the dings and so on. And we always try to efface these marks of personality, so that we might not be so identifiable, so that we can sell that object later, so that is still has value. But taking a brush and a glue gun and making some theme out of a vehicle is something completely different. That is radical. A car is so big and so valuable that personalizing it in such a way is a kind of craziness. But craziness against such car craziness might also be the actual true sanity of it all. Perhaps cars are better suited, after all, to be art objects even more than they are suited to be transportation devices.

July 24

July has been my month of breaking my pledge of not riding in cars, for I rode in cars twice yesterday while I was videotaping the Minneapolis Art Car Parade. I suppose I could excuse it, for I had to ride to bag that beast, to get that shot. But I probably also could have worked around that and I just did not, I imagined the shot from the car and I had to try to get it by riding along.

I rode the bus and then the train to the Art Car staging area at the Midtown Farmer's Market. A co-worker and I started shooting some interviews with Art Car artists. A City Council Member who usually rides his bicycle was doing the interviews. We only got a couple interviews down when a storm came up. Clouds flew in from the west as fuzzy and curly as can be and they dropped wind and rain that threatened to blow away all the Farmer's Market tents. The sellers collapsed their tents and put all their things away while many people gathered under the next door building's awning.

The band arrived to play at the market and it was a jug band. They decided to play an acoustic set for those of us gathered under the awning as the rain fell and lightning lit up the sky. They gave us spoons and guitar and a jug and tap dancing feet, all full of sound as the rain tapped away. By the time the rain stopped it was almost time for all the Art Cars to head to the parade course.

I rode in a couple of the Art Cars to shoot video from them. I got back on my feet in the intersection of Lyndale and Lake Streets, which were closed off from regular cars so the parade cars could take over. I stood in the intersection, safe in that street, and filmed the cars as they went by.

After getting more interviews in the afternoon, I took the bus home, and as K was not feeling well, stayed home Saturday evening. We watched the fireworks of the Aquatennial from our front yard.

So far this year I have ridden in cars on a total of nine days, out of two hundred in all or so. On a couple of those days in July, those were long rides around the Yellowstone Park area, but most of the other rides were short, were just a matter of a few minutes. And most of those rides I took because it was the social thing to do, and not riding would be anti-social.

Cars are often used in an anti-social way. One person rides alone in them and gets angry at everything outside. But cars can be social, when many people ride together in them or when they are used as the show they were yesterday. Hundreds of people were lined on the streets yesterday to see the cars go by. Many of them saw me go by in the convertible with Grand Marshalls Viva and Jerry, local public access TV hosts. I was looking thru the camera at all the people sitting on the curb and standing on the sidewalk, and I was watching all the tootsie rolls fly thru the air and land in the street, which was now a safe place for kids to run and grab them.

July 25

The two buses that get us closest to home run downtown on the Nicollet Mall. The Nicollet Mall is a street that was turned into a transit mall years ago, with two lanes for buses and wide sidewalks. Because of the wide sidewalks, many sidewalk cafes have broken out along it over the last few years, and the last thing the wealthy diners want while dining alfresco is a big mouthful of diesel exhaust, which is what they get sometimes when the buses go by.

So this year, the city and the transit agency joined in an experiment to close off the Mall from buses between 6:30 and 11 p.m. each night. This experiment was announced fully formed, and transit passengers certainly did not get a chance to give their two cents worth before it was announced, as far as I know.

What this means to a transit passenger is that it is pretty much impossible to catch a Nicollet Mall bus that runs around 6:30. The buses are supposed to run from 6:30 to 11 p.m. on Hennepin Avenue, which is only one block away from Nicollet at one point, but is many blocks away at most points. So if your bus is scheduled to be rolling down Nicollet around 6:30, on which street do you wait? I pretty much always pick the wrong one. Yesterday, once again, I started waiting for my bus about twenty after 6 on the Mall and as the clock approached 6:30 I figured I better walk up to Hennepin. I finally caught a bus at 7, which meant that I missed two buses in there somehow.

They might have gone by as I was walking from one street to another, they might have gone by on the street that I was not on, but it is all a game of roulette, as far as I can tell. Which street will your bus be on if it is supposed to be running at 6:30? It seems that sometimes it will be on Nicollet and sometimes it will be on Hennepin. With my luck, it means I will pretty much always miss it, so I might as well just give up on catching a bus at 6:30 and just always wait until the 7 p.m. bus.

I have talked to transit riders who feel that this "experiment" is just another attack on the poor. The wealthy folks can stuff their faces with cake and steak while the poor transit riders have no idea where to catch their bus. I once was waiting at a bus stop near 6:30 with a woman who had no idea which street her bus would be running on, and it was the last bus of the day that would take her home. I do not know whether she got home or not, because I walked up to Hennepin and she bet on Nicollet.

It gets really confusing when an event is on Hennepin and Hennepin is closed. This is something that happens often during the summer. The bus re-route patterns then get so byzantine that I was actually on a bus where the driver explained the whole deal, north reroutes and south reroutes, and it took him nearly five minutes. When I was going home I just flagged down my bus mid-block and luckily the driver stopped for me. I had no idea where I was supposed to catch it.

The least that should happen is that inconvenienced transit riders should get free meal coupons for all those fancy restaurants. That way, we can have a meal while we are waiting for the extra hour to catch a later bus because we cannot figure out where to catch that 6:30 bus.

July 26

Record temperatures across the country. Homeless people are dying of the heat in Arizona. Mercury in the hundreds for days. Finally, with a big storm yesterday, the heat has cooled away from here, and we in Minneapolis have a respite from days of heat, but we flirted with one hundred on many days even this far north. It is cool now, but the heat remains stalled over much of the rest of the country.

There have already been several hurricanes this summer, and more are forming. With the heat and the hurricanes, people find their lips starting to form something, but then they stop from saying the obvious. They cannot quite say the words global warming, but they really know it now in their heart of hearts. They know what the words taste like even if they will not quite say them, and then they talk about cars as if cars will always be heating up the air.

The price of gas shot up once again at my local gas stations. The price shoots up, then it slowly recedes, then it shoots up again slightly even higher. There was a pre-commercial tantalizer on the news last night that suggested that lower gas prices were on the way, but when the story came, it was about how three local gas stations had prices much lower than anywhere else. It did not say why those prices were low, it did not mention price gouging, but that what all the seduction was about. It was really a non-story. Meanwhile, the price of gas really is high and is getting higher. The words are almost licking themselves onto the lips of the people, but they cannot quite say it, oil depletion. Instead, they get into their cars as if there was no such thing as tomorrow.

Last night in our neighborhood meeting, we discussed a new park in our neighborhood. What so many people were concerned about was how there was no off street parking in the plans. I cannot even think of more than one park in the city that even has any off-street parking, but this was a major concern. It seemed like they were willing to pave over some of that small space to make more room for parking. As if we will even need parking a few years down the road. As if we did not have to change for the weather, for running out of oil, for nothing. There are no words forming on our lips, other than where are my car keys. There is no realization that talking about parking and the future in the same sentence is as good as the most hilarious joke.

July 27

On most days I do not do much transportation. I have a ten minute bike ride or a ten minute bus ride to work and then I stay there for a long time. Maybe, like today, I will have a few hours at home in the morning. I plan, like yesterday, to spend as much of that time as possible outside in my teahouse. I will eat my breakfast, I will read the newspaper and from a book, and I will enjoy the great nature of my back yard.

Even my short trip to work can seem a bit monotonous. Why do I have to go back and forth over the same territory every day. It seems like rolling that same rock over and over up and down that same hill. I would rather just stay in one place than take that same trip over and over again, day after day.

But I do love real travel. To go great distances, to see things I do not see every day. To see absolutely new things, new streets in my town that I have never been down or new towns and stretches of landscape on which my eyes have never seen the glory. I love that kind of real travel, to put my body in new and interesting places. To read about the local history and experience the local culture and attractions, the lights and the sounds. That I love.

I can do such trips in my own town or I can do them in far away places. This fall I am thinking of a great train trip across the country. Very soon I will have to start to seriously plan this trip. I think about this again and again, the distant places I want to see and how these will change my mind, how the sight and the air impact of them will make me into a brand new person, will leave me changed utterly from the impact of their experiences.

I like to go in a big way. I like to expand my circumstances and experiences, as long as I do not put too much at risk. I like to expand my geographic conquests so I have my own tales of Marco Polo to retell inside my head in case I am listening, in case any one else will listen.

Marco Polo was not an avid commuter. He did not care for back and forth. He wanted the forth without the back, he wanted the round and round we go. And so do I, on foot, on bike, or on transit.

July 28

I really wonder how all those car addicted folks are going to deal with rapidly rising gas prices. Are they going to bankrupt themselves for their love of driving just to keep those four wheels on the road? Sometimes I think so. I am thinking of the people who say that transit will never be for them because they love their car, and they cannot imagine getting along without it. They have a sick kind of love, the worst kind of unhealthy dependence, and they will grow sicker and sicker as gas prices go up. They will discover that they have to chop off much of the rest of their life or risk great debt and imbalance just to keep their habit up, just to keep their bodies free from the transportation contamination of walking or biking, just to keep up the quarantine they wish to keep from their fellow beings by avoiding the great society of mass transit.

I see them quickly as skeletons, having cut off everything else human, having boiled their life down to the bone so they can keep to the car, which they need so badly for their geographically fragmented life lies. Skeleton after skeleton driving cars that will barely putt putt while everyone else is walking, and starting to demand more of the street back from the skeletal car cowards.

Their fingers will grip to the steering wheel tho their flesh is gone, tho their ideas have all melted away. All they know any more is that cars are the only way to go. The rest of their brain is empty air. They have barely enough air left in there to get a little startled about all the walking people taking up the street now.

All the folks who got their minds over that matter, or who were not so addicted to cars in the first place, they try their best to be tolerant to the skeleton drivers. But then the skeletons see that because they have become nothing, they now have nothing to lose, and they assert their streets back thru murdering acceleration. Then will be the time for pedestrians to fight back, to hide the gas caps, to chalk over the windshields and make the skeleton drivers blind with fury. Maybe some deserted street can be set aside so the skeleton drivers who just must go can drive in their usual circles, but that will be the final end of car transportation, the last drips of that long age of torture.

July 29

I will not be riding in a car today. In that respect, today will be like most days to me. I am glad to not ride in a car, for when I ride in a car I feel a strong sense of discomfort, tho it does dissipate with time. I feel passive, I feel guilty. I feel guilt for what we are doing to the whole world. I feel a little carsick, I feel like I am contributing to the world carsickness, I feel a little cramped and bothered, I feel a little car, a little ugly.

I like to avoid cars. I do not even want to get close to them, for when they get close to me and they are moving they can harm me, they can harm me bad. I do not want to threaten others with that hurt, so I want to stay outside of them, I do not want to share in that threat of misery.

I better just wash my hands of the whole thing. I best just stay outside of cars. I will be doing that today, and that is a relief.

July 30

After work, I rode my bike to the theatre and waited under the marquee for K. She had to take the bus home from her job, get her bike from the shed, and ride from home to meet me at the theatre. As I was waiting, I looked up and watched the critical mass bike riders turn the corner of Oak and Washington. The line of them was a short city block long. It was nice to see them go by, but I was sad that I had forgotten, and that it has been so long since I last went on one of the local critical mass rides.

It is such a powerful feeling, and a feeling of freedom, to be riding among so many bicycles that you, the bicycles, actually take over the street. The bikes become the traffic, and the cars have to slow to a human speed and wait behind the mass of bikes. It is such wonderful emotional pleasure to ride in this once a month street revolution, and it was almost as fun watching the whole line of bikes go by as I stood under the movie marquee.

The movie we saw was Godards Masculin Feminin, a film that I have seen many times, and one that I can see again and again. The long line of bicycles is a good antidote to the formulation of contemporary culture that one of the young people in that films says: "Give us a car and TV set, but deliver us from liberty."

July 31

Two wheels: that is me

Two legs: that is me

Four wheels: that is them

It is a little like being

Outnumbered

I stay to the side

Of the wide lane street

But that is not even enough

For some car drivers

I get there too

To at lease most places

In town

I just do not

Burn up my planet

To get there

I saw that

House take a smash

Right in the face

To make it fall like

Sticks

I wonder what comes next

Usually, it is a

Parking lot

Sometimes

All the time

A few times

Not at all

Here I am

I am going slow

But I am steady

As long as I have

The body strength

To move my body

I can go

Hear those birds?

Or maybe no

That is your car stereo

Louder than all forms

Of nature

Interesting that I

Have just as much life

But not a single

car

August 1

Sloppy Books

tact: E-mail me