June 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

June 1

It is already June. Time is racing by like a speeding monster car. Every morning, I write a little about why I avoid cars, why I do not own one, why I am trying not to even accept rides in them this year. I am trying, but I am also failing. I accepted one ride so far, back in April. I will take a few more rides before this year is out. I try to avoid cars, but they are so hard to avoid. If you listen hard, you will always hear one, unless you have escaped to the most remote mountain. If you look hard, you will always spot one, or spot one more cut in the world made to accommodate them, their brutality.

I have my reasons. I have had them for years long before this year. But this year everything just seemed a little more immediate, a little more drastic. From the time I was a teenager my goal has been to avoid cars myself for the reasons that seemed so obvious to me, but also to make a stink about it, to make a point of letting others know that I was avoiding cars and had my reasons to do it. My goal was not to just avoid cars myself but also to proselytize, to try to convince others to do the same, to try to convince them that they were doing their worst if they stayed with their cars. In my view, this is so necessary. In my view, this is of the utmost importance.

The war for oil rages on and more people die every day so that our military can occupy the only oilfields of hope left in the world. The effects of global warming seem even more striking every day and month and year. But every morning the sounds of the morning are broken by the hiccups of one or two or more cars passing by. I hear their swoosh and their angry grinding gears as I write these daily why words. I hear the shame of cars in the street so close to my window and it makes me remember, and it proves the necessity for my miniature mission.

I took the bus, the train, and my bike yesterday. I walked for some stretches to take in a few errands in the middle of my work day. I experienced the world and my fellow citizens. I used the power of my breakfast to make some of these excursions. I noticed the smells and sounds of nature as I placed myself, vulnerable, inside it. This is the glory and the wisdom of car avoidance. These are the rewards for my living against the stream of the day to day USA, of the city ruled by cars and streets and drivers who take their violence in such stride, who tear down the world and think nothing of it but their trip. I will try to act out loud my obvious in my car rebellion. That is my tiny mission.

June 2

Girls play with dolls. Boys play with cars. That is just the way it is. Girls play with dolls and in doing so they learn nurturing and responsibility. Boys play with cars to learn what? Transportation? Or just to be lured into some fabulously big consumer product.

Boys are indoctrinated into car culture from an early age. These are the toys they play with, the ones with wheels that roll. Actual models with scale details of the actual makes and models of cars that their adults drive. Race cars with bright colors whose only utilitarian use is to do nothing. They go fast for show, so people can see them for an instant, or their swish across the barrier rail, on the way to the finish line or a crash. Either scenario is just as interesting for boys and cars.

Basic patterns adjust and set. The car is programmed directly into the neurons with the toys, the favorites of all. The girls get tired of the responsibility of raising dolls and want to play with cars too. They have a supply around if they have a big or little brother.

Pushing the cars around is a little like crawling - the past of infancy is paired with the future of adult car infancy in the operation of the toy car. You have to push out with your two hands and grip the car and lean forward to make it roll. Your feet have to do a crabwalk behind. It is almost like you are learning that your legs are useless appendages behind your back, that they are extra tentacles you do not even want to see.

Altho little cars that you push are the standard essential toy, boys dream of bigger cars. First they dream of the ones that they do not need a driver's license to use. These are kiddy cars that they can sit in and move with pedals. I dreamed of these cars in catalogs and toy showrooms but never had one to call my own. And so they dream of real adult cars, the toys on steroids. They dream and they draw them, they color them in coloring books with the colors within the lines more carefully than they color the pictures of people. They see cars on TV and in videos. Boys dream of cars as if they were better than people. They have to raise the cars like girls get to raise the human doll baby children.

With such indoctrination, with such a focused messaged, no wonder people get hooked, men and women both, at a young age, and cannot shake it. We have made toys of drugs, we have started the advertising out in miniature, we model behavior with models that move. And the kids, boys and girls both, in all their youthful action, cannot wait until they get to sit still, when they are old enough and weak enough, inside the beast.

June 3

I must be a fictional character. I seem to live an impossible life. At least I live an impossible life in the great nation of cars, the USA, the United System of Automobiles.

It is so easy to live without a car that I must be fiction, but the real fictional characters may not be me but everybody else who thinks that they need an automobile to live here. Automobile life is simply unsustainable and very short for the world. People who live and breath car culture are living on fumes, for the gas is short and any other energy source that could so wastefully power the absurd car condition is not forthcoming.

There are fictional Americans who visit other places that are not so car obsessed and they live there like the locals, they do fine without cars attached to them at all hours. They live the other life where cars are way back in the background. They take mass transit or walk or bike or ride in rickshaws, whichever is the local manner. Perhaps they even make resolutions that when they get back to their land of cars they will continue in this reduced car fashion. They think that they will get rid of their car because they have glimpsed the freedom of life without car and they think they should make that freedom part of their day to day USA life. But then they get back, and after all, that is their car right there, too big to ignore, and their good thoughts vanish so quickly, and they turn fictional again as they think their thoughts of cars and driving and that must be the only way.

No, I must have heavy delusions. I cannot be correct and everybody else wrong. I have to get back to my fictional ways, and get on my bike, or walk to the bus stop. It feels so very good to be a fictional character. It would feel even better if I could convince myself that all these cars that threaten my peace with their midnight motors and their chrome assaulting engines were fictional also. But they are too screaming and heavy to be that way, and will not vanish when I turn my back.

June 4

You can tell whether somebody owns a bicycle for real transportation or just as a toy if you look and check to see if they have some kind of basket or bag or rack on it. A bicycle trailer is great for big loads, but for standard loads, like for a grocery trip, the panniers that I have that clip on to the rack on the back of my bicycle do well to get the goods home.

My panniers are two nylon bags with some reflective stripes. They each have a large compartment that you can seal with a zipper and a side compartment for a slim load. You can clip and unclip them from the rack, and they even hold together with a handle that you can use for carrying.

I filled up two paper bags at the grocery store last night. Outside of the store, I had to set the bags down next to my bicycle. Then I reloaded. I transferred things from the paper bags to my bicycle bags, large items first, smaller items to fill in the gaps. I left the bread in one of the paper bags and folded up the other bag. I hung the remaining paper bag from my left handle bar. I did this to keep the bread from getting too wrinkled. Then I unlocked my bike and was on my way.

I could feel the extra weight on my back bicycle wheel as I rolled down the parking lot and over to the street. The load was nicely balanced between left and right so it did not impede my forward progress one bit. I might have had to pump down on my pedals just a little harder to get things going but the trip was no problem.

I used to leave the panniers on my bike at all times, just in case I had a load to carry, but they stick out and do not especially look sleek, and I had things stolen from them when I would leave my bike parked somewhere on a trip. A couple years ago I started to only clip them on when I knew I would need them. Sometimes I would forget, or I would tack one more stop onto another trip and then I would be left stringing all my bags on my handlebars. That forward weight from hanging bags was a nuisance, but plastic bags in the wind make a nice shushing noise, and they do hang in there for the trip and the weather.

When I see the pictures of bicyclists in Asia loaded up high with goods on the backs or fronts of their bikes, I wonder what the trip is like for them. They must need an incredible sense of balance, and their legs need to be able to put on some extra power to get those first pedals forward. And what about the wind resistance if their piled up load is taller than they are as they go from field to market, as they go from one place to another. Such pictures show that the bicycle can be a terrific beast of burden, and who needs a car if they have the feet to pedal forward.

June 5

One of the greatest things about walking is running into people. Walking gives you great chances, and chance happens an amazing percent of the walks I take. Last night, K and I took a walk. I wanted to go to a party that some of our neighbors were having but K was not sure because she did not think she would know anybody there. So we went for a walk instead.

A couple blocks from our house we saw D, somebody we know in the neighborhood, and he was with two other guys, who we did not know. As we walked up, D said, “Maybe John knows.” He asked us if we knew where such and such lived, and it was our friend who was having the party. The two guys were looking for the same party that we were debating going to. They had run into D on the corner and he did not know where the party was, but they were still having a good time and even taking photographs as we walked up.

So we ended up going to the party, leading M and S, the two guys, down the alley and to the place. When we got there we realized that we did know many of the people there. We also met new people.

One person at the party was talking about the car accident she had seven days ago. Her car was sideswiped by another car and it sounded pretty bad. She was shaken up but she had no major wounds. She had just bought a new car today, but she said that the last seven days, her days without a car, were the worst days of her life. I smiled across the back yard at my friend S, who knows about my anti-car obsession, and we both laughed as I felt him read my mind, but the conversation moved on to other things, like conversations always do. I did not add my two cents to it, and I am not sure I really wanted to, but I did want to ask her if she thought her week without a car was worse than the crash itself.

Earlier in the day, I had taken a long bus ride home from a conference with an acquaintance, V. We were probably the only people at the big Take Back the Media conference who were taking the bus back from it. Talking to V, a real rabble rouser, woke me up to a lot of ideas about class, lack of representation, honesty and dishonesty and how she views things, including the transit system, on which she was dependent. I got a chance to see a little bit how she, a community activist who lives in public housing, sees things and trusts power far less than I do. I barely knew V, and I am sure that we would never have had such a cosmic conversation if we were not riding the bus together. I got to slide back my own blinders by talking to somebody who not only sees things differently than I do, but whose views are never represented in the media.

I taped part of my conversation with V for my On Transit show, so now I can share that experience with others on my small slice of the media. As we got off the bus, the bus driver gave me a talking to for taping on the bus without the driver's permission. I apologized and assured her that the only person I had in my camera was V, who told me I could tape her. V wanted to give the driver a talking to, and tell her it was my right to tape in a public place if I had permission from the person I was taping.

June 6

If you go slow enough, if you take some pauses in your trip from beginning to end and back to beginning, each journey can take a long twisting path thru past and future. You can see the place thru old eyes and new eyes, and you can see your life projected on the geography, if you take the time, if you go with your eyes and your senses.

We took an afternoon bike ride to visit the Steven Square Art Fair, and rode our bikes downtown first to catch the train. This part of the trip had something to do with the present and the future, to a future of hope and transit and greenery. We rode the train down to the Lake Street station, where we got off to try the new extension of the Midtown Greenway.

The Grand Opening of this new section, the extension thru the Phillips neighborhood, is just a couple weeks away, so I thought the construction around it would be mostly over and we could take it straight thru to Nicollet. We rode the trail below the streets that rode us as bridges. We rode in the green trench under the houses and brick buildings. We lived in the neighborhood above us, Phillips, more than ten years ago, but we were riding down in that trench of its transportation future, where things were green and there was room for flowers and a streetcar someday in the future.

The sky above us was blue with huge clouds. Bombs could have been responsible for those clouds, so massive and tall and white and gray and exploding outward to the north sky and the east sky.

We rode past the Closed signs that half-heartedly blocked the path and wondered what the fuss was all about. There were new trees planted in a little band section on Arbor day, then we came up to more of our past which was now completely crumbled. We rode beneath the Malt Factory that once towered over our walks to Lake Street, the big concrete towers that I dreamed of and filmed. They were now a pile of rubble. We rode thru the city of the old Sears complex and all the new construction going around there, building that old hull into a place of life and living. And then up ahead of us, we saw what the signs were all about. The path was closed for serious. There was a great dirt mountain where the Chicago Avenue bridge had once been. The bridge was still under construction, and the site completely blocked the greenway path with a big brown mess of debris and dirt.

We went back up to 13th and rode on the city streets thru our old neighborhood. It has been more than ten years, but I still got flashes from my life back then. This scene and that scene all in color and 3D, like I was holding up a View Master that saw my past with each click superimposed over the place as it happened to be on that bike ride.

Riding back from the Art Fair, we got caught up in some rain. The massive war clouds crept up on our left flank and dropped a shower of water nails. We ducked under the skyway in front of the IDS building and waited it out, getting splished, getting splashed. There was a gap in the downpour, so we rode, only to see a new wave of hard rain come over us and chase us under a bus shelter. We got wet, but we had to stop long enough to see the world thru the rain, to see the past and the future clouded one on another. I recognized that we hadn't gone kicking and screaming from then into now or the other way around, whichever way it works. We were just steadily drawn into that water of time, as long as we stopped long enough to notice that time itself was passing us by, back and forth, rather than racing it to a conclusion, of which there really is not any.

June 7

The dark clouds are moving in

They keep the sun from

Waking me up at the usual time

The sky

All the millions of it

On my shoulders

I am living in its kindness

Its generosity

Who said

Broken back broken feet

That the sky

Broken leg broken arm

Was a trash can

Broken shoulder broken eye

And we could just

Broken elbow broken brain

Shit in it

Broken daylight broken dream

This thing

We should be so careful

It has got us under

Rubber stamp on cloud bottom

Its heavy tall

What will this

What symbol, what image

When it jerks down

Monster feet

To stamp our flat forehead?

June 8

Last night I walked out of the movie theatre and I did not look up to see the sky. I rode my bike to the 38th Street Hiawatha Line station and then I looked up, past the street and the grain elevators, up high atop the lights and the shelter structure and I saw the sky changing. I finally noticed it.

A deep dark cloud was coming from the south to cover up the dusk. A single massive cloud was sliding up the north and turning on all the streetlights and headlights, and making it all much darker. It crept up like a covering blanket with chicken flesh pattern highlights. I looked up at the sky and could tell from its starkness that a storm would be coming. The storm was still several hours away, but just looking up in the air, I knew that this was a sky that you just do not want to mess with.

I rode the train and the blanket crept northward. It pushed to the horizon the last few painted abstract clouds of ink and highlight. It shoved them under the skyline like a broom, that blanket did, of atmosphere. It made the lights on the stations turn brighter; they had to try harder against the coming blankness.

I got off the train at Hennepin Avenue and looked up to see that the blanket had gone even further yet. I had hoped the train would go faster and race it, but it just let the blanket go by above. I rode my bike the rest of the way home thinking as I looked over my shoulder that this certainly is a sky that you do not want to mess with.

The storm came in the middle of the night when we were trying to sleep but the heat would not exactly let us. It smashed water at our windows and we had to close them down. It tossed the trees and leaves like frisbee, it growled and clenched its teeth at us with its wind and its rain and its flashes and its thunder. I waited carefully and felt the bedsheets closely to try to notice if the storm was rocking our house over, but our house held fast against this sky that you certainly do not want to mess with.

It is morning now, and the peace of dim light has stopped the war of weather. The leaves are still moving, but not from one side of the window to the other. There are puddles and there is continuing rain action, and the clatter of the birds getting back their stuff, their songs. They know with their little mouths and wings that the sky is something that you do not want to mess with.

The first few cars of morning come with their tailpipes growling miniature thunder. They dare to shake the puddles that have gathered in the street to remind us of the deadly. A single car does not make much difference, but talking millions is talking something dangerous. They make their sounds and their so-called trips and the sky has to frown with the only rain it knows. The sky is tall and it has a big stamping foot of wind and rain. It does not like to be messed with, and it knows the meaning of all that exhaust.

The wheels of absurd transportation are changing the sky, the atmosphere, the thing that keeps us from the cold and the hot of absolute outer space. The car makes it war on the sky, that big thing you have to check now and then and that you have to notice that it does not want to be messed with.

June 9

Man, are we ever messing with the sky. I read about the two explorers who were trying to cross the North Pole this summer, but ran into the far advanced signs of global warming and had to stop their quest far short and early. They were pummeled by rare summer snows, and the ice sheets of the arctic were cracking and drifting so much that the men were always losing ground, going backwards every night as they slept.

A science advisor for the White House, an advisor who had no science background, but did have a background in service to the oil industry, was editing reports on global warming for the president. If there happened to be the word "doubt" in a report, he would add "significant and incontrovertible" before it as extra bushist modification.

The polluters are watching, warning, regulating the polluters. The warmers are keeping tabs on the warmers, and everybody else might give it a tisk or give it a task but they go no driving their cars, living the warming large.

We sure do enjoy messing with that sky, even if it means dangerous car wrecks and dangerous streets. We will live with the chaos and the consequences even if the mode of the extinction is so awful in its day to day operation anyway. We are happy to live the horror now and pass it on to the next generations.

So far, the sky has been fairly easy on us. I would hate to see what it does when it gets awfully angry.

June 10

Tuesday night I went to see a showcase of quickly produced locally made short films. They had actually all been made last weekend. There were a number of similar themes and scenes and settings in the films, but it kind of surprised me that two of the twelve were about car accidents. In one, the guy in the car crash died. In the other, the guy in the crash survived, but just barely.

The repetition of this theme was some kind of demonstration to me of the ubiquity of car crashes. The car crash has a central role in car culture. It is one of those events that people use to tell cultural time, to identify place, to help distinguish some special days from the whole accumulation of time and place that sometimes vanishes so easily from memory.

There is a car crash going on right now. People are maimed or dying or dead right now because of a car crash. It is part of the deal that comes along with getting in the driver's seat and turning the key. You get speed and power, sure, but in order to get them you run the risk of crash and death or else just tremendous medical or car repair bills. And if you do not kill yourself, you risk killing other people.

The crash is part of what you accept when you take car culture into your life. If you drive there is a chance that you will crash or smash up your car in some way. It is far more likely than the chance that your plane or bus or train will crash, or that you will kill yourself in a particularly dangerous walk.

In the last two weeks I have heard people tell their own crash stories. In both cases another vehicle smashed into the side of theirs. I listened to such a story at a party and someone at work had the same thing happen to him and his vehicle. In both cases the cars got the worst of it, and the people came out with no injuries, other than being shaken up. But neither of them was shaken enough to say enough is enough with metal death machine transportation.

Of course, a crash is the last thing that most drivers want, but the first thing they set in motion when they turn that key and start the combustion explosion. It is part of the war that they live with to get around in this scattered social scene, something that we have built up a whole industry to minimize, with seatbelts and airbags and law enforcement. We are quick to the band aids but never want to touch the heart of the problem, because getting to the cause of the problem of all that death and disfigurement would mean closing the door on car transportation itself and saying that it is just not worth it, not worth the pain and crashes.

There is a gamble that goes with everything, but the gamble that goes with car transportation is particularly fixed against drivers, pedestrians, the whole planet. The crash is at the very heart of car transportation, it is an essential part of the situation. It is a seed kernel from which much greater chaos grows. It is the incredible news that is never news, it just happens all the time and all around us and we let ourselves go into a great car coma to ignore the death. That comes with the strength of medication of the whole car drug trip thing.

Sloppy Books

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