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June 11

Is there anybody who has never had a close call with a car and were just lucky to survive? Is there anybody who, when they were a kid, had a close car encounter and just barely made it? Maybe they ran out into the street to chase after a rolling ball and did not notice the car until they heard the whine of the sudden car brakes just in time? Or almost got creamed coming out of the alley on a bicycle? Or were just short enough that even the crosswalk didn't matter but the split second did and they could live to tell the fairy tale?

Everybody has come close to biting the dust from the bumper of a car, whether it was when they were a kid and just so small and unaware in that giant car environment, or an adult crossing the parking lot with keys out and some other driver was a little careless. Cars are so dangerous that I think it is safe to say that everybody living has come close to dying by car.

So why do people still love this constantly attempting murderer? Why do they love this thing that is destroying their beautiful cities and beautiful nature and beautiful atmosphere? Why do they love this thing that is so susceptible to carelessness? They love cars like a nicotine addict love cigarettes. They love cars because they have been numbed into loving them by carmaker propaganda. At every moment, someone is suffering from the effects of a car and a car commercial is playing on some TV channel to keep the suffering going strong.

I did not want to be one of those people who killed a kid with their car, or almost killed a kid with a car. I never wanted to have to deal with the guilt of that, with the potential of that. I never wanted to be one of those potential murderers, so I made up my mind when I was still a kid that I would never drive, and I have stuck to that. I have never owned a car or a driver's license.

It is well into June and I have avoided being inside cars for all but ten minutes so far this year. It feel so nice to avoid that Murder, Inc. It feels so nice to wash my hands of that carelessness and chaos. It feels so good to look on as an outsider and make my universal judgments and hope that somebody notices the behavior I am modeling because it makes so little difference if only one person is doing this sanity. It takes the planet releasing themselves from their seatbelts and windshields to give us all a fresh start, to save us from this self-imposed destruction.

June 12

Living without a car is not the hard part. Doing without something is easy. Doing without something that makes such a mess is the easiest thing of all. What is difficult is trying to understand how so many people can drive. What is impossible for me, what strains my mind, is trying to reconcile that so many people let themselves do something that is so destructive.

Last night we had a movie party and a few people came over to our yard. I am always happy showing off my garden, particularly our driveway which is no longer a driveway. The plants keep taking it over. That is what they do best of all. The pavement has to shiver because of the ground below it, and how that ground trembles to gain its air rights back. Send that asphalt back to its home in the center of things, break up the surface to be free and breathe. That is the song of the earth, and it is such a wonder to give it a helping hand with a few cracks from a few sledgehammer swings.

June 13

Yesterday four more American soldiers drove over bombs and died in Iraq. This puts the total of U.S. soldiers who have died there over 1,700. The number of Iraqis who have died in our little oil retrieval adventure is unknown, but in the thousands, in the many many thousands.

I saw that our army leveled a small city in Iraq because the enemy was using a road in that city. The news did not say anything about the innocent people who died. That is what happens when you turn an entire city into rubble, but they did not say anything about that. I hear a car turn a corner and head down the quiet morning street. How many people have died to keep that car turning and moving and noisy?

The future of oil in the world is a fading future, it is a scratchy future, it is a future of no future, it is a future of war for the last drops. Today we want a country's oil and so we go to war with that country to keep the oil flowing. The next war will be between the nations that want that oil, and we will be going to war with nations much more powerful, and that war will be much more brutal. We will need to do that if we want to keep up our car chaos, and that will be a crazy war. That will be the war that will tell us now that we ain't seen nothing yet.

Yesterday was no nice that we spent the day in our garden. I did not leave our house until the evening, when we took a walk thru our neighborhood. We walked past houses of people we knew and lo and behold we saw some of our neighbors, and chatted with them for a while before walking on, before resuming our foot-based transportation.

Some coal was burned to keep our electricity going yesterday, but we used very little of even that. We shoveled a little and we sat in the shade, we cooked on our charcoal grill, and the day went on under the leaves of our grape arbor like a little eternity. I read Kandisky's theories about tension and release, about the powers of abstract lines on a plane, and the point that stops a sentence and other things. We watched the birds and the butterflies that were enjoying our flowers. We had no use for cars. We will have no use for them today either, or any other day. No reason to go to war for us. We are not the people reason to kill other people to keep the oil flowing.

June 14

Last night I was a guest on a cable talk show. The producer and host of the show, M, has been doing this for over twenty years, and her program is well-regarded and watched, unlike my show, On Transit, which is mostly unknown. I talked about my cable show and about transit and why I do not drive. I spewed out for half an hour and was amazed at how quickly the time went by.

I am a reluctant evangelist. I am shy and do not like to make a spectacle of myself. I would rather just retreat into my backyard and watch the flowers, but I also want to get out this information. I also want to change people's minds so they get out of their cars and save the world for the rest of its creatures, for me and for them and for everybody.

I am so distraught over the transportation mess we have made of the world that I will, myself, talk on TV to try to share my concern with some other minds, to try to get them concerned too, concerned enough to take action. I want to shout it out as loud as I can but I really do not do shouting. I do not want to show off, but I am willing to go before the cameras for this thing that I believe in so strongly.

I kind of stumbled into the whole thing. On Friday, M was making copies of tapes at the place where I work, the public access TV station. We had been talking about transit and driving and she told me that her second guest for Monday's taping had canceled and she needed a replacement. I had tried calling the transit advocacy group Transit for Livable Communities, to see if they could send in someone, but they could not on such short notice. So I did the show as the solo guest for that half hour that whizzed by. There was so much that I left out, even tho my mouth did keep going.

I doubt that I will change anybody's mind. I do not think anybody talking can joust against the car industry's billions of dollars of advertising every year, the propaganda that starts out with kids thru toys, the attitudes that have been pressed so hard for so long about why cars are so necessary. Every moment around the world, somebody is suffering because of cars but also a car commercial is playing to keep the chaos going.

But I gave it my shot against that juggernaut. I said a few things.

Then I took my bike out into the hard rain. My jacket kept my shirt dry, but my pants got soaked. I counted out seconds after each lightning flash to tell whether the thunder was getting closer or further from me. It was getting further. I rode thru the rain as if I was washed in the atmosphere. My tires did their trick on the dark streets to get me home. Wetness could not stop me, not the pouring rain or the lightning sky. I got home on my bicycle quite easily, and then I sat down on the couch to dry.

June 15

On Monday I purchased, by riding my bicycle to the record store, a CD set that came out recently of music and videos by the band Stereolab. I have been listening to them and liking them for years. The members of the band live in Paris and London. Their music is sweet and repetitive and hypnotic. It is also strangely sad. It is both modern and less than modern, and has the feel of the futurism of the 60's and also the sound of noise music in it. The music is all topped with the vocals of Latetia Sadier, songs that are often political in nature, tho the politics come more from the sound than the actual words, at least to me.

The back-up vocals are non-literate but almost more powerful than the lyrics. They are nonverbal bops and baps, scat singing like a doo-wop backup from 60's Europa. They were the sounds of Mary Hansen, and as I listen to the songs I think about her. Of course I never met her, but I saw her and the band perform twice. But two and a half years ago I heard about her death, and I am thinking about her death as I listen to the sound of her voice.

In late 2002 she was riding her bicycle down a street in London. A truck backed up. It was not looking, I suppose. The truck backed up into her and her bicycle. It backed up straight into her.

She was killed by the truck. She is no longer. I can hear her voice on the disks but will never see her perform again. She will make no new music, but there is music that she made that I will still discover, like many of the tracks of this new CD.

I have liked this band for a long time, and hearing about her death shocked and depressed me. But like her music, the news was bittersweet. It was so bitter and sad to hear about her death, but it was sweet to read that she was a bicyclist. She made wonderful music, but she was not a global warmer. She lived her life in a way that did not destroy people and places with the car carelessness that so many people practice. She was a hero on a bicycle, and now she was no longer.

I can see that truck backing up into her. I can imagine it because similar events have happened to me. I have seen vehicles back up or front up to me. This is a part of life as a bicyclist, as a pedestrian in a car world. The life of such as me is always a life of barely escaping the careless car or truck, of barely escaping their threat of death.

What I cannot imagine is the moment of impact, of the fall of the bicycle, of the red of her blood. I have known such a scenario but not as far as impact, not as far as misery and death. I have known the shock, but not the pain.

The way of the car is a continual near death. Sometimes it runs over the line into death. That is the risk that the car people always take, both for themselves, and for so many others. And sometimes their guilty risk means the death of the innocent. Sometimes the death of a bicyclist is the price the world pays for the carelessness of the car addicted.

June 16

I am sensitive to the sounds of engines at night. I am especially sensitive now that it is spring turning into summer and the nights are cool but not cold and we can leave the windows open to breathe the night air into our house. The windows are open to lead in the soft air and the sounds of life, but also the sounds of engines, that sounds that seem to me like death.

Some nights I hear the sounds of a car engine revving up. I hear the squeal of brakes as a car or truck hits a corner. I hear the engine rev up loud and hate. Someone is racing on our streets as I lie in my bed, too sedated in my own temporary coma to get up to the window and take a look.

In the past I might have thought it was one car that could have been circling. I could hear the engine sink into the distance but then unsquish itself back from the sound horizon and come back into ear. And then I hear the sound reflection of it passing against the street in front of our house. But last night I clearly heard more than one car. Are people using our neighborhood streets for a wee hours Le Mans race? Are they putting at risk the stillness of our night, the safety of our sleep, the sides of our buildings for their own most dangerous games?

I can see the thrill and skill behind foot races. To see who can go fastest by their own internal strength and thoughts. I can see how young men or young women might want to test themselves against each other in such a race, to show off their own abilities, to demonstrate their own body as tall and tentacle as is their internal construction.

But the idea of showing off with a machine? To show that you can press down the pedal further and aim the steering wheel so as not to hit that building or that midnight pedestrian? That is laughable absurd, that is the competition of couch potatoes, that is the race of a spineless legless junkie. A car race means nothing. A car race means that someone has risked dying and has come out living. It is not a race to show off anything more than luck and stupidity, to show that you can dangle the split second and hopefully come thru just as stupid and alive as you entered it.

A midnight car race down the streets where we live is insanity, is mental defective. It is the last thing in the world. It is the lowest form of ant life. I suspect it may be happening, and that is might be a sign of something, maybe if only of abject failure.

June 17

I left work early yesterday and took a joy ride bicycle ride, a ride to ride, to go nowhere but to see. I started down on the bike trails along the Mississippi River and kept on riding, past the mills and mill ruins downtown and then down even further to Bohemian Flats underneath the University buildings. I rode past the cliffs that taunt the river's edge, and the trickle of tiny waterfalls. And then I rode up up and up, down to the lowest gears, for the assent of the cliffs, what I call the Grand Canyon of the Mississippi, and back to street level, where the trails run down as far as the Ford bridge.

I made a stop at Minnehaha Park. I walked my bike thru there to read some of the Hiawatha poem by Longfellow that is carved in rock, and then to watch the water roar and pour over Minnehaha Falls. It was my first look at the falls this year, and the falls looked good. I stopped at the bicycle rental stand to ask some prices, then I got back on my bike to keep riding down.

The trail turned from Minnehaha Park to Fort Snelling State Park. The trail ran on old railroad right of way, thru the shadiest narrowest world in the world, and then back to visible river cliffs as I eked along the white walls under the bridge, then the brick walls down below the old Fort Snelling. Then gently into the shade of park at the confluence of the rivers, where the big streams come together, and the bike trails beneath the Mendota bridge, so tall and leaping, and then around flat Snelling Lake where you look up at the bellies of entire jets just about to land.

I rode down the Minnesota River, where the trees are lined and the water was high, and then back the way I came, at least as far at 50th Street. There I waited a short time for the next train. I mounted my bike in the train car and took a break, sitting and watching the world from the giant train windows and listening to a couple ladies say where they would like to see more trains running. From the way they sounded, this was their first ride. They were easily convinced.

Between downtown, where I got off the train, and home I missed a sandbag that had been set up on a trail as an inadequate curb cut, and I took a spill. I skinned up my knees on the asphalt sandpaper but got up to easily ride the rest of the way home, where I could sit under my arbor and drink some water.

June 18

I can maybe try to imagine the illusion, the feeling, that drivers must feel when they move their big car with their small feet and hands. I get a kind of feeling, perhaps it is similar, perhaps it is different, when I ride my bicycle. It is amazing how smoothly and sometimes how fast I can get that bicycle going. But the difference is that when I ride my bicycle I am the one making the smooth motion with my own muscles and guts. I am not burning the compressed energy of millions of years to get around. I am not unleashing a pollution plague upon the earth by the smoke of my escape, but I am using the energy of my breakfast lunch and dinner. I am making fast motion from the stuff inside of me.

It is control and it is illusion. When I ride the smooth asphalt path, that evil steadiness made out of the same dinosaur guts and sinew that cars burn like potato chips, when I exploit that artificial smoothness ground, when I do not make time for the sunshine and the stillness and make motion out of everything, and make a path from far to near.

Sitting in one place, that is where I soon will be, beneath my grape vines in the stillness of the shade. I can feel yesterday's travels still in my legs, the snapshots of flowers and trees that I made on that excursion across town, and I can be a little proud of that trip I made with my legs and turning, and the speed I got at some stretches helped out by gravity and the still of the wind. I did not have to lean on the extreme waste of molecules, I made the most of my own inside energy, all those garden strawberries I picked and ate with my cereal. The pea pods and the lettuce that I grew in my sunny patch of dirt and that gave me all the motion I really needed, and will give me further motion to get thru today. They gave me all the speed I was ever greedy for, and I did not need the crutch of pushing a pedal and spinning my wrists and thinking that I was going somewhere, rather than down to fast death.

I had a dream that I accepted a ride in a car, but then I woke up to another day with only bikes and walking and public transit. I hear those cars, but it is easy to avoid them. Just tell them that you are going your own speed, whatever you can make with sidewalks and gears. That will tell them off. That will get them stewing in their metal angry mouths.

June 19

Cultures, both old and now, marked the transition from childhood to adulthood with some kind of initiation ritual. In some cultures, the initiation involved some kind of mutilation of the body, often of the sex organs. In some cultures it was a ceremony, in others it was a physical or mental test, in others yet it was pregnancy itself. Today, the initiation rite practiced in the U.S. is learning how to drive a car. The mark of initiation into adulthood is the issuing of the driver's license, complete with photograph and name, your visual and aural identifiers of you, the new adult.

I never passed thru this initiation. I never really learned how to drive, tho I took a training class. I never got my driver's license to name me as an adult in my culture. Perhaps my development was arrested. Maybe I am still in childhood for the absence of that ceremony and marking.

I rejected the initiation rite of my culture. I am sure other youths in other cultures rejected the initiation that their fathers or older brothers tried to wrestle on them. What happened then? What happened to the people who rejected the initiation, those who refused it or were frightened off from it or avoided it or failed it. They did not pass into adulthood. Maybe they were rejected by the culture. Maybe they were forced to leave the tribe and cope with the world on their own and maybe find early death. I do not know what happened to those rejected. I, however, was able to somehow slip into the culture whose initiation I refused. I do not bear the mark of the driver-initiated, and thus some would call me eccentric or crazy. But I did find a place among those cultural structures, and I try my little bit to live within and yet opposed to that brutal car nation, to live out the opposite of the gasoline lifestyle, the opposite of car.

Yesterday was a lazy Saturday. In the morning, I rode my bike to the neighborhood farmer's market and back and in the evening we took to the bus to a movie about big band leader Artie Shaw. We walked ourselves back home. We passed by many cars, and many cars passed by us. They were not our friends. None of them were there to help us, none of them could help us, and we did not even need their help, we needed no help at all. After all, the cars are only there to trouble us and reject us.

The cars know that I do not have the mark - the cars and the cops can tell. I get around anyway. I have my ways, and they are so incredibly easy and interesting.

June 20

Yesterday we carted home some bookshelves in a box and a small air conditioner on the bicycle trailer. That was a heavy load, and I biked home a little slower than usual. We could have bought more. If we were the average Americans we probably would have bought more, but we had to stop when we had as much as I thought would fit in the bicycle trailer. If we had a car, we could have stuffed even more in our commodious vehicle, but our load had reached the limit for the limited capacity of the bicycle trailer. When you have to haul your load of consumables home with your own horsepower, you look a little smaller, you might look a little less.

We have so much darn stuff in our little house anyway, and always seem to be getting just a little more. Because K is moving her office at the art institute, she is bringing home things that would have been otherwise thrown away. They are interesting things, but of course they take up space. Some of the things we get are needed and perfect, like the little air conditioner that I put in the window and will cool down our small bedroom while the rest of the house is hot for the summer.

But our accumulated stuff can sometimes threaten to smother us, and some day this summer I will have to load up the bicycle trailer with stuff to get rid of, and take it all down to the Salvation Army to see if they will take some of it. We get things, and later we get rid of things.

We also grow things. That is the garden. We start out with seeds, and water and sunlight, and look at all these colors and look at all those leaves. The garden is growing, and we made a big stir fry dinner yesterday with many things from our garden, greens and pea pods, and added a few veggies I got at the farmer's market on Saturday to the brew. We dined al fresco, on our picnic table after a day of moving around furniture and small garden projects. We wiped our sweat, and I have been sniffling from some kind of allergy, so I had to wipe that too. We had our once again weekend adventure in our backyard, in our cabin in the garden countryside, right in the middle of the city, the place we like to call home.

June 21

Sloppy Books

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