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March 1

For those of you who are latecomers to this diary, this is the story so far. There were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, so it is probably safe to say that it was a war for oil after all. Many people are killed every day for that war for oil, for that war for the freedom to keep on driving our U.S. cars.

Global warming is happening, and while many other nations are trying to do something about it, ours is not. Our leaders deny it, and hope it will go away. It is not going away, and the signs are much stronger every day.

Cars burn oil that you get these days by war and destruction, because the supplies of it inside the skin of the world are just winding down, and we are getting more desperate to get it. When you burn the stuff to move a car, the product of its incomplete combustion fouls the air and causes global warming. We in the U.S. put more of it in the air than anybody else, but we will not have anything to do with Kyoto.

I do not want to be a part of this. I do not have a car. That is the first part. The second part, and the different part for me this year, is that I will not accept rides in cars, or will at least make a good try not to. Riding in a car, having anything to do with cars, is being part of the problem. Riding in a car is dropping a bomb on Iraq. Driving a car is toasting our planet and moving the owls south, and shifting the weather patterns, making the atmosphere angry.

No cars for me, so I will ride the bus and walk to get there. Later this month, I will most likely take up bicycling again with some seriousness.

I will write about this experience. I will write about how and why and the challenges and the rewards. I will write to take up some time in the morning, and maybe some stray eyes will find these lines.

If others read these pale attempts to reason why and reason how, it is my hope that they will agree. My little actions mean nothing at all, but if I can convince others in this land to agree with me and change some of their ways, then I will have some success.

I have not been in a car for more than two months. It was not hard at all. It was not really difficult, tho I had a few adventures, tho I had some walks and waits in cold weather. It did not kill me; but neither did it probably make me stronger. It was not really an adventure, not like visiting foreign lands and risking your life to save others is an adventure. It is my little stand to make by standing at the bus stop. It is my little route to go by walking and not taking that offered ride. It is my little life as it usually is, trying to tread a little more lightly so that there will be something for others that may follow me to walk on, if they still remember how to walk in the future.

March 2

Migraine morning. Only a few timid thoughts make it past the prison warden of my tortured brain.

This avoiding cars thing is not much of a stretch for me, because I have never had a car, I have never had a driver's license. I made that decision long ago, when I was just barely a teenager and I have kept to it.

Sometimes I wonder who I might have become if I became a car junky, like so many other people. Who would I be if I let myself get hooked in the first place, what kind of drunken brutal monster would I have become.

It was tough to hold that course, to keep it steady. I had to face a catalog of temptations that kept on saying that I had to learn to drive and fall in with the addiction culture. It was most likely toughest when I was a teenager, when I lived in the age and parking lot schoolyard land of conformity. My social life suffered. I knew that I could not date those cute girls unless I had a car to take them to dinner. I actually was thinking about maybe I could invite a girl out to dinner and take her on the bus until a social studies teacher of mine said, in relation to something, that "it would be like taking someone out on a date on the bus."

Who would I have become if I let myself turn into the usual car monster. All I remember is that the few times I did have to drive, for driver's training class, I could not press my foot far down on the pedal. I thought, "this thing goes fast enough to kill people," and I could not press my foot down, I could not make it go faster than walking speed.

March 3

It is not natural to drive all over the planet, to torture the earth with tires. To be so callous as to drive a car takes a certain kind of basic training. It takes the brainwashing of a million car ads accumulating, takes the drill sergeant of flashy seconds, takes the social pressure and peer pressure that compress out your compassion and compress you into the tiny unscrupulous nematode, the soul of a driver.

To be so insensitive as to drive, to be such a heel as to waste the air and atmosphere, takes a process of social desensitization. The advertising industry is there to be your loud screaming drill sergeant, is there to tell you that cars are not about transportation, but that they are the essence of you, that to be without one is to be a toad that someone else is going to run over. The ad industry shapes your meat into the driver's seat and presses you to car duty against the motherfucker planet earth, tells you that you are a gun to destroy mountains and plains, and space and time and eternity. The drill sergeant commercials beat your brain into a bloody pulp so that you are a driver, so that you are a soldier of earthly pain.

They break you down until you are more than willing, until you are begging for the privilege of vehicle madness, until you are crying if they take the acid keys out of your burning hands. They scream it, beating you down, until you say uncle drives a chevy, until you say driver, and then they bleed you in the pocket with that driver's license that speaks your whole sum total.

Each year more money is spent on car advertising in the U.S. than the Federal Transit Authority spends on public transit. They pound us with the same kind of basic training that the military adopted to turn reluctant loving humans into killers. The U.S. military invented the humiliating and dehumanizing process of basic training to make their soldiers willing to shuck their genetic inheritance that tells them that it is bad to kill another person. It scientifically beats soldiers into machines that are ready and willing to kill other people.

The car industry has done this too, it has crawled its way into our social systems and made this system of death and destruction into the normal, into the essential, into something that people say they like, like soldiers might say that they like to kill the enemy to make their drill sergeant oh so proud.

It is also the thing, the heavy weight, the billion pounds of pressure, that is inflicted on me every day because I avoid this thing in such a place where it bears down so heavily. Every time I stand on a street corner in my humiliation waiting for a bus while all those sexy cars drive down the puddles, I hear it calling, I hear it tempting me to murder.

I never did take to that basic training; I went AWOL at an early age. I am a deserter from the army of car destruction, and I suffer from it, like any other deserter would. But I am also rewarded, for I did not participate in the killing. My hands are clean, and my mind is clear like the water could be if we stopped bleeding our motor oil into it.

March 4

Yesterday, coming back from work, I waited fifty minutes for my bus before just deciding to walk home. Three buses should have come by during that time. I saw six buses of another route pass by as I stood and read. This is the time of year when I am feeling a little itchy to get back on my bicycle, but there is still ice and snow on the street, and it is still a little chilly, so I will keep to the bus, even if that means waiting.

Several of us were lined up along a short wall on the narrow sidewalk. We were all waiting for buses. There was a puddle of dirty water near the curb. The snow was melting, so the puddle was a brew of water, mud and road salt; a very corrosive mixture, most likely. Only the buses pulled up close enough to the curb to disturb the water of the puddle, and when they pulled up they were going so slow as to not splash it much at all. I felt no need to step back away from the water. Not that there was even room to step back. This was a narrow sidewalk with that short wall packed right up to it.

I did not see it coming, I was reading at the time, but I saw it round the corner for its speedy getaway. A big black SUV with maps of splashed mud all over it. May it break down somewhere inconvenient. That is my wish, but I do not necessarily wish it all that strongly; I do not need to wish it, for it will mostly likely happen anyway.

That beast of vehicle had driven by the curb so close and so fast that it sprayed up water that splashed those of us waiting at the bus stop, and the small wall behind us as high as the wall went. I looked down and my pants and lower coat were spotted. Actually my right pants leg was not spotted, it was pretty much completely wet, soaked to my leg. I could feel the cold salty water on my skin.

Basic training in the act of driving turns people into monsters. What kind of adult would spray mud water at a whole lineup of people standing along the street? The answer is that no adult under his or her own human influences would do it. The answer is that only someone who has been misshapen by the force of the car would do it. The car is like the ring in the Lord of the Rings. The car, like the ring, turns its bearer into wizened evil monsters who only want more of it, more of their precious wheels, but are not sure exactly why they want more. In fact they never even question it.

Cars turns people into gollums. Drivers look older than people who do not drive. They sacrifice the natural exercise of just walking to do their transportation; they just seem older because of the stress of driving, because of the heavy world weight of it that they might not realize but that does press down their shoulders.

It is no tragedy that a few people standing at a bus stop got splashed with a dirty puddle. But it is tragic that people could let themselves get so twisted that they could splash us.

Drivers turn into gollums wanting after their precious for every single little trip. When they even see people walking, they wonder why they are doing it. They have no concept of transportation that does not involve that car. They are monster enough to splash a puddle at a whole line up of bus waiters, at the sidewalk, at the trees and grass, at the world as well, and go speeding off thinking that the stain will not affect them. But I am able to wash and walk off the stain from that muddy puddle; the driver who sprayed me will remain stained with that act.

March 5

Yesterday morning, in my walk to the bus, I stopped for a moment to read the poster stapled on the telephone pole on my corner. It said, "Write a letter to Jesus," and said that Jesus lived in Northeast Minneapolis and played in a rock band. He had also been Krishna, George Washington, Haile Selassie, and several other people, and the poster gave his address, a post office box at the northeast post office. The sign said that some will not believe this, but that true believers will know it is true. It said that Jesus will respond to some of the letters he gets. Under the hand-written note were three rubber stamp images of a Jesus face.

A few steps later I saw the same black and white cat I see almost every morning sitting between the window and the curtain at the brick house with the gargoyles. The cat has a strange mix of yin and yang in its fur, black and white in its face and down its belly. It never turns its head like it is watching me walk by. It seems like there are more interesting things to do than turn its cat head to follow this human.

I noticed the very transient pattern of the melting snow on the grass and sidewalk. It was like the edge of some continent, where land meets sea, and it is so thin that in places it could almost be glass or feathers. It was the image of the moment; in a few minutes it would melt some more and the shapes that I just noticed would have dripped into others.

These were the small things that were the wealth of my walk. I would never have noticed them if I went by so fast in auto ignorance.

March 6

After dinner and a movie, we were walking thru the parking lot behind the movie theatre to the uptown bus transit center, the little bus stop building on the edge of the world, just over the bridge.

A big jeep SUV was circling around the parking lot. It slowed down as it turned near where we were walking. As we got closer the driver's window rolled down and we could see two faces where there used to be black glass. There were two women inside. The woman in the driver's seat asked us, "Are you walking to your car?"

I pointed to the transit center and said, "No, we are walking to the bus."

I always feel such a thrill when I get a chance to say such things out loud. They wanted to take our parking space but we had no parking space to give them, we only had the bus to walk to. I suppose it is sad that we could not help them, but they were the cause of their own misery, and so much more. They may still be circling around the rows of cars looking for a place to park their behemoth. We had to wait a little while for our bus, but we made it home.

The parking lot behind the movie theatre held the area of three more movie theatre buildings, and yet it was not adequate to meet all the needs of the Saturday night movie goer-drivers. We got to use our fabulous upright bodies instead, and had no need to park, and just walked to where the buses pulled up and let us on.

The price of gasoline is going back up again. It is up over $2 a gallon in Minnesota and is predicted to be in the $2.50 range this spring. I cannot help it, but I feel so giddy and happy about this. I feel all flowers and sunshine and ready to jump at the news of rising gas prices. It will surely lead to the collapse of the United State of Cars, but maybe it will get a few people thinking.

It is sad to take such happiness from the misery of others. It is a little like hearing that the hangman has stubbed his toe. I might have a twitch of empathy, but he also really deserved it. And the drivers deserve it; it serves them right. If they want to make everything else suffer, they can suffer themselves now and then. It is just the nature of sport and life.

March 7

Yesterday was a brief preview of spring. The temperatures rose up into the fifties, snow melted, people put on short pants and t-shirts, and the streets were mirrored with dirty puddles form all the melting snow. But a wind from the north is rattling the windows this morning; the weather turns colder beginning again today.

Because it was so nice, I took my bicycle out of the shed, pumped up the tires, and rode it to go to a movie. Three months have passed since I took a bike trip as long as that one was, but I could manage, my body remembered exactly how.

It was so easy to move thru space, it was so simple to roll down the street. I moved thru the city with such ease and on only the energy of my own body. I could move myself with just myself, and go faster, much faster than I could by walking. And I could get there more directly, and maybe even faster on a short trip like that one, than I could by taking transit.

Other people were awakening from the winter and walking down the sidewalk just to slam their car door shut around them as I rode past on my bicycle.

On one narrow street on the University campus, the puddles were lakes along the right side of the road. The white snow mountains were melting their fresh water ponds, and so I rode on the shoreline of the puddles. A big white balloon of a pickup honked loudly as it passed me. All I saw was its big empty white pickup butt and all those soft edges of the blown up beast of car. Inside I could barely even make out the tiny driver, the tiny occupant, not much bigger than I was. But he was taking up thirty times more space in transportation because he had to get that beast around me, he had to honk because he needed to make it before the car came from the opposite direction that could smash into his white pickup face and melt his nose and bloody his bumper.

If that driver was on a bicycle, there would be plenty of room for all of us. But he was in that big fat truck, and taking up most of the width of the road so that if I tried to avoid the big puddles it was a tragedy sad enough to scream out in honk at.

Bicycles came before cars, but cars won out the twentieth century transportation contest. The car makers turned ideology on the bicycles, and convinced so many millions that bicycles were toys for children and cars were serious transportation devices for grownups. And bicyclists in the 1910's even helped seal their doom by joining the car makers to organize for a national network of paved roads. The bicyclists helped organize for those roads, but then as the road system expanded, they found themselves shut out of them. Our nation's largest ever public works project, the interstate highway system, bans bicyclists. Signs on all the entrance ramps say so.

If there was the one true contest, if there was an actual competition, there is no question about it, bicycles would win out. They move on no energy but the bananas and granola and steaks and french fries of their riders; they don't need wars to squeeze out the last drops of their favorite liquor.

If a bicyclist farts, it will not waste the world. When a car farts, that means that an iceberg will most likely break loose of Greenland or Antarctica, and cars are farting each and every second. The bicycle takes almost as little space as the person that is on it, while the car is a whale that you have to find a place to beach each and every ride.

If only there were justice, there would only be bicycles.

March 8

The car-me inside could well have become the dominant transportation-me. I remember well the car coloring books, the tiny toy cars and the larger ones, my car-lust at miniature cars I could sit inside and peddle and which I never got, and if I did have then how they might just lead to the stronger, bigger stuff.

All those family car trips, and how I might have imagined my second grade car-me at the steering wheel where I could take everybody for the ride so that they would say thank you and nod in my direction. The toy car raceways, the tracks for them that I laid down a table so those little wheels could roll so plastic as if gasoline was eating them, but really it was gravity, or the push of my hand that was making their motion.

Car-me could well have been the dominant beast within me. I played the games of matching manufacturer with steel husk, I dreamed of my future garage days and how I would be king of the street if I had command of the magic silver keys. It could have been anything, I could have tipped the scales in my brain with the filling station my favorite drug depot. It could have very well been me. The indoctrination was relentless, and I was amused by it, the colors and the songs.

I guess I busted the odds somewhere. I took the road of transportation craziness rather than the road with all the cars. In Wyoming and Montana, where I grew up, that was about as broken brain as anybody could be, for the places demanded distance and the distance demanded cars and anybody turning their head into adulthood would have been broken in leg and spirit without a hulking steel beast to call his guide and staircase, to call his pledge against the mountain weather and the next town hours away by speeding and liquor.

It seemed so obvious to walking-me, and then to bicycling-me and transit-me, when they emerged in my days before driver's school. How they won out over that strong car-me, I am not quite sure, but once I made up my mind that I wasn't to fall in the car-me trap, it was fairly easy. I just knew that car-me wasn't me, it was some kind of illusion of a possible human being, but it wasn't me and it wasn't natural for anybody to be. I convinced myself and so it was so. As easy as that, despite all the distance, despite all the peer pressure and the hostage streets.

March 9

Because the youngster cannot drive, the car-me must be repressed, the desire must not be guaranteed. And meanwhile the young person's best and coolest companion, the TV set in the corner in the road in the mind in the afternoon, is exploding with the lure of car-me potential, of car-me power, of car-me accomplishment, of car-me normal human being.

The young person can only ride in the back seat of the car even tho his car-me is turning into potential energy monster of speed, even tho her car-me is remembering brutal thoughts of popped up packed up regret and unbearable. The child must park thru life like a cold head noggin, must hold it down in gym bag shorts, must blow out the tension in carsterbation with tiny toy car objects and car desire oily dreams of car mastery, of adult legs and steeringwheels and faces and the windshields that see the world for you, for car-me, for the chick growing out of that shell into the world-eating adult to be.

In its regime of repression, car-me grows much stronger. In its repression and its suppression car-me grows its monster teeth and whiskers and knows there is no other transportation-me. In its suppression the car-me builds strength inside, and smothers the growing spark of walking-me, and bicycling-me, which can not shake off the specter of training wheels, and surely transit-me, and all its yellow associations.

Car-me builds up brutal strength until the eruption like a gas main fire in driver's training indoctrination and the musky sweaty stench of young love in the car seat sex. The only true rite of adulthood is driver's license ordination, and the driver's test is the sacrament, and the practical test is the holy church of god in mind, of god in car.

When I was a teenager I felt the repression and the anger and the car. I knew that I would be less of a person if I repressed the car-me and gave special privilege for the transit-me, but I did so even tho I fully realized the risks and the consequences. I was ready to sacrifice myself to something else. I think I mistrusted the repressed car-me inside me, I wonder if I suspected something in its strength thru limitations, in its shiny mind repression explosion.

To reject the car-me was the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion, was the rebellion that even the rebels and nonconformists could not stomach, was the rebellion that even the leather coats could not face for the firey sun, was too much for the oil in the hairdo to ever wrap a follicle around, was far too much for many others, maybe even too much for me. But I made my decision, even tho it meant that I had no adulthood, even tho it meant that I sacrificed the sacrament that made me car-human, even tho it meant keeping in its cage that car-me and its taunts, that car-me and its world destruction hands, that car-me like the teeth inside that eat the stomach and heart wall all at once. I kept the car-me inside me like the monster who never could jack in the back get out of me, and to this day I suffer with the consequences, and to this day I live the life of full-on complete compounded car-me repression.

And am I ever glad I did.

March 10

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