May 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

May 1

I (dream) have a car. I do not have any memories of actually driving it, but I am here at the edge of a parking lot. It seems that it is the kind of car that I one does not take you places but that you have to take with you if you are going to get anywhere. I have a kind of biological connection to the car. It is an umbilical cord that is still stuck into my navel. This is what ties me to the car. But I am still surprised when I find unexpected water in my car. All the cassette tapes I kept in my secret compartment are wet. I wonder if I will even be able to play any of them again, even if I give them proper time to dry out. My jacket is in the secret compartment too. I pull it out to let it dry, but the water wicks off almost immediately so that I can wear it. And I need to wear it. A cold wind is racing across the parking lot. That is what parking lots are for.

I cannot walk very far in either direction because I do not want to risk the presumptive length of my umbilical cord. I need the cord. It nourishes me and sends me music and other good advice. Sometimes I call it all information. That is what it sends me. I suppose if I feel too constrained by it I could cut it off, but that would be impossible. I do not know what would happen to me if I did something as ugly as cut myself off from my car. I might just pop like a balloon. No, I better keep the cord attached, even if it means that I can barely leave my car.

I do not want to let it unwind too far. I do not want to let the biological, soft, wet fleshy cord get too dirty on the surface of the parking lot. I know I have some umbilical slack stored in my chest, in my coat pocket. I know that if I start walking I have enough cord to get me across the parking lot. I think that is the case.

My whole life is inside the car, but I cannot always predict when everything will be soaked. There is a shop across the parking lot and I could go there and get some replacement articles. There are some things in my car that are very wet, and they do not go immediately dry like my jacket did, and that is such a pity. I could get new things to replace those old things, but I get afraid about my umbilical cord. I think it will reach as far as the front door of the shop, but will it get me to the cash register. I might have my arms full of items and then find that I can go no further, that my umbilical strong is as tight as telephone wire. I have my arms full of merchandise like a thief but I cannot buy it, and the store will call the detective, and then things will get very miserable very quickly.

I stand on the side of the road. I am pouring the water out of my audio tapes. I am wondering how I can make my secret compartment between the front seats better protected from seepage. There is nobody around in this parking land with which I can discuss my problem. In the car I have seats for three people, but those seats are always empty. Or maybe I keep them clear for the ghosts who must relax now and then between bouts of car horror.

In that dream I fall asleep in the wet front seat and have another dream that I have no umbilical, that I have no car. In that dream I can take my bicycle down to the busy corner and decide whether to take the swift train or the local bus, or if I should just ride my bike the rest of the way, or if I should take my bike along on the train or bus or leave it parked here in a locker. I have so many decisions to make, and all the other people are making such decisions too. There are many other people at the busy corner waiting for buses and trains, holding onto their bicycles or not. We discuss our decisions, and I make new friends. In the meantime we notice that we have all cut off our umbilical cords. It was only a little messy, but now we all are free.

May 2

Bus train bus ride to south Minneapolis to the May Day Festival. The whole street, Bloomington Avenue, is closed to cars for over an hour as the parade passes. A parade with no cars. Everything in the parade, the floats large and small, is walked or pushed or biked.

As soon as the streets are cleared but before the parade has reached our street, the Hard Times Bike Club crew explodes down Bloomington Avenue. They wear their leather jackets and they are circling and racing with their tall and complicated home-made home-welded bicycles. Also: bikes made out of shopping carts and bikes with platforms so entire small bands or groups of children can sit or stand and watch the road go by and all the spectators stay still. Also: the bicycle like one big roll bar wheel around the driver, so that it can ride down the street normally but when the biker goes fast enough and then hits the brakes, the big wheel over his head takes over and makes a whole loop dee loop until he comes back after one rotation, or, with a little more difficulty, two, and back on his rubber tires. We hear a loud pop like a gunshot but it was one bike tire popping on the street. The bikes took over the street with such enthusiasm once all the cars stopped. The cars had stopped their killing for an hour or so and the hard times bikers made the most of the immunity.

In the parade, a long black stripe like oil of banner held up by marchers. First in white paint on the black are the names of Iraqis killed in the war in their country. Next is a parallel strip with the names of American dead in the war in Iraq. A few names are called out to the cold air, but most of the dead remain to be read on the soft black strip carried by marchers just above the hard black strip that made the deaths so necessary.

It is a cold day. Snowflakes are falling on the first day of May but they disappear before hitting the street and sidewalk. After the main part of the parade we go into the Ecuadorian restaurant on the corner and watch the rest of it pass the big shop windows as we order and eat an afternoon dinner. Then we decide to skip the festival at Powderhorn Park to bus train bus a ride to the University to see the Sunday afternoon Renoir film. At Powderhorn Park, had we gone, we would have walked the circle around the lake only to see and stop and chat with people we only see once a year at this event. People from our past. People we knew when we used to live around here. People we know now. It is social and it is walking and it is always one of the highlights of my year. But it is cold and we skip the circle.

After the movie, bus bus ride home.

I (dream) and K walk home through our old neighborhood, down the street that the parade had emptied. We are full of fear because it is the middle of the night and very dark and nobody walks at this hour and that makes the whole place dangerous. We walk thru a large construction site that once was the middle of the street. They are a development of row houses in the middle of Bloomington Avenue. Have they heard about the traffic? Maybe they will move the street so it rides on top of these new row houses. Maybe they will find out their mistake too late and have to demolish the houses to let the traffic back. The traffic belongs here, this road belongs to the cars and not to people, and not to houses. But in the meantime they are building here, and we have to cross a deep basement on a two by six bridge dropped on the foundation.

May 3

My daily bike commute to work is barely more than a mile. I can vary the journey slightly, but I usually get into a rut, following one course steady before slightly altering it.

I pull my bicycle out of my shed and say good bye to my garden. I close the gate and then get up on the seat and pedals in the alley. I swing past the side of my house, and then take a left into 4th Street, checking for traffic past my lilac bushes.

I head down 4th Street, and hesitate at the 4 way stop sign at the corner where the two bars are, and then I am down two more blocks to 13th Avenue. If I see someone I know on the sidewalk walking their dog, I saw hi to them.

At 13th I look down the block for traffic. I see the art galleries and restaurants and the silent marquee of the Ritz Theatre, waiting for the renovation that is coming soon. If I have something to mail, I stop at the mailbox on the corner, right in front of the postal worker's union building.

Down to Broadway one more block, past the houses and the Sheridan school building on the right. At Broadway I have to wait for a clear spot between all the heavy traffic. While waiting I take a look up at the downtown skyline, and just under it, the gas price sign at Superamerica. I keep my watch out on the price of gas, just $2.02, down from $2.19 last week. I always feel a little happier when I see the price higher because I have the strong and faithful illusion that higher gas prices will make people rethink their car addiction.

I cross Broadway and have to carry my bike up the curb. At some point in the 60's or 70's, the cross streets on the south side of Broadway were all culdesacked thru here to keep Broadway a more roaring car-dangerous car-centric superstreet. This was one of the anti-city mistakes made back then during the dark days of urban renewal. Continuing down 4th Street I see a few smaller signs of urban renewal. Although the houses here are grand, they are set farther apart, for during urban renewal times many smaller houses were demolished and their lots split up between adjacent houses. It leaves a bit of an empty feeling in some places. The houses here are bigger here than they are north of Broadway, where I live. In my neighborhood they are more varied, brick next to stucco next to vinyl, fourplex next to duplex next to cottage, while here they are slightly more uniform and larger, duplexes, triplexes and single family houses, but all upstanding.

Then come the churches and I might look at some of the terra cotta relief on the one or listen to the bells ringing if I pass by a funeral. Then I take a right at 4th Avenue NE and over a block to University Avenue. University is busy but it crosses the railroad tracks up ahead and 4th Street does not. I used to take a left down the calmer 5th Street, but that seems silly, because it takes me a block away from my destination, while University Avenue is slightly more direct.

But University Ave. is busy, and I have to wait for a break in the cars to take my left turn. I get as close to the right as I can, riding in the gutter, as the creepy bully cars creep up behind me.

Down University I go, or rather up, as it ramps up to cross the railroad tracks, and then down to the little downtown of Old St. Anthony. Past the new rowhouses and the restaurants and shops, the brick commercial buildings, both old and new to match the old. There is not much room for a bicycle between the traffic and the parked cars in this busy street, but I stand my ground and watch the pedestrians.

Across Hennepin Avenue and down another block. Past the trees of Chute Square and the old Ard Godfrey house, well over 150 years old and staying there, and the old strip mall on the other side, built in the 50's but going very soon for a new high rise condo building. I check the time and temperature at Union Bank at Central, then down one block and the bike lane begins in front of the old library.

I have one block on the bike lane before I take a right in the land of parking lots. A parking ramp to the right of me and flat parking plain to the left of me as I go down 2nd Avenue SE, then down the driveway ramp for the Winslow house high rise to the door on the back of the river buildings and the big 125 address sign. Between the buildings I can see the river and the downtown skyline, and I am at work. I walk my bike up to my office. That all takes about ten minutes.

May 4

The first two weeks of April were very warm, were very spring, were early summer, and the plants all took off, bursting thru the earth and growing up and out. They were in a race with the warm, bursting buds and speeding sap. Then the weather cooled for two weeks, and all the plants hesitated. They just up and stopped growing. It was like they were waiting to see if the change in the seasons was real or not. They wanted to wait out the sun and see if it was just playing a game or incredibly serious. Now it is warming up again, and I expect to see the plants continue their journey up to meet the photons.

Last night, biking home, I was full of the odors of the crabapple trees in the boulevards, and nearby lilac bushes blooming. The smells were so strong and sweet, and I could enjoy them because I was sailing thru the odors on my bicycle, and because I was rolling slowly down residential streets empty of car traffic. I had all the smells to myself, and I could breathe them into my body and beating heart and lungs. On my bicycle, I was vulnerable to them, and the only way to let nature in is to give yourself to it, to open up your vulnerabilities to its fingers in smell and touch and vision, to drop your control freak and your auto ways. Were I to be the dream car me imprisoned in my internal combustion with my car umbilical keeping me attached to the parking lot land, I would have instead been washed in the sound of my car stereo. I would have been vulnerable to all those artificial vibrations. I would have been smelling the plastic of the seats and not the pink and blue and white of all the blossoms. I would have been ignorant to the world of plants and night sky. I would have been brutalized by the mechanical of car nation addiction.

I am so lucky that I can ride home swiftly but silently, and not too swiftly, by the name and the vulnerability of bicycle me.

May 5

It is really spring now, and the sun is so bright and astonishing, and it is accelerating the growth of everything green. I sit out in my garden and I do not want to leave it. I wish I could stay here all day long and observe the birds and the plants and read or write.

The planet is being so nice to me that I really want to be nice back to it. One of the nicest things one can do to your planet is to not drive, and I have been practicing that little gift all my life.

Perhaps the single most destructive thing that anybody can do to the earth is to own a car. I find it hard to call anybody who has a car an environmentalist, because everything that they might be doing right is certainly outweighed by the damage they cause with their car. Cars make their mark with air pollution and global warming from daily driving, but they also cause much pollution from their manufacture and dereliction. And the infrastructure, the roads and freeways that support them, are even more menacing for all life, for creatures on foot, for plants, for water, for the natural movement and migration of things, for just life. New figures I have seen estimate that millions of people are killed every year by automobiles, and certainly millions of animals are killed by them too.

Last Saturday I went to the Living Green information fair at the fairgrounds. It was a trade fair with information booths from vendors and organizations encouraging or making their commerce on the notion of living a more planet-friendly lifestyle. There were hundreds of people there checking out the displays so they could do the right thing. These people were looking over information and asking questions on composting and friendly cleaning projects, on energy efficiency for the home, on ways to support local agriculture. There were a few tables and displays about transit and ride sharing and bike commuting, but that was a very small part of the event. It seemed to me to be a little lopsided based on the huge negative effects of private car use.

There was quite a bit of room devoted to hybrid cars. Altho hybrid cars are slightly less polluting than regular cars, the roads and the speed and the pollution that comes from manufacturing them surely outweighs the tiny advantage of them getting slightly better gas mileage because they have batteries. But they have in their core the essential injustice of a car, the idea that to move a body that weighs less than two hundred pounds requires a machine that weighs over two tons, and bears down on the earth like a bomb always rushing to target.

And hybrid cars make it necessary to go to war for oil. Hybrid cars as well killed 70 people in Iraq yesterday. Hybrid cars cause global warming. Hybrid cars need roads, which are one of the great problems caused by car transportation. If you have a hybrid car, you might be able to state the case that you are living slightly less evil, but you are not living green, and that is certain.

May 6

Yesterday I picked dandelion flowers. Just the yellow petals. I snapped my fingernails around the base of the flower to loosen the yellow quills stuck to the stem and then I put the petals in a plastic bag. I picked them in a friend's yard and in our yard. I picked them for about an hour in the sun and in shade to get enough to make a gallon of dandelion wine.

The dandelion tea that I made with the petals, soaking them in boiling water, is not far from me now. I added sugar and acid yesterday. I added some sulfite to kill wild yeast. I started a yeast culture in some orange juice, and if that has started well, I will add that to the tea later today. The yeast will start eating the sugar and making dandelion wine.

Each dandelion flower was full of life. There were tiny bugs among the petals, black dots vibrating in the yellow center, and bees and flies visiting. They had all gone in for a drink. It was so enticing, so bright and stellar in the sunlight. It is amazing how tiny life can be, and how it is all around us. And that is what we pave over when we pave a road. And that is what we drive over when we drive cars (I do not).

My mother is in town, and I will visit with her today. This time last year she lived in Minneapolis. In June of last year she moved to Portland, Oregon. She made up her mind last year during the transit strike here. She wanted to live in a place where there was sure to be mass transit, and Portland seemed a much better bet than Minneapolis. There were other reasons too.

I visited Portland last year, in October. Yesterday I worked on editing some video for an On Transit show and I was using some of the video I shot in Portland last year. When I brought back October on my computer screen, I could see that the Portland Streetcar was full of people and moving smoothly and amazing down a city street. If only we had that kind of transit here, too.

My garden and the dandelions keep me here, but how much longer. I am hankering for a decent transit system to make my life just a little less challenging. My bicycle is nice, but to move on rails is easy on the earth and just a great way to get around, particularly in the colder months when my bike is in the shed. If only.

May 7

Our house is close to the street, so when somebody drag races with himself in the middle of the night, it wakes us up from our dreams of sidewalks and painting cornstalks. It wakes us up from conversations with dream neighbors about the width of streets and the friendliness of muskrats.

A car engine is about explosions. That is what internal combustion is, an explosion in a cylinder. No wonder it makes a sound. No wonder it can be so loud, ripping a hole thru the night like a chainsaw.

Last night we sat in our garden as the sun set. We wanted to hear the sounds of birds adjusting to the stars but mostly we heard the cars. We heard motorcycles doing their impressions of jet engines, we heard the tires of cars making their start and stop like fingernails on a chalkboard, and saw the blue smoke that held the sky for moments after. The drivers were doing some kind of rancid mating call with their tires and engines. They were looking for crazy lookers, building up their self-esteem with assembly line racket and motor macho.

I cannot wait for the post-car age. I cannot wait for the silence that will come when the gas gets just too expensive. The loudness of cars is not worth their transportation pitifulness. Cars are too much a noise nuisance to be something to even smile at.

Kristine wondered what bad those aggressive car noisers would do if they couldn't skid their tires or roar their engines to release their frustrations, because the gas to roar them out ran out. I wondered whether the force came from the car itself, whether the will to noise was something that would just dissipate when the scissors cut the umbilical of car away from their beer bellies.

When you live by explosions, you brain by explosions. When you need a bomb to take one step forward, you think like the bomb that takes you to beer time. The brutal peelers and draggers will turn out walking pansies when the gas goes to hell, when the cars turn into useless flower pots and potato peelers with no potatoes to peel out, no more elbow grease to car bomb them into action. And as far as I am concerned, that last drop day cannot come soon enough.

May 8

Last night we saw Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, speak. She said, almost as an aside at one point, that so many of the world's problems are due to the greed for oil. She was talking about East Timor at the time, but the list of nations and wars is long.

As we were directing people into the church where the speech was to be, we heard the complaint over and over again that this was a hard place to find parking. The speech was in a church right downtown. Dozens of bus routes passed by within a few blocks. You could hear buses going by the open back door during the speech. There were bike lanes painted on the streets around here. We took the bus. There were a few bikes parked on the street poles on the sidewalk. But most of the people who came walked up from the direction of the parking ramps. Most people came to the talk by burning that oil that causes so many problems. Many of them came by exploiting that same greed and death. You would think they would have known better if they were coming to see Amy Goodman, but they did not know better. Either it did not concern them or they had some kind of block on their own implication in these wars and this misery.

The limousines were out in great force last night. They were circling the streets of downtown like absurdly stretched out sharks. You had to imagine the teenage parties inside behind the sunglass windows. The quick teen indoctrination to car culture and car partying, to blowing the gas into the sky in their fancy dresses and suits and it does not matter what kinds of massacres made in their bit long white limo names as they slice thru the traffic night like that.

Goodwin mentioned Ghandi's quote. Western civilization? It would be a good idea. Cars are the opposite of civilization. They are a transformation of transportation into fascism. They make the ego so central and so ultimately important that it is absolutely ignorant to its own practices. They close their users off from the suffering in their name and the rabble on the sidewalk. It does not matter who you are stepping on if you are gunning your engine. Nothing matters, but that windshield movie world, that fragment of reality like the television brain. The driver is the star, and has the illusion of freedom and comfort and control with no responsibility. But it is only upholstery and not really comfort, but it is only freedom to look for a parking spot, only the freedom to find a place to temporarily store the behemoth, and not anything that really has to do with mind and body. But it is responsibility, it is implication, it looks clean in the advertising but it really drives spilled blood.

May 9

I (dream) ride the dream transit system. Many elevated train lines whip around and curve, and I see old friends as I ride. One old friend in particular I see under a platform and he is visiting the clinic to get a check-up for his kidney. Another is with her kids, who are still kids even tho it is years later. I wait at the platform and get on the train. I have trouble finding a seat, but I do find a seat after standing for a while and walking to the back of the car.

Some of the train riders, one or so on each car, act as informal tour guides. They call them Shinsaku, I think. The Shinsaku on our train points out the sites. I notice that this Shinsaku gets a lot of things wrong. Or maybe I always understood differently what that was, what this is.

The ride is smooth and quiet. Sometimes I get off just to get off, just to look down at the city of gardens underneath the elevated rail platform. The city looks so different. All the streets are gone, replaced with verdant gardens. There is a city of gardens underneath the elevated rail platforms. Shade plants and plants for the sun. The houses almost look like outhouses in their small comparison to the vast gardens around them. People in the cities these days have to grow all the food for the people in the country. The people in the country are still chipping themselves out from all the parking lots, and they blew their knack for agriculture long ago by so much commuting.

I meet an old friend when we get off at one platform. As the three piece band plays on the sidewalk, she asks me who my council member is today. I think about where I live, but no, that is where I used to live. I do not even know where I live. Maybe I just ride around. Why shouldn't I, if the trains are so nice.

There is the little band playing. I listen to the street carnival. It is a pity that I have to wake up, but I could ride these trains all night and all day. There are no cars to drive the city down in this world. Only gardens and trellises in the former streets. My dream knows just what I need.

No cars, but I can say hello to all the people. Everybody is somebody else, and I know who they are, I met them all at some point. I do not even have a memory, but I know them. I do not remember my connection, but we all are friends somehow.

When I get on the next train, there is no Shinsaku, so I stand up and start explaining the sites, and telling it my way out the big curved train windows. Everybody listens. They all know what I am going to say, anyway.

May 10

The view of the world thru a windshield is a fragmented and mediated view, like the view of the world that comes from television. It is not like when you are standing or walking in the world and the world reaches out with its touch. Behind the mediated frame of the car windshield you can avoid the touch of the earth on your body, on your brain, on your face and fingertips. Inside a car, the world is drawn by definition of the windshield. You are presented with a sign that represents reality, a skewed fragment only, but you consider it the whole of reality. Rather than clarifying the world thru necessary simplicity, the frame of the car alienates you from it. The framing devices of windshield, car and television say more about themselves and their needs than they say about the world outside that you could actually explore in person on foot.

Perhaps this alienation is what has cut us off so much from what we are doing, of how much we are totally messing things up. The fire of petroleum shortage has started burning, you can see the coming fire in the gas prices creeping up despite our government's best efforts to keep them down. But as the fire starts we have decided not to throw water on it, we have decided to hurl more gasoline on it to make sure that it toasts us completely.

The rising price of gasoline ought to tell us something, but according to the media, all the prices are saying is that we should buy our gas in Minnesota rather than in Wisconsin because Minnesota has a lower gas tax. The poll in the paper yesterday said that Minnesotans do not want an increase in the gas tax to pay for better roads. They would rather drive on inadequate roads and pay less at the pump. But maybe that is a good thing, too. Any investment today in roads is daft. It is an example of building an infrastructure that nobody will be able to afford to use in a few years.

What we should be doing is investing in mass transit, and particularly in transit that can run off of electricity, like trains. But cities all over the nation are facing transit cuts because of other cuts in government spending. The nation will be cutting to bones its passenger rail service. Even transit-friendly San Francisco is saying that it must put off new rail projects.

In a few years, we will all be hopelessly helpless. We will have this huge spread-out uncivil civilization that nobody will be able to negotiate, because the cars will cost too much to drive and cars are the only way to get around in it. Either you go bankrupt moving yourself around by burning liquid gold, or you stay in one place and brew more madness from the television screen in your deteriorating murder scene living room. Your car outside will not take you there on spit. And you cannot get to the nearest state with slightly lower gas prices because you cannot get anywhere at all. In other words, we are happily on the fossil road to doom.

May 11

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