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May 11

Every once in a while I need to start over again, say how and why, to remind me, to remind this flashing page, to remind you, if there is a you, if you are not extinct or never were, to remind the absence of audience that is the no readers of this ditty. I am writing these words as I live my life. In my life I do not have a car, but as I write these words I hear the rip of a car engine. I live surrounded by fists of hostile curse-carsery, by the grunts and the groans of internal combustion. I want to live by flowers and bicycles, but all around me the car monsters roar and destroy.

I do not have a car. I do not have a driver's license. I am trying to refrain from all car rides, but I did accept one short ride once last month. My original intention was to try to go the whole year without even riding in a car, but I have already blown that. But if I can keep it down to no more than one car ride a quarter, I still will have done something, I will have succeeded and failed.

Every day more people die in Iraq. We had to blow up the place because we are running out of oil and we need to keep our cars happy with movement. Other reasons for war were given, but they were lying exuses. I am trying to stay out of cars because I know that if I ride in a car I am implicated in this foolish war. I stay out of cars because I do not believe in bombs, car bombs or comfortable bombs dropped by tanks or planes from the hose of a gas station.

This is the year that the Kyoto treaty went into effect, but my country, the carbon messer of them all, did the selfish thing and said a toddler no way. Meanwhile, we are the ones blowing it out the most, killing ourselves and all others with the real science of global warming. My country said no, so I am doing my own private Kyoto. Not one damn drive is my way to spit in the face of oily man Bush, and my own private Kyoto to spit in the wind of my nation's selfish drive-by tantrum.

I write about this, I write about that. I ride my bike mostly these days to get around, but I also walk and ride the bus or ride the train. I wish I had better transit in my neighborhood. It has gotten worse instead of better and promises to get much worse as this year goes on.

This journal should really be a joyful recall of my day's alternative transportation experiences, but sometimes I get angry. This writing is my first few moments every day. This is my head cleaning and my dream digout. This is my little brain spew, here to sit and glow if ever it could. These are my word bullets aimed at all of car nation, and there is nothing I can do but curse and hope for the best as my country all around me drives the road to self-destruction ruin. I would rather walk, and go in the other direction. That is my point.

May 12

Riding my bicycle smoothly and sweetly down the street with cars at all times, I just cannot think about how squishy I am and how steel all of them are. I cannot think too much about that or I will not keep my balance. The thought is pretty grim. The odds are just too weighted against my life with gears and windows and upholstery. If I doubted my wheels too much against the steel and car aggression and bumper grins I would lose my way and fall down in their mouths and get beaten between their car teeth and eaten for lunch or car breakfast.

It is not even steven. It is not when I am cycling; it is not when I am standing or walking either. I am a few feet away from the steel mouths of motor and they do not have my butt or front right at this moment but it is only a matter of a thin barrier of air and some poorly remembered anti-kill me customs. It is only because the drivers believe that it is not the right thing to do that the cars do not bowl me over every day. But it also is the wrong thing in the first place that people are even using cars in these days of war for cars and global heat, so why even that tissue to keep me breathing and wheeling on my ride and daily breaths?

The truth is that I just barely make it out alive every day in this steel transportation metropolis. The cars do not eat me, but they get so awful close. Sometimes they miss my bicycle shoulder by mere inches as they speed down the speedway avenue. A driver can get as daisy as I get sometimes when I am dreaming while I am walking when I am dreaming while I am cycling. The only difference with their daziness is that they are driving the whole damn living room. They too could daydream their way with steel right thru my shoes and protective layer of pants and t-shirt and spring jacket for the windy rain. My belt buckle will not stop the penetration of their global warming bullet breath and the air in between might bunch up to warn me but darn it if I will not be able to skeedaddle fast enough to avoid the draft, the smash and the shock stretch of collision.

If those cars do not keep to their slot car lanes, then I am a goner, but I am up against that wall and skin and bones are no match for steel, not even down to the molecular level, the electro-chemical atomic layer and all the space between. It is still a car, and its other name is squash me.

May 13

Last night I was talking with a friend who had read some of these entries. He is probably one of the two people who has. He was concerned about how I felt about him because he was a driver. I know that these little stories can sometimes seem misanthropic, but I mean to be directing my mis at cars, not so much at the people inside them. I am not throwing my thropy at the part of the people that is the people, but at the car phantom that has gotten inside them and made them so careless. Those car phantoms need something shouting at them now and then because they are mean and grip real hard. My daily fibs are not even shouting, they are barely even whispering, but they are the best that I can do right now in the next few minutes.

As we looked down at the intersection of a freeway and two busy streets, a place made into a noise and reality desert from all the toy cars below, I told my friend that I imagined a world where all the cars were gone and how great that would be. My friend said that people would not stand for that, they would fight for their cars, they would battle against car-absence until their arms fell off, until you had to pull their cold dead fingernails off their steeringwheels and stick shifts. I hope this is not the case. I hope that the world will not come to this and that those car phantoms will be exorcised when the price of gasoline reaches some high peak, when the news on global warming gets just a little grimmer, or the war for oil seems just a little bit more like a war for oil.

He talked about how going without a car might be difficult in this town, and I reinforced his view by talking about the challenge, but my bus ride home last night was less a challenge than a tiny adventure tale that is not very swashbuckling.

The ride home started in a dark bus shelter. The sides and top of its plexiglass were steadily shelled by the cold drizzle rain. There was a young woman sitting to my right and she talked on her cell phone all the time. Mostly she seemed to be talking about where she was, the streets coming together, the location and the time. To my left was a tall man standing and looking in the direction from which the bus would come over the roll of the world, or looking forward across all the lanes of traffic.

I caught the quiet bus that rode up to us. There were two other people, but none of them dipped their head for forward body first, so I did and walked on into the light. I took this bus to the middle of downtown and got off to catch my transfer. As I walked the block to my transfer, I saw my bus go by. A half hour until the next one. I did not feel like running after it, so I went to a bright bookstore. I did not buy a book, but I read a recipe for dandelion wine. Interesting.

When I went back outside for the bus a group of anxious young men had colonized the entire bus shelter, inhabiting all its walls like a liquid. I walked one block forward to wait there with only my thoughts in the darkness. The bus came up with its inner light and I, reading about the elections in Iraq in a magazine, rode it home with all the other steady quiet people. I could barely see the dark wet city thru the bright reflecting windows, but I knew when I got to my bus stop.

May 14

It seems only logical that if you are judging how efficient and useful a form of transportation is you should factor in the container. That a car has such a big container ought to give it a major disadvantage early on in the point count.

One of the reasons that I decided when I was a teenager that cars were crazy was because I did the simple math. It seemed completely absurd to me that a 150 pound person needed two tons of machine to get around. One of the big problems with that situation is that once you are at your destination, you need to store that two tons somewhere.

Today I am going to our local Democrat Farmer Labor Party city convention to be a part of the process of endorsing candidates for mayor, library board, park board, etc. If it will be like some of the city conventions I have been to in the past, it will last all day and maybe even into the night.

I will need to go there before too long and I need to think about how I am going to get there. It is too far to walk, so my options are bicycle or transit.

My bicycle will get me there fastest, just because I can take it on a more direct route than I will have to go it I take transit. Our transit system is just not that flexible. I wish it were, but it is not, and taking transit will make the trip last two to three times longer than it will be on bike.

But if I ride my bicycle there, I have to leave it somewhere outside while I am inside all day long. The container situation enters into my evaluation procss. If I bike, I will be using my bike twenty minutes to get there and twenty minutes to get back but all the other minutes and hours of the day it will be sitting outside. It will be locked up but still vulnerable to vandalism and to weather. It would be much safer if I just left it in our garden shed.

That is why I am thinking of taking transit, even tho it means leaving much earlier. Transit still seems like a great and wonderful gift to me. It can take me somewhat close to where I am going and then it is off on the rest of its way and I do not have to do anything with it. There is just me and the stack of schedules I keep so I can figure out a way to get home hours later.

So I will take my bus downtown and then transfer to the train. I will get off at the Cedar Riverside station and then walk about four blocks. I will bring along things to read on the trip.

If I was a car-person, I would have to deal with that space injustice all day long, the injustice that has turned much of what we still call cities in the U.S. into permanent auto detention camps. There will be a few hundred or maybe a thousand people at this convention. For the privilege of a short drive at the beginning and end of the day they will need a place to park that beast that will get them there and back. I am sure that just like about every other place I go, I will have to listen to people complain about the parking situation.

The suppressed evil impulsive me just wants to slap them in the face and ask them why do they even drive if it is such a drag? But I will just smile and hope that rising gas prices do the trick instead.

May 15

Yesterday I spent all day in the Minneapolis DFL Convention, from 9:30 or so in the morning to about 11 at night. I saw great drama acted out in a meeting of almost 2,000 delegates. It has to be one of the great dramas in the world, really, an old-fashioned town city meeting show of wit and strategy to endorse candidates for city offices, and mostly, to endorse a mayor.

After all those hours, no mayoral candidate was endorsed. As one candidate's numbers rose very slowly, the other candidate pulled his troops out so that there would be no quorum, and no further votes could be taken. I looked around at one point and all the teal shirts were gone. The current mayor, whose numbers were lower and not rising, had given the call and all his people had suddenly vanished.

Going back home, it was late for the buses. After 11 pm, most buses run once an hour, those that still do run. The train runs more frequently. I walked back to the train with a friend who lives in my neighborhood. He had gotten a ride with another neighbor, but she had left the convention much earlier.

The train came in just a few minutes. We had barely enough time to look at some of the art at the station. We took the train downtown, but missed by five minutes the bus connection up to our neighborhood. The next bus up there would not come for over half an hour, which is about how long it takes to walk home from downtown, so we walked.

Once we left the club crowds of downtown, where pedestrians were dressed up to check out the action at the various bars at 11:30 on Saturday night, we stopped seeing other walkers. The rest of our walk all we saw were a group of kids. First the boys taking up the whole sidewalk and asking us for money, and then the girls, saying nice and hi to us in their second mass, almost half a block behind the boys.

One thing I notice about life in Minneapolis is how most of the pedestrians you run into are kids. If I made a graph of pedestrians I see in a year of walks, and estimated age range, teens, twenties, mid-lives, etc., I'm sure the graph would have a big spike on the teens and then fall like a cliff for all the other ages.

In this town, so many people, most people, lose the knack for walking once they get their driver's license, and really have no reason to walk unless they have a dog. Now that is just too bad for this city's sidewalk culture, and that is just too bad for safety on our streets.

If only we had that commitment to feet and walking. As I got closer to the convention yesterday in the morning I started seeing the huge sea waves of all the cars parked on the street and in lots, all the cars of all the delegates. I also heard people complain about the parking, just as I expected and predicted.

If only those two thousand people could commit themselves to walking, then we would have a mobile town meeting all the time in Minneapolis. Two thousand would grow to ten thousand would grow to the entire city, and soon we would have a town of feet and legs, filling the streets with their wit and strategy, ruling the highways as we the walking people. We could make the town meeting every day of negotiation and togetherness and peace and cooperation and no more car hate to bog down the gutters.

I would like that, and the shoe companies would be happy too.

May 16

Yesterday I made three trips with my bicycle trailer. One trip for plants, one trip for cat food, and one more trip for groceries - I thought I might as well because I had the trailer hooked up anyway. That is the secret to living well without a car in a big box world, is to have a vehicle to hook up to your bicycle which lets your carry the big box bulk items of the big box store world. A bicycle trailer is such a vehicle. You take the trailer out of the shed, you unfold it a little and hook it up, and then off you go. It can carry loads of up to 100 pounds, and long things, like a flat of plants for the garden.

The nice thing about a bicycle trailer is that you can hook it up just when you need it. I do not have to carry it unless I am going to be carrying something big. When I am just riding normally, I leave it behind in the shed. If you have a pickup, or another large motor vehicle that can carry big loads, you carry the extra container whether you are using it or not. So people are burning the extra dinosaurs to move the extra weight of their carrier even when they have nothing to carry. Most pickups have empty backs on most drives. Most vans will be full of junior soccer players one in every twenty rides, but most drives they contain lots of empty chairs and just one driver, but they still got to burn the gas to move those chairs. Now is not that completely bizarro world? Bicycle trailers make so much more sense.

At one point I was taking a left turn and stopped at a stoplight. A van pulled up behind me when the light was still red. When the light turned green, I was already leaning into my pedals to get my bicycle trailer load, weighted down by cat food, going. Because of the trailer load, I needed to put a little more energy into my forward momentum to get my bike going, so my start up is a little slower than normal as I compensated for moving that extra poundage. Once I get that momentum, riding with a trailer is barely different than riding without it. But that first start-up takes a little bit of oomph.

As I was starting into the turn, the car behind me beeped at me. I was moving, I was turning. The only difference was I had to put a little more power into my pedals to get myself and my load going. All that driver in his big empty van had to do was press down his gas pedal. I was moving as soon as the light changed, and I was visibly putting my all into getting my momentum, stepping down onto the pedals, but I guess I still was not putting enough effort into it for that lazy driver.

Because he was not really beeping at me because I was going way too slow. He was beeping at me because I was an uppity bicycle who dared ride in the car's left turn lane.

I would like to see that driver pedal his own van forward. If he were in front of me, I would have to ring my bike bell, because he would not be able to pedal one centimeter with his massive empty payload, I would guess. My philosophy is that you have no right to beep at a pedaller going slow unless you can pedal your own load faster.

May 17

Yesterday was easy. I biked to and from work, and then in the evening I walked to and from my neighborhood meeting, a few blocks away. Altho it rained much of the day, I got all but one of my trips in during breaks in the wetness action. On my walk back from the meeting, it was raining gently, but building up to something stronger. I got to listen to the tap tap tap on the hood of my coat. I made it home just before the deluge, just in time before the hard rain hit the atmosphere. Crossing University Avenue, I had to stare down four lanes of cars to cross in the crosswalk. I had the right, but one car sped out just in front of me as I was crossing.

When I am on my bike or walking or standing on the corner and I look at a car, I do not see the person inside. I see the car as the person. I stare down the headlight eyes, I look for cues in the chrome grill mouth talking gear talk, but I do not see the small toy person inside the costume thru the glare and the curved glass visor.

When I have to stare down a car at the crosswalk to take my right of crossing, I stare at the car and not at the person inside. I see the big metal mask, like the buffalo on the sidewalk, and I forget sometimes that there is a captive person inside imprisoned in its stomach, and slowly being digested into its metal view of world and nature.

A new Star Wars movie is coming out this weekend so I will use the Darth Vader analogy. When I or anybody else sees Darth Vader, we see the mask as the person. I do not necessarily imagine that there might be someone inside so misshapen that they have to hide behind all that metal and mechanics, but there is, or they are vanishing. There is someone there so helpless that they cannot exist unless they are half person, half machine, and they have to hide behind that set grimace for a mouth, those light beams for eyes, the buttons and lights for heart and soul.

I will not be seduced by the dark side of the oil and war car world. I will stick to human power and the community room of transit vehicles. I will not hide behind machine selfishness, and you can avoid the dark side too. Just repeat these words and heed their advice and you will be free. I will not drive. I will not fall to the dark side of war and global warming. I will not drive. I will not let myself become a misshapen human behind the mask and robe of assembly-line car culture. I will not drive. I will not become half human, half machine, and more and more machine as I become more human helpless. I will not drive. I will not let myself turn into Darth Vader of the wheelie legs.

May 18

Any person with any interest in economic justice should be opposed to car transportation and fighting to put an end to it. Car transportation, if analyzed in such a manner, is terribly flawed and simply unjust.

Car transportation places a huge burden on the poor, a burden that is not shared by the wealthy. All of those who use the car transportation system need to first make one huge up front investment. They need to buy a car, whether they are rich or poor. A car is expensive. It might be second only to a house as the most expensive item that any person might purchase. Unlike the house, tho, the car loses value the longer that it is held. Cars are a bad investment because they get so worthless within a few years of their purchase. Use wears them down until their gears stop grinding.

Because cars are so expensive, the poor end up spending a much larger percentage of their income on transportation than do the rich. More expensive vehicles are available for purchase by those with the money or credit to do so, but even cheap used cars are expensive, and the cost of maintaining them involves bucks as well. This means that the poor folks who have cars do not always keep them in good running order and their cars break down more often.

Car transportation is really a rich person's transportation device. It is, at its core, economically unjust. Out of laziness, the U.S. has tried to adapt it to be a transportation system to serve everybody, but that has only led to overcrowded roads and depleted or nonexistent public transit systems.

At work I see and hear from people on the economic fringe. Many of them flirt and dance with car transportation. They have a car, and then their car breaks down and they do not have the resources to get it fixed or get a new one right away. So they try to get around for a while on the transit system, which is not really flexible enough for them to get to work or to an extra job, and so their economic power diminishes even further. They wait for the day when they can get that car back running again, or get a new one by gift or bargain, or soul-eating credit.

They end up spending a major percentage of their incomes on transportation, even if they only have a working car for a small part of the year. Meanwhile, the rich can easily afford new cars, and keep them in good working order by paying for all the tune-ups their car needs.

A transportation system that would be much more economically just would be an extensive rail system powered by electricity. Such a system could be paid for thru an income tax that is progressive, allowing those with greater financial resources to pay for a greater share of the system's cost. Riding the system would be free or involve only a nominal cost. Both rich and poor would ride the system, and build community by sharing the space.

Such a system would be expensive up front to build, just as the highway system was expensive to build up front, but maintenance and operation costs would be much less. Rail is much more permanent than asphalt roads, and does not need to be repaired as often at all. The system could be powered by wind and solar power, thereby making it sustainable, unlike the car, whose oil power comes only at the expense of war and global climate problems. With such an economically just transportation system we could easily say goodbye to the injustice of cars, roads, highways and parking lot absurdity.

May 19

Riding my bike home thru wet and foggy streets at 11 pm all the cars are bullets. On the bike lane of the one-way street like a freeway with houses, the car traffic moves thru the wet like it was shot. I pass over the freeway on the pedestrian bridge and look down as if each car were on its way to a flesh target heart, to kill it with momentum and casing. Each car seems to be racing time itself, so frantic as to be spastic, so spastically fast as to be death.

I am going fast too, on my bicycle. I seem to see myself, or my shadow, in the wet street. Maybe it is all in comparison, maybe it has to do with the illusion of fog that turns this world of Marcy Holmes neighborhood into a small room, black street to black sky, wet hair, wet coat, wet pants now stuck like glue with the wet car-troubled grit of the fierce racing street.

I cannot keep up with the cars. I am not even trying. Their headlight eyes are daggers that I must out-maneuver as if they had turned the world into a video game and my hand eye coordination has to battle them with gears while they have all the power of internal combustion explosion to armor their monster warriors. I just have thoughts of home, the light of the living room window, the lilac bushes leaning heavy under the day of heavy sky perspiration.

I am going nowhere as fast as those metal streaks, I am just barely stopping. I come up to a stop sign only to hesitate after a stare for headlights, but I must be on my heavy head way before sleep takes over and drifts me off to sky.

The cars are all bullets, their sound and their speed. I dodge them as best I can, with left right left, with crosswalks and waiting. I do make it home, to the light and the window. One more day I escape serious injury and mutilation from the hurling missiles in our midst. I am lucky to be alive in this world of car death and anger.

May 20

After a long night pocked with positive and negative, with alternating black and white spots that mark periods of sleeping and lying awake, my mind is still populated with the faces and the images of the white hot flashing segments of dream. The old friends now in a new place visiting, and I have lost my coat, or my bag, or something. The character from another dream months ago and she is in that chair. The pattern in a drawing I made a few weeks back, and now it is on an old bookmark from City Lights books and marking the tattered brown pages of a book of screenplays that were never written by Terry Southern before he never died. I was reading them in that dream, in the long night party caravan of trailers pulled by a noisy engine train. I do not remember what I was reading in that never book, the comedy or drama between the tattered covers and marked by that image.

But I always have a way to get around, I do not have to worry about that. My dreams always seem to have excellent transit service, frequency and quality, subways and trams, streetcars like the old days and like the new days. That caravan of chained together vehicles. It is supposedly going from party to party with the sound of the 70's playing on the sound system, but I mostly remember it parked in front of a strip mall where the crew is on high wires and making larger signs for all the stores. There is a party going on in the parking lot, but I am trying to read that book. And in the caravan train there are slat seats and there are cushions. I am riding high on a cushion. How the music never stops until I get to that house, the one where my old friends sit in comfortable large chairs and we talk about the train, the one character brought up the issue to break the spell, and how great a way it is to get around.

In all my dream places, a car never goes by unless it has motivation. It is not like this morning, where I hear the sound of a car on the street below and I never know why. Maybe it really has no reason, no reason at 7 am, no reason ever to make that sound.

In between the dreams, and I only really remember one of them, I was lying awake. Those times were the dark street that the dreams lit up like stripes in the middle. As I lay awake I worried with concerns about what are we doing to this planet. The global warming, the dissolving of the transit system around me. These thoughts triggered by unheard explosions of internal combustion. The busy streets like traps that have slowly crept up to us over decades of fear and distraction. And worries of how I will get around today in a city where the buses do not go back and forth, but only up and down and not even that often.

Lying awake, I have to hope for sleep and dreams, because my dreams have the good fortune to always take place in settings that have real transit systems.

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