May 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

May 21

Cars take people off streets, and that makes the streets vulnerable. Life in urban places is rich but tenuous and risky. Great advantages come from living closely with other people. It is the richest way to live, but it is also vulnerable to chaos.

We joined a thousand or more others in the north side of Minneapolis to make a human chain along one of the most troubled streets in the city. We joined to say no to violence and yes to peace. People from all walks and backgrounds gathered along the sidewalk. Cars honked their horns. The street cleared for a drum corps parade and a party on the asphalt as the sun set.

This was only necessary because most people cross these streets only in their cars. This was needed because the streets were left behind for bad business, for violence and hatred. Cars turn streets into battlegrounds. They are tanks, or at least they treat people like tanks, and when people abandon the sidewalks and clear the public spaces to drive their cars instead, hatred and violence and crime are free to spread. People get more scared and are less liable to leave their cars. Two sisters who live just a few blocks away say that they have to drive from house to house because it is scary. This makes the neighborhood even more dangerous.

Because of the ordinary and ill-conceived or not conceived evolution to car transportation and abandonment of the street, something extraordinary must be done to make things well again, and this extraordinary thing only means a moment's peace. The chaos will return once the elements of the human chain let go their grips and drive back home.

May 22

The Art-A-Whirl event in my neighborhood is drawing out a constant stream of pedestrians. They are coming from Wisconsin, they are coming from south Minneapolis, they are coming from St. Paul and the suburbs and north Minneapolis. They are coming from the neighborhood itself. They fill the sidewalks. They roam from one art gallery to another, past the string of small shops of 13th Avenue, where the old commercial buildings somehow escaped the wrecking ball that took them down in many other parts of the city. The pedestrians are making my neighborhood the opposite of the one that we visited Friday night. If only this pedestrian energy could keep up all year long, then things would be safe and lively and wonderful year round, and community would be spread by the sound of walking feet.

I spent the day in the neighborhood, walking from place to place, from the neighborhood library in the morning for the dedication of a fountain, to the neighborhood office in an art gallery where I spent the afternoon with other volunteers asking the passers by what they thought this neighborhood needed. In the evening, Kristine and I rode our bikes up to Psycho Suzie's up a few blocks and a long walk but a short bike ride. That is where we had our dinner out.

Friday was the opposite. I roamed all around the city, first with my mother, who was visiting town, and then in the evening with Krisine, up to the street action/peace protest. I rode several buses and the train across town in between a few long walks. From south Minneapolis to downtown to the north side, we saw the sites from our seats on mass transit.

One thing I did not do those last few days, one thing I have barely done at all in much of my life, was spending any time in a car. I looked at cars, I dodged cars, I laughed at cars, I was threatened by cars, but I never rode in a car. Who even needs to, but so many think they do. But even they were walking around yesterday. I wonder if they put those two and two together.

May 23

I spent another day all within my neighborhood, all within walking distance. I went to many places, but they were all near my house. I had a variety of experiences and adventures, talking with people, watching videos and dance and seeing art, but nothing was more than ten blocks away. My mind was expanded, but only because I also understood the place that I was seeing.

I experienced a good old fashioned sense of geography. The whole world was within my neighborhood. One hundred years ago, most people who lived in this neighborhood most likely spent every day of their lives like I spent yesterday. The warehouses that now hold artist studios once had factories and breweries, the storefronts that now hold galleries and bars once held other businesses and bars. People worked and shopped and lived within walking distance. Most people did.

The car expanded that sense of geography, making the stomping ground of a person into a much wider area. At first that probably seemed a little liberating, but then it become obligatory as everything spread out because it could. Work and play all spread out and concentrated at nodes rather than stayed mixed all together as it had been, as it was when this neighborhood was first settled. The warehouses that once held industry are on one side of the alley, the houses of the workers on the other side. The commercial businesses and offices were right next to housing. Then the car changed the mood of things and kept everything separated.

The expansion of geography went from liberating to tedious. Because the car made it possible, people spread out and expanded their sense of territory until they had no real sense of territory left. Every place became their neighborhood until no place was their neighborhood, and there were so few neighborhoods left.

Because mind follows geography and we think as much thru the map of place as thru anything else, this dilution and expansion affected the minds of the people who lived so diluted and expanded lives. Patterns of thought, like geography, spread out and lost the distinctions and understanding that comes with understanding the small and the local. If you cannot understand yourself from the minutia of your place, how else can you understand yourself, your soul, your moorings if you are always adrift. When you cannot understand the smallest things from knowing them in their place, you have to understand things because your are told them. You end up following orders if you lose touch with the ground and location and their faint ways of teaching.

The loss of personal mind geography is a loss of mind. The loss of place is a loss of emotion, a loss of attachment. The car drives you to a continuous empty. Sometimes understanding comes with horizons. You cannot sit and wonder if you are always moving to get somewhere.

May 24

Parking parking parking. That is mostly what was talked about at our neighborhood meeting last night. There is never enough of it, when you are dealing with car transportation.

Cars are like a multi-drug. They get you into many filthy addictions. You need to grub for oil and parking and highway lanes if you are addicted to cars as your transportation drug. Mostly it is all about destroying things.

Laying asphalt to park cars. Greedy after parking spaces, that is the heroin mantra of the car-obsessed. Trying to vary the zoning so you need oodles of parking spots for a tiny neighborhood street that is perfect for walking, that is perfect for a bicycle. Sometimes you need to tear down other buildings to spread things apart even farther so you can put parking there and make it even more necessary to drive between those longer distances. You need parking so you can drive by the parking spaces on your way to the parking lot, where you will talk and complain about the insufficient parking. You might as well just pave over your own whole neighborhood, you might as well pave over your own head and shoulders - that is a good place to park too if you are really greed for the good flat stuff.

You do not want little businesses next to you because it will take away your parking. But this neighborhood had so many little businesses placed between houses so people could walk to do all their shopping, to do all their living in the dinosaur days before dinosaur cars.

To me, all this talk about parking is so short sighted. It means that we will always have the oil to spread out a coat of oil to park our oily pets of addiction on. It means that we will always want to have such beasts roaming our inner and outer and flesh filled spaces. It means that we will always put up with hell on earth just so we do not have to walk or push a cart.

Parking is always about stowing the unnecessary. Parking is the crime that comes with car territory. Just let it rest and get over your problems. Do not feed the car problem with more ashtray parking, just get rid of all the spaces, plant gardens in the parking, and force the issue to walking.

May 25

The day was brilliant thanks to the sun and the sky. I could have ridden my bicycle to work but that would have made the trip go by too fast. I wanted to stretch it out, to make the most of this precious half hour of Minnesota spring heaven before I had to seal myself up in my windowless office, so I walked to work. I walked to savor the day for twenty-five minutes, to lick and smack every centimeter of the path from my house to my job.

I stepped down my front steps and made it by only two houses before I got to the house of my beef jerky strip of a neighbor, G. Bent over his cane, he called out to me, "What's that bright light in the sky? I forgot what it was called."

After weeks of spring rain and pregnant gray clouds, he did have a point. The sun was pretty amazing just above the profile of the corner bar brick building. But G. is a guy who starts talking and then will not stop. He was directing his tenant in how to cut up the shrubs in his small front yard, but G was just talking to me, about the bars on the corner, about what is art, about plants and hostas. I was seeing his whispy gray hair melt into the sky above his home security camera as much as I was hearing any of his words. All I could get in was "I gotta be going," a couple times, before I was able to make it real and actually get going.

At the corner I passed by the two bars. It was getting near to noon and the outdoor tables at Mayslack's were delicately rounded by the people eating, drinking, smoking there for lunch. They were the last people I would see for quite a few blocks. From here down to Third they must have all retreated into their cold cars. It was just me and the sidewalk.

I heard the wind roar in my ears and then clear the path for the whole sphere of acoustics that rose up around me. The birds, a passing jet, some car sounds made a globe all around me. Then the churchbells, startled by the noon hour, let go their rings. The first one came from ahead of me, the next one came to the right side of me, and then one after that came from behind, as if time were migrating north for the spring. The old bells in their towers rang out the hour and even the birds had to shush for the movement of moment.

I got to busy Broadway, where the cars were fast and evil. I crossed on a corner without a traffic signal, so I had to make a run for it when a gap came up only temporarily. As I crossed I glanced at the gas price at the Superamerica a block away. It was only $1.99, and that disappointed me. I hoped it would be higher to convince more people to abandon their cars and their global warming ways and meet me and greet me on the sidewalks for the sun.

Down the tree-lined sidewalks of lower Fourth Street, the sun and shade and walking made the whole world flicker like an old movie. A man walking his dog stretched up like tai chi on the corner as his dog sniffed after something. That dog stayed silent, but all the other neighborhood dogs behind fences led my walking way, barking like a red carpet so I knew where I would have to go.

The odor of a stand of lilacs across the street rushed over the anthills and up to my nose to wake me up to all the colors, the fading tulips, the choir of irises, the flowering bushes dropping their slow petals, the whole color symphony of spring.

I hit the wall of newer townhomes between the old residential neighborhood and the railroad tracks. This is where a freeway was supposed to go, but thirty years ago the neighbors fought it and stopped it and built condos where the trench had been gutted. Then I stepped gingerly over broken beer bottles on the sidewalk of the bridge crossing the railroad tracks and I descended down to the eastern most edge of downtown Minneapolis. Suddenly there were many more cars, and pedestrians, and sidewalk tables at restaurants, and more.

I passed more people sitting in groups and talking over their soup, and one woman sitting alone with her legs up for the sun on another chair for ottman, and her laptop computer comfortable between her knees.

I cut thru Chute Square Park, where picnickers from the beauty school down the street were sitting on the grass. I knew where they were from because they all wore the white shirt uniform and had the same odd hairstyles and most of them were smoking over their paper lunch bags. I glanced at the time and temperature on Union Bank. 12:13 and 69 degrees (20 celcius).

I crossed busy Central Avenue between the corners; it was clear of cars for a moment so I ran for it like a robber. Then I walked down the cobblestones and the stairs and saw a glance of the Mississippi River. The chatter of pedestrians died out and I heard again the rush of wind in my ears. I walked into the building where my office is, and I said goodbye to the sunlight for the time being and just felt good all over from such a nice day walk.

May 26

My weekday of work is just simple trips. I can walk or bike or bus to get there, and I have done a few of each this week so far. I have not done a long trip since last Friday. I stay in my small realm of space, and that is okay, and that is what people did for so long before there were cars, and that is my life too.

It has been my life for so long. This year I am just trying to take it one step further. I have never owned a car or had a driver’s license. But before this year I would willingly accept rides from other folks in their cars if they were going my way cars or if we were doing something together. Last year, I started getting uncomfortable about even accepting rides because the practice implicated me in the war for oil and in global warming. By not accepting a ride and making it clear why, I would get my message across a little stronger, even if it was just amidst my small social triangle.

I think it is bad to even be in a car, to even have a little bit to do with the worst there is. Last year I tried to limit myself to one car ride a month. This year I decided to try to get by on even less, and to write about the experience and the reasons with a little diary entry every morning.

Lots of people in many places go without cars all the time. There is nothing especially special or difficult about my little challenge. But in this city, cars are generally considered necessary. Even people I know who are strong transit advocates may not use public transit all that often because our transit system has so many deficiencies, and with cuts in funding and governance that is at its heart anti-transit, it is getting worse.

But I will make my way without a car. Anybody who is willing to give it a try can also. It might mean some long walks, but those feel so good on the body and the soul. It might mean a simpler schedule of duties and recreation, for you cannot do everything if everything is everywhere. You slightly limit your horizons, at least geographically, but then you notice the intenseness in your own personal microscope of place. There is so much in that drop of water. You may be surprised at how much and how wonderful there is within your square mile if you really look at it, and experience it without a shell.

May 27

Earlier this week I participated in a television experiment with a couple of my friends. We shot video on three cameras simultaneously so we could have the related video shown on all three public access channels simultaneously.

M wanted to go downtown to do it and H had his car ready, but because I would not go in a car we walked downtown instead. It was a very nice day, and finding a parking place downtown would have taken probably as long as walking there, but my refusal to take a car was also part of the equation. What I am hoping for in my refusal to accept rides is to affect the behavior of people around me, to get them to think about transit or bike or walking before driving a car, because I will not ride in that car with them.

For the main video experiment, the three of us walked around the block downtown that has the IDS center on it. This is probably the 100% block in Minneapolis, with the pedestrian/bus Nicollet Mall on one side. We each set off with about a block between us and each walked around the block. We held the camera out in front of us to keep it steady and a little more inconspicuous. We each walked around the block to record our version of it to play on one channel, while the block away version could play on the channel right next.

All told, we each walked around the block four times. Some of the sites changed as we walked, and there were also some repeating characters. Most people, like us, were walking, but some people stayed still. There was an accordion player sitting on a chair near a window wall. His instrument was so quiet that I really did not hear it until after I had just walked past him. There were two canvassers for U.S. Pirg who were trying to sign people up for something or other. They had clipboards but they were not very aggressive. I never, in all four trips, actually saw somebody signing one of their clipboards. There were people at a sidewalk café, there was a guy waiting by his parked car next to the gaggle of smokers by the office tower door. There was the hotdog vendor, and various people waiting for buses.

The life in just one block was fairly dense. I would never have noticed all the characters and stories were I to walk around just one time. Walking around four times made that block into a world, an arc of many forms of human life. In walking around repeatedly we became characters too, and some of the characters in our movie asked what we were doing in their movie. While my other two experimenters stayed silent when asked, I explained to a couple people what we were up to, one of the Pirg guys and two woman at the café with their late lunches.

The smallest amount of space can hold a never-ending density of life. One would never notice this zipping by in a death machine.

May 28

Not only does car dependence misshape and age our world, our home, our planet. Not only do cars poison our home with global warming, with metal monsterdom, with a slap happy slap of asphalt everywhere to seal the lips of mother planet, to smooth out all the imperfections that equal life. Not only do cars kill off the land and sky, bad for their health, they do the same to the people who are addicted to them. Car use ages, deteriorates and misshapes the people who practice that use.

I am 42 and I am pretty wimpy. I was always the last to finish junior high school running races. I was the last to be picked when teams were being drawn in school sports. I was a sickly kid and I had a heart condition that nearly killed me in my 30's. To be perfectly truthful, I am a pretty pathetic example of a human being. But I am still healthier, I would expect, than most other people my age. I am 42 but many people think that I am much younger. Last week I got carded when I tried to buy a glass of wine. This does not reflect on me as much as it reflects on so many others. It is not so much that I look young, it is that everybody else who is 42 looks so much older, at least the 42's who use cars all the time.

It is not that I am so much more healthy, but that so many of the other people around me in this spinning unhealthy world have let their body and souls go to their cars. Cars are the fountain of fast old age. They make people look old and feel old. They misshape the bodies of drivers, they turn people into mutants because they squash the urge to build some activity into the good old day-to-day life.

Cars have a lullaby singing way to lull people into not wanting to use their scissor legs. On my bike ride home last night I saw a herd of people riding their Segways, big round wheels on the sidewalk and stick poles so you can run down the other shorter people with your machine that helps out sure because it goes slow walking speeds but does not make you walk. There were big butt alien people riding the machines. They were saving themselves some of the fat they just earned in lunch so it could pad their seat just a little bit more.

Cars make people old. They sit them down rather than make them walk and move for a living. It is the living room with the couch potato all over again but now they have taken it to the road with radio soundtrack and asphalt street sign adventure pictures. Cars are turning people into big fat flesh bags. I know I am cruel saying this, but it is what I see from my tiny lonely perch on the edge of the sidewalk.

Getting out of cars is going to help the health and appearance of everyone and everything. It is about time, if you ask me.

May 29

Yesterday I spent most of the day in the universe of my home/yard/garden, and today will do much of the same. We talked about how sustainable we could be from just our back yard, depending on how intensely we practiced our vegetable garden and organic backyard farming. I was thinking about the rising height of the bottles in my collection of homemade wine down in our cellar. How if we cared and were careful we could grow much of our year's food and drink in this backyard with the sun and the rain. How we could do that, that is, if our global climate tipping gives us even a sun and world to call home.

It is a cool start to the summer, and that reminds me of things I read last year about climate shifts and ocean currents. How really tenuous is our fairly temperate climate here in the center of the continent. How our climate is affected by the currents of the distant oceans, and how those are being thrown off with the global warming sent from the CO2 from the tailpipe of so many cars. How fragile our small backyard paradise is at the hands of this plague of automobiles; how they are sending our globe into a climate tailspin. How could anybody drive a car knowing these things? How can anybody who knows the slightest thing about greenhouse gases ever get in a car and turn the key?

All the life here that depends on us to do the right thing. The plants and the animals and the insects, just how many there are in our small backyard and how they depend on us to do the right climate thing and not drive and not torture the earth with our emissions into the atmosphere.

There is a certain balance in the world of our backyard, the soil, the wind, the rain, the sun, it is a model in miniature of the whole balance of the world. I will be careful and take my time in walking, in breathing, in digging, in arranging. If I make small mistakes in the garden, I can watch the backyard repair itself, but only slowly, but only if I did not go too far. I would never dream of driving over it or spewing it with poison. This backyard would never forgive me for that. It would abandon me for that. It would give up on me for that. And yet this is all our backyard, so we must all stop this car torture.

May 30

Yesterday I continued my assault on asphalt by building a rain garden in a corner of what had been the driveway of our house. A driveway is an ashtray of a place for putting cars. It is also a place that rain water runs right off of. The earth beneath the driveway wants to drink the gentle rain, but the driveway prevents that. We do not have a car, so we have been building a garden in our driveway over the years. The latest feature of this ex-driveway, the rain garden, allows rainwater to seep into the earth rather than ride the roads down to the storm stewer to join the surface water in the river.

After digging a swale (depression) in one place, I realized it made more sense to dig it in another. I was putting my rain garden in a place that made more sense to me aesthetically, but it was not naturally where the water would go. I filled my old depression with the dirt from the new one I dug. The new one would be closer to the house, but still far enough away, I think. Not that it really matters at that point anyway, for our house does not even have a basement in the part of it near the alley.

Early in the morning I rode my bike with bike trailer to the big box hardware store to get a couple ten foot long plastic drainage tubes. They looked like big black stretchy snakes. These will allow me to channel our downspout water from our roof into the rain garden. I bent the big long tubes and bunjy cabled them and somehow I made it home with them. Actually, they made the trip on the much shorter bicycle trailer quite nicely bent up into big coils.

Another bike trailer trip got me some prairie plants to plant in the garden. Another bike trailer trip took us to the co-op to get some groceries.

Back to the digging. I made a wide depression a few feet away from our house and near the concrete alley. I dug out rocks and sandy dirt from what had been our asphalt driveway. I kept on widening the edges and it still is smaller than I would like, so someday I will probably make it just a little bigger.

After attaching the tubes to our downspouts, I dug some trenches to keep the tubes going ever lower as they get closer to the garden, to keep the water going down by gravity. I planted the plants in the swale, with the ones most wet tolerant at the bottom. I put some cedar chip mulch down to keep other weeds from growing in the soil. I tried it out by passing a garden hose in one of the tubes and letting the garden partially fill with water and watched the water drain down.

Before, the downspout nearest the rain garden had sent water straight out into the concrete alley, which meant that the water went down the street and gutters, collecting impurities until it hit the storm sewer and the river. Now it can slowly seep into the soil of our rain garden, and give the earth a drink, and filter in the soil, and replenish aquifers and all that good stuff.

May 31

Who need to read about Eden

We could make one

Just turn all our parking lots

Into gardens.

The monoculture of cars

Verses the diversity

Of life

In three square inches

Either you put all the

Secrets and mysteries

Or else you pave a

Parking lot

It is all

Seriously strangely suddenly

At risk

This is what we are doing

From sheer laziness

A delicate

Balancing

Act

The rain, the sky, the green

A fine place

To drive a Mack truck

Across

In my dream

A room of furniture

Emptied for a move

What is new, what is old in the wood

A secret compartment

Discovered in the back of a shelf

With hidden treasure

Of the early 70’s

Pictures, books, assignments

Look at how strange

The cars looked then!

In this quiet

In this movement

In the extra pleasure

Of walking, of surviving

But is that the distant

Conversation of car tires on asphalt?

The long weekend is over

After all this time

In a small space peace

With nature and the strength of body

And the green of life,

It is back to the world of car heads.

June 1

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