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November 1

Yesterday I walked twelve blocks in the middle of the day and I did not meet a single other pedestrian. I do not think this could have happened to me in most of the cities I visited on my journey.

In the evening, when I walked to the bus, I walked several blocks on the edge of downtown at rush hour, and I walked on empty sidewalks, past pregnant empty places like in an Antonioni film. I walked on sidewalks looking for people but there were none but me.

Before I left on my trip there was a newspaper series that pointed to Vancouver as a place where people walk and use transit and live downtown. The series talked about the importance of an environment that invites walking, nice sidewalks with trees, buildings instead of parking lots. But it did not mention the most important ingredient. The thing you really need if you want people to walk is other people walking. It does not really matter what the environment is like for pedestrians. There are nice pedestrian environments here with nobody walking in them. That is not as important as the people themselves.

The places that feel good for walking are the places where people are already walking. Streetscape planning is not as important as the development of a pedestrian culture. It is up to individual people to stop their driving ways and walk instead. That is what turns concrete in to community. You need that if you want to make dangerous scary streets into safe inviting streets.

That is what people here do not seem to get. They want pedestrian friendly safe streets but they also want to walk out of their house and get right into their car. That is how you make a city into en empty dangerous place. It is as easy as that. It is as easy as the actions of one person multiplied by half a million.

November 2

A couple days ago I was standing in the popcorn line of a movie theatre and listening to the blank faced woman behind me in line talking about how tired they were of liberals trying to get them to change their life, to change the way they do things. They were talking about how tired they were of liberals trying to get them to stop driving with the high price of gas. I wondered for a moment if I was listening to some kind of absurd dialogue track from some parody of simple right wing minds or if I could actually be hearing the real voices of actual human beings with brains and some kind of senses of responsibility.

To me, it is all about selfishness. To continue to drive a car as a hurricane egged on by global warming destroys cities and states is selfishness. To continue to drive and leave all the environmental clean-up to future generations is selfishness. To continue to drive and use up the rest of the world's only oil, the cheapest energy source we will mostly likely ever come across, that is selfishness. To continue to drive and endanger pedestrian environments, to rip apart cities with busy streets and freeways, that is selfishness.

I certainly would like selfish people to be a little less selfish, to think about the whole community of the world and not just their own immediate needs. That is a part of the maturation process, to be able to see the needs of others outside your skull and body, to be able to empathize with the future and with others. To be fixed only on the self and refuse to see how your actions impact the rest of the world is toddlerism, which is really a more apt name for the kind of right wingism we are seeing these days. This kind of mind frame should have died as the ten year old turned eleven, it should have crept away before the rites of adulthood made it possible to name yourself an independent person of action whose actions have consequences and shape the world around one. That one can be called to question for one's actions because they do have an impact on more than just that person, that is part of the responsibility of growing up. To continue to make a mess no matter how it impacts the world is to live the life of perpetual toddler, and that is what cars are all about.

November 3

They were talking about running cars on vegetable oil. They were talking about how cars would be around even after oil ran out because there would always be french fries. Well, maybe a few cars might make it, but you cannot run the whole fleet on fry grease.

As we run out of oil, many people will grasp at straws to keep their car hit going. There will be all kinds of technical marvels to keep the speedway carnage running. But each new tech advance will have some kind of unforeseen backsplash. Each new gizmo solution will have an unseen dark side, a cancer that will only show up some years later. Each frigging brilliant brain explosion will need its own solution in a few more years. When you build a house of cards on technology, you keep needing to invent better toxic glue to fix the cracks left by the last toxic glue.

They might run their cars on vegetable oil and that might save them from the crash of the oil middle east, but what will that do to the molecular level, what fry grease genie will that let loose from the oil bottle. How will that change things in a way we do not yet know how to look at.

Used grease might save the day for the time being, but what other days will they crash down dead with that amazing technology marvel.

November 4

One revelation of my infinity trip was how important social contact with others is. I was traveling alone, and sometimes I knew nobody in advance, and I felt how I could descend into some form of craziness if I did not glom onto another human being, if I did not find at least one temporary friend to share some time with, to talk to, to be next to.

We are social animals after all. Which is why car transportation is so antithetical and psychically destructive to us. We need to be around other people, even if we are just walking with them, even if we are just sharing a sidewalk. At least we are close to them, and we can share our pretty faces, share a look or a smile or a sound or a feeling. If we close ourselves off from each other in tin cars, I fear that this need turns itself on its head and turn us into monsters, into brutal, into something not even posthuman but less than human.

On my trip I discovered easily that I could not be an island. I had to share my humanity with others, even if just for a moment or an hour.

November 5

A week ago today I started the last stage of my trip. A week ago today I made my journey back to home. The past week my mind has been animated by all the images and feelings of my one month odyssey. It all plays back now like a book, like a movie, like something that might have happened to somebody else, like something more imagined than something that might be now.

I have my feet back on the ground of this city. I pull my bicycle out of the shed each morning to go to work and have a busy day there of catching up. My life goes on much like it did before my trip, tho the weather is cooler, and the house feels cool, and the plants outside are burning bright in dying down colors for the winter months.

I am back to a Saturday morning normal life. The exceptional life of my round the clock travel is something that is slapping away. I have to try hard to turn on my brain TV to play back the moments, to redefine them with new casts and commercials, so I do not lose them, so they stay with me somehow.

November 6

I spent much of yesterday editing my video of my voyage. I was working on just the first two days of my travels, the long train ride from Minneapolis to Philadelphia.

Still cameras take landscapes best from one fixed position, but movies or video are all about the movement. To see a place in motion, to see it passing by you, that is how video shows the world best, it shows it in several viewpoints at once, the shifting perspective, the shifting viewer, the way around it to see it, getting around it to get something of a sense of it. There is a frame rate for every movement, there is a frame for every tree leaf turning color, and when you put them together in a movie, in a stream, it could be words on paper that you read as fast as silk.

I am looking in a window. I am looking out the window. The television can be my window to see this trip again and again. The glass protects me from the electrons and the wind, it protects me from the glow that tells me that it was all last month. Now it is all an illusion, moving past me, moving me there again.

November 7

I am back to my life not on the road but still adjusting. What continues to be the hardest thing to deal with is the lack of people on the sidewalks here. Minneapolis is a city with the transportation mindset of a small town in South Dakota. Everyone must drive their trucks and cars, and sidewalks are only place where the smokers gather because they are forbidden to smoke indoors.

The sidewalks here are empty and haunting. The price of gasoline has been sliding down too, so there is no incentive for people to change their ways. But last week on the local news they actually did a piece about peak oil, and an article in Saturday's newspaper said that some people who chose to live in big expensive houses in the distant suburbs are now beginning to regret that decision in light of the expensive home heating costs and the price of gas for those long commutes to big box home. Suburbanites are turning to transit to save some transportation money, and they are having good experiences.

If only the people in the city were as willing to change their ways, to shift from cars to foot to populate these empty gray sidewalks.

November 8

As my trip progressed, I lost track truly of which day was which. I stopped measuring time so much as time, but instead measured it by place. It was not Monday Tuesday Wednesday, it was Chicago or Denver or San Francisco. I crossed the continent as the sun crossed the sky, and that was my calendar, the map of space instead of the number of days.

Place could be time. It already has a jump start in that, because place is the way we think. Geography is the very basis of our sense of thought. We think things out as we explore new nooks and crannies.

Mind is geography. The way we think is based on the terrain we cross, the landscape we live thru. If we cross a place in a car, we start to think like a machine. But if we cross it with our eyes, our eyes of looking rather than of driving, then we can wake up to the wonder, then we can be informed by the ridges and the valleys. The trees can scrape our brainscape and make their brilliant paper thoughts into our way of knowing. To see space with the body is to turn it into mind.

November 9

I have been back on solid ground and in one place for ten days now, but I still live in the legend of my grand adventure. I still think out its thoughts and its lessons when I tell myself to others, when I tell the trip to others and to myself, to give my excuse of my long missing season, to explain that month burp when I was not being quite so Minneapolis obvious.

I hold onto that adventure in the steady stream of same day places, I hold onto those visions and actions, and those hours spent sitting in many places as my life sits in one place and I have to think of something better. But mostly I am still engaged in typing down that journal and editing that videotape of my travels. In other words, I am still engaged in the process as I set down my own permanent record of it. In turning all my alive wild thoughts into a wall of brick words, I am losing something of the grandeur of the trip, of its mystery, of its gone present. Turning my faraway fantasy technicolor every picture visions into something as wall and grainy as videotape loses it too. My mind is still crazy with the thoughts of where I was when I was moving the continent beneath me with my feet and seat. I can still have wild adventures out of my mild adventures because it has not all hardened yet into my personal quiet legend.

November 10

In the middle of each night, I am still traveling. My eyes open up to the world in back of my head and I am visiting a friend in a tall tower building. We look out his kitchen window and see all the other city buildings like tall creamy Emily Carr fir trees dotting the hillside, and a fancy modern elevated train weaving between the tallest and most pointed of them. We chat over the sink, and I talk about my latest travels, the ones I do in the air and ground and in between on all kinds of amazing mass transit machines, the ones that dig and the ones that crawl.

The cold sun seeps up on another day falling, and my transportation now is back to bicycle. I have been riding back and forth, small distances, tho yesterday I had to ride in a fierce wind. At one point, going north for a mile or two, I had to battle it forward, I had to lean my way for most of it. I had to press every pedal down with my whole darn body or else I was going nowhere, or else I fear the wind would have taken me straight backwards.

November 11

I think that what is really going on is that people secretly and deeply hate cars. They say they love them and they cannot do without them but they secretly hate them, very deeply, very passionately.

Last night I went to a community meeting in another neighborhood. A housing development was under discussion. The building talked about would hold 38 units of housing and around 60 parking spaces. The people at the meeting did not complain about all the extra people who would be living in their neighborhood. They complained about their cars. They complained that certainly there would not be enough parking places for everybody in the building, and that would be very troublesome. They complained and they talked about that only, that was their primary feedback.

This is also the primary issue in my neighborhood when a new development comes up. People do not talk or complain about the people. I assume that this means that people do not hate other people, not really. They complain about the cars that those people will bring, they complain that there will not be enough room for those cars in the neighborhood. Other people must really hate cars as much as I do, only the emotion only comes out when more people will be coming with more cars to the neighborhood.

It seems to me like the only solution is to work for a world without cars, or where cars have a very limited role. Then there will be almost nothing at all to complain about.

November 12

When I see people get out of their houses and then get right in their cars to go anywhere, to go down the street or great distances, I think I am looking at sleepwalkers. That practice is so routinized. Open the house door, walk across the lawn, open the car door, close it, turn the key.

The act of car driving for transportation is a zombie act. It happens despite the deep inner hatred most people share in their secret inside selves to cars. They will not admit it, but they really do hate them. That deep hatred comes out at times like in the neighborhood meetings I witness, and blares to the surface so speedily if drivers do not like something that a fellow driver does, or a pedestrian or bicyclist or just any speck of interference on the black roads they travel. That car hatred is so deep inside, but it is also kept in check so well by the depth of car propaganda.

All the car propaganda, the advertising, the free plays in movies and TV and so on, the billions of dollars of skull-crushing picture and sound and psychology that has masked this deep car hatred that I see so generally. This brain mashing has made the car haters into robots that say that they love cars and that is the only way to go while inside they are seething, and exploding, and in mighty denial.

November 13

Last night we were on a long bus ride back from a movie and as we got closer to downtown, four women, four friends, got on the bus, but not all at the same time. First one woman with a long brown trench coat got on and she sat by herself and she was quiet. Then a couple stops later, two women got on who were friends of hers, and they all lit up, they said wow, they said hi, and they took up some of the front seats with their conversation. Then a few stops later another friend of theirs got on and they were all four happy and talking until they got off at a downtown stop, all together, to go dancing or something. That is just one more of the so many stories of the social side of public transit.

A few days ago, the Amtrak governing board fired the director of Amtrak, a man who had worked hard to make the passenger service better and more efficient. During his watch ridership was rising. Despite his success, he was fired. When he was asked why he was fired, he said, "ideology."

The Amtrak board that fired him was comprised of four Bush appointees and three vacant positions. He was not taking Amtrak in the direction that the Bush folks wanted it to go. He was not destroying the service, and that was what they wanted him to do.

They want to destroy Amtrak because it is subsidized by government, as if roads and airlines were not also subsidized. So why are they destroying passenger rail and not single occupant car use and an extremely expensive airline industry? Maybe one of the deeper reasons they want to do it in has to do with the social-building aspects of the train. Trains pull diverse people together, and that is one of the things that the Bush regime seems to hate the most.

On my long cross-country train ride, the rides that the Bush folks would like to cut, I was in a big experiment in community-building. I was on a string of cars with many other people I did not know as a few days went by. Over that time, many of us got to know each other, and we got to grow ourselves in ways we could never predict because of that exposure to people who we would never meet under our usual situations. In addition to that, we also achieved our transportation goals, we also got some place, and we saw the country in great detail.

The kind of transportation that the Bush regime wants to destroy is precisely the kind that builds society, that builds community, that brings strangers together. He want to destroy the things that could go furthest to strengthen democracy, which he says he wants with his lip service, but which he is really tearing down. The bus and the train reinforce the democracy of the people; the car and the jet reinforce the oligarchy of corporations.

November 14

We live half a block down from two bars, so when we spend a day at home, one thing we end up hearing a lot is the sound of car doors slamming shut. I do not so much notice the sound of cars driving up or away or by, but I do hear the thump, the pressure wave disturbance, the slam, the thud of a car door closing. I cannot hear it open from inside the house because that does not make a thud, it does not make the sound pressure waves. I hear the thud of the door slamming shut. Either someone is now outside their car or someone is now inside their car.

On a Sunday afternoon of sports and beer, this can be a sound that you hear over and over again. On a Sunday night of music and drinking, you can hear it more and more. The thud that follows thud, the thud on its own or in concert with the shotgun passenger's thud. It is a sharp and sudden sound, if it is right next to our house, which is pretty close to the street. It can be a startling. What was that, what minor explosion is soaking the sidewalk? What sound waves have puckered up the windowpane? What was that bump in the afternoon or in the night?

This is the sound of lazy human transportation. This is the sound of people who have lost their sense of walking or transit or bicycle. This is the sound, the last nail finality of it, of car addiction, of transportation helplessness, of continuous toddlerdom. I hear the sound, I know the car. I hear the sound, I know that somebody is paralyzed.

Beer will follow, or beer has come already. Senses are diminished by alcohol and soon they will be further diminished by road rage. One more is lost from the walking human race. That short walk was just from the bar to the car and it did not save the world, it just barely turned, that is all.

The thuds come like shotgun, the thuds come like the sound of the end of the world. They hit you in the forehead, they hit you in the back of the skull. It could be a baseball bat, it could be any other available form of violence. It is a door slamming shut on metal and upholstery, it is a door shutting thud on mental and desire.

November 15

Looking at all the videotape I shot along my journey last month, I get to relive little randomly captured moments that I had totally forgotten. I get to see again those moving landscapes from the train. An example is the approach to New York City. With so many other journey memories, I had forgotten the details of it.

The Manhattan skyline seemed to be all about just one building. The Empire State Building looked gray in the distance, like the tallest peak in a minor range. It played the role of the sun in a game of railroad eclipse with the church steeples of Jersey City.

I put so much effort into counting and recounting this one long journey. As I stay in one place, as I watch winter descend from the North, I get a new sense of thinking from the senses of place I had in the journey. Odysseus went from war to peace in his journey. In exploring the world, known and unknown, he came to find his own home, and to save it, and to destroy much as well.

That sense of remembered geography helps to take me thru my own mind, helps me to think out my own issues of release and escape, brings me back to the mirror of our collective immigrant adventure. Home is a big land, stolen from other people, and how we made a rollicking geography lesson out of it. How we stretched it and packed it and narrowed it with rubber bands, how we tamed the wild beast we thought of it with roads and bridges and border lines. How we made it civil and then made it so insane, how we have to explore the whole width and breadth of it to find our old lost musical souls, or at least that is the myth from our literature and movies, our own legend heads, our collective, our unconsciousness.

I have to revisit it all. I have to ride those same tracks, synapse after synapse, brain electric bolt after another. I have to keep those memories warm by running those movies and running them again as they decay thru reuse, or else I have lost part of my own continent of self, some of my own living and breathing as a North American, as one of those old west outlaws of the western hemisphere.

November 16

Sloppy Books

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