November 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

November 16

Yesterday morning I rode my bike in a cold rain. My pants soaked up with water and I watched the drops collect and fall on the visor of my bike helmet. Even with the visor they speckled my glasses. My socks soaked up the water, too, and I pedaled so fast that some of the water on my head was water that my back tire was spinning up and over my backpack.

That will probably be my last bike ride in the rain for a while, for by evening the rain had turned into sleet. I left my bike at work and walked tot he bus stop to take the bus home. The street did not seem slippery yet, but I also did not want to take any chances.

This morning the world is covered with white. Our first snow of the winter fell over night. Now a cold wind is blowing the winter in. There is an ice and white concoction on the sidewalks and the streets, and the cold wind is putting all the last touches on the frosting glaze. I can hear the ghostly squeal of car tires spinning in the street outside our house. I am just happy to sit inside for the moment by the flame of our natural gas fireplace and just listen to the threats of that deep-voice wind.

Tornadoes cut a path across the U.S. yesterday. All those Bible belters talk about the last days and the judgment of God, but I think about the judgment of global warming and payback for all those pickup trucks and cars. Who knows what calamity will come next to the trailer parks and golf courses of this land. Who knows what flavor of global wind will blow by to knock all the cardboard houses over, to wash them all to sea.

The glazing I did on our windows a couple months ago seems to have really worked. Our house is holding in heat better, tho the furnace stays quiet much of the time. We are keeping the temperature in the fifties, but a few bursts of furnace now and then is enough for that to stay even tho the temperature outside has been dipping and the wind whips up its sub-freezing gust laughter.

This is the time of year when I shift fully from bike to bus transportation. I think I will buy a monthly transit pass today. I have been paying ride by ride for a while now, since last winter, but sometimes it is hard to keep up all that change and ones.

November 17

Yesterday I was back to jumping on and off buses. The air temperature had dipped down low, so I was not about to stand outside for long. These temperatures will not seem so cold after a couple months of them or worse, but now, right now and fast into the dreaded cold pot, they seem so frigid, so I trusted the bus schedule and did not go to wait five minutes prior, which is recommended, but just a minute or two prior, and ther was the bus, after not so much arctic for face.

And then inside the bus it was warm thru the windows, it was warm thru all the fellow human bodies despite the cold sun, despite the cold night when I rode home. Some jostling, some smoothness, and then it was time for the pull the chord, and then it was time to get the heck up and get the heck off and then really feel that cold. The ice went down to my shoes and my ears, but I also picked up a $1.79 stocking cap, and that makes all the winter head difference.

November 18

It was a bit of an icy day yesterday with more snow on the world and cold in the air. I got to the bus stop in the morning just before the bus turned the corner, and last night after work I did not have long to wait either. I got on and got warm and used my new pass, not once, but twice in that day.

I started up a new book to read while on the ride. I need to have a book for the short ride is good for reading. I could look out at the same streets and houses, but even with a strong sense of wonder they still get old after a few trips. I can fall into a book world for a few minutes instead, or move my eyes over the book words while I repeat an incident of the day, or think out something in the direct book of my life.

My brain is free to roam or stay put. It can go in any direction it wants. It does not have to stay on road, in full or in part, for I only have to think about getting off at my stop and not so much about the journey to get there. I am only the rider. The driver is a paid professional.

November 19

In the U.S. we have a big problem, a big hang up in our thinking about transportation. We think that transportation is all about moving cars. But it is not. Transportation should be about people, and that is where we should start, and if we start with the notion that transportation is about cars we have lost before we have begun. We have already wasted more than 90% of everything if we start with cars.

If we think about transportation as people, and as allowing them movement, pretty soon even thinking about cars as transportation devices becomes absurd and you will drop that thought like the guck it is. With their global warming, with their weight and waste, with their destruction of pedestrian and transit and bicycle environment, it is easy to see that they get more in the way of transportation than make it easy.

Last night Senator John McCain was on the David Letterman show and talking about the seriousness of global warming, and how we need to make changes now, or yesterday. But when he talked about what we need to do, he left out the we and put all the blame on the power companies. But what we as people can do is focus on how we move ourselves, and the great waste in that. For when we move ourselves in cars, more than 90% of the energy goes to moving the car that we are in, and not us. That means that 90% of the global warming gases released from cars is released in an act of sheer waste. Those gases come from the energy expelled to move the vehicle and not the person inside. (If you do not believe me, simply compare your weight with the weight of your motor vehicle). If only the person was moving, and we only had to spend global warming energy on moving that person, less than 10% of the global warming gases now coming from car transportation would be hitting the atmosphere. Because you don that great deadnaught car when you go, and think about that hilarious mistake as an act of transportation, that is where we are getting a majority of our global warming gases. That is the craziness we do that is burning up the planet, that is melting the glaciers and poles.

We need to focus on people and how they move around, and how they can move around if they need to move around, and how they live, and how that could be more efficient. We need to move the conversation to those things and take it away from talking about that car, that more than 90% wasted energy that goes into every single car drive. But we cannot seem to get our minds around that mistake of confusing cars for transportation. We think that transportation is about moving steel from place to place and not about moving bodies and souls.

November 20

Riding the midnight bus, the next to the last bus of the night. Knowing that if we had missed it, we would have had to wait for an hour. The streets downtown are full of buses at just this moment, but soon they will be empty of buses. If we miss the last bus we will still get home, but we will walk very far. But maybe we have even already walked so far just to get to that midnight bus, and walked fast to meet it on time.

The police surround some guy. They have him on the sidewalk and they tell him to just stay there. The buses move almost in slow motion, just so they notice everyone and everything, just so they do not miss a person.

We were out for a late night of movies. We saw the dark room, and now we step outside into darkness. On one side is the sandcastle in the art center and sharing the window doors is the cathedral and its lights. We walked between art museums, between movies, and now we take the next to the last bus home with that lethargic night, with the drunken night, the silent night of midnight people. I sleep in late, just a little, this Sunday morning.

November 21

I took the bicycle trailer out for maybe the last run of the year. I went maybe a couple miles, maybe a mile and a half, to get over half my weight in kitty litter for home. I had to pump up the tires of the trailer for I had not used it for a couple months, at least. I hitched it up and made my Sunday morning way with the trailer empty, and locked up my bike at the store, and went inside with a shopping cart.

I loaded up three boxes of kitty litter, and a few more small things onto the bicycle trailer, and then I set off back to home. I could feel that weight behind me, and I had to pump my pedals hard in the chilly morning. I had to do battle with so many cars to get one small stretch of road for myself and for my cargo. They were all blank metal robots, eating their way around me with their gruff, and I was the only person in that rock em sock em land.

I rode down my street. I could feel the extra weight bunching up behind me every time I took off from a stop sign. I rode up into my backyard of twisted vine garden, brown for the winter, leaves all fallen.

November 22

I was riding my bicycle home yesterday evening. I was just a couple blocks from home, on 13th Avenue, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Two cars passed me going in the other direction and then I heard a dog squeal. I stopped riding my bike and looked behind and saw a bump of yellow fur in the middle of the street.

I rode my bike up to the dog that had been hit. At first it did not move, but I got down low and saw that it was still breathing. The back of its body had most likely been crushed by a car tire. Nothing was moving there. The dog could still move its head and its front paws. I saw no blood on the street.

The dog was in the middle of the street so I set down my bike and gently pushed it toward the edge. I looked up when I heard cars and stood up so they could see me, so they would not hit me.

The driver of the car that had hit the dog had driven up a couple blocks and then pulled over. She waited in a her car for a while and then came back to me and the dog. She was all distraught. "I did not mean it. I do not need this." She said she had a sick daughter in her car. First I wondered if she could take it to a vet, but then I felt a dog tag on the dog's collar and was able to pull it around and see a phone number etched in it.

The dog tag was heart shaped. There was a name on the tag along with the phone number but I could not bring myself to read the dog's name. Another driver pulled up and he had his cell phone handy. He called the number and talked to a man. The driver with the phone said the owner said he would be here in twenty minutes. He and the women who hit the dog had to leave, and I stayed to stroke the dog's fur, to comfort it, to wait for the owner. The dog was rocked by some convulsions, but it was still alive, but it was quiet and breathing.

Another car pulled up and a woman spoke out of her car window. "You need to get it to the vet." I told her that the owner knew and was on his way. The woman stayed in her car seat and made the sign of the cross over her carwindow face.

A little girl came up. She was nearly hysterical in her crying. Then a man came up holding another little girl. They just looked down at the dog that I was stroking. They asked what had happened. They asked about the driver that hit it. I told them that she had had to leave. I stepped back and the man picked up the dog. He and his two crying daughters walked away.

I almost could not leave the spot. The concrete street seemed to gray. I almost could not get back on my bicycle. I saw the spots on the street from the small dog's urine.

I still see that little dog's troubled face, that little yellow Pomeranian mix. That cute little dog with the feces smeared on its rear fur. Its back legs motionless. I see the picture, I smell that strange smell coming from that dog. I see it still very clearly, I saw it all last night, and I wonder how people can drive. I wonder how they can do it.

Why do so many people have to get around in a behemoth that weighs more than ten times what they do, a thing that smashes animals and people and the whole world, a thing that brings death with its very being. Why do they. How can they. I do not understand. I do not understand such a culture of death, such an implement of casual killing.

November 23

At the transportation planning meeting last night, the few citizens who were there were asking for more transit. I am trying to write one thing but I just see that dog that was crushed under the tire of a car yesterday as I sit here next to our pet cats eating their breakfast. I know their names but I could not read that dog's name from its tag. Now I wish I had read that name. Then I could file that tire-crushed dog away in my brain under that piece of text, rather than have that helpless face in my memory.

I am working on the fourth show of my October travels. I am editing together the video and adding sound. Last night I spent time scanning in my sketchbook drawings. The episode I am working on is the middle of my trip. Toronto and Buffalo and Chicago and Denver. I get to stare out the train window all over again. I get to think out my adventure, further process it, turn it into a record that makes sense to me.

A few days ago I bought plane tickets. We will be flying to Portland, OR for the Christmas holidays. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

November 24

It is Thanksgiving and many people are probably giving thanks that the price of gas is not so high now, which means that they can drive somewhere for Thanksgiving. That price has slid down the last few months, and despite more mentions of peak oil and global warming, it does not seem to strike anybody that their personal habits have anything to do with the greater world. The article in the newspaper here about peak oil was all about developing alternative fuels to lug big cars around.

Today will be a car day for me. We are going to Thanksgiving dinner at Kristine's neice's place. She lives in a distant suburb with limited mass transit, and no service at all today, so we will be getting a ride form another of Krristine's neices.

Living somewhere in which the only way to get in and out is one way, is the car, is, I would think, digging yourself into a hole. If there are no choices, if there is only one way, that seems to me to be a huge mistake. If there are no options you are helpless. If there are no choices, you are a pushover.

November 25

Snow is falling, small white flakes. The new snow makes the old city world of hundred year old plus houses look new again. Yesterday I was in a suburb where everything seemed so new, even before the snow fell and covered it. It all looked new because it all was fairly new, and who knows how much longer it will look so new and shiny.

It was not a long car ride from there to the city, so I can see how people want to live there and why. But the car ride is the only way. I suspect there is good transit service for normal working hours for getting people downtown Minneapolis. I suspect that there are a few buses for commuters, but there is no real transit service beyond that. There were no sidewalks where we were, tho the rolling hills made a nice setting for houses, and maybe even a better setting for the rolling woods and creeks that used to be there.

Once again yesterday I broke my carfree pledge, and I have now over ten times this year. at the end of the year diary I will have to make a full accounting. Even tho I have only taken a few rides in cars on a few days this year, I have ridden in cars more than the majority of the world's citizens have.

November 26

We took the express bus to St. Paul yesterday to visit the Science Museum. In one of the displays I read that coal mostly comes from decayed plant matter, while oil is mostly formed from decayed and dead animal matter.

In Carbusters magazine, I read, on the trip back to Minneapolis, that a scientist in Germany synthesized oil out of the bodies of dead cats. If he could make oil out of cats why even stop there, why not even make oil out of people.

This is the real Soylent Green, the real solution to overpopulation and to peak oil. If people drive cars with oil made by geological pressure and time from dead fish and lizards, then, if they really need to drive, someday they will be making oil out of dead human bodies. The greed for cars and driving is so strong that this is not inconceivable. It may be necessary to make these great sprawl leaps with people for fuel if we want to keep the suburbs possible.

Cars already kill enough animals already. The irony is that they even move by burning animals.

November 27

A month ago I came to the end of my long train journey. At this time last month I was in Winnipeg. Now I am home in Minneapolis and there is snow on the ground and the journey seems so far away. It was a trip in the shape of an infinity sign, but was it any kind of infinity. I saw the shapes and sizes of the North American landscape, at least some of it, but was there any way that this could reveal anything about myself to me, about the all inside me.

The journey thru space has long been a metaphor for the journey thru life. Yesterday my whole journey was only one of in and out of the rooms of our house. I never even left my house. Our house is our head, and I stayed in my brain all day on Saturday. Our life journey has to take us out of our head now and then, which is why we feel the need to explore geography.

Our continent is our whole big national head. That is what defines us in terms of culture and lifestyle and ideology. Exploring a nation is like exploring all the tattoos painted onto the inside of your skull by time and advertising and the atmosphere of images and sounds around you. I have gotten several tattoos in my dreams, tattoos in the shape of musical instruments mostly on my arms, tho I have never had a tattoo printed on my actual waking life body.

November 28

I took out the recycling last night for pickup this morning. Many people collect their papers and glass and plastic and aluminum and set it out for pickup rather than just throwing it all in the trash. People did not so much do this twenty-five years ago, but now they do it as part of their routine.

When many people recycle, they think about how they do it to be a littler easier on the planet. Many folks might actually be thinking that when they do it. But will they do the same with cars. Will they give up their car or use it less for the same reason, to be easier on the planet. Or will they hold on to it kicking and screaming because they are caught up in a horrible car addition.

Despite the news of global warming and of peak oil, people do not change their ways. As far as I know, there has been no mass movement away from the automobile, and most people would not even connect their individual actions to the broader world situation. Recycling, after all, is something you spend a few minutes doing every week or so. Giving up a car would mean some serious life changes.

November 29

After a day of rain yesterday, the winds shifted cold last night and the world is white this morning. We have had snow and it melted and now it is snow again. It makes me feel like I want to be less industrious, like I do not want to dress up with pounds of clothing and head out into the ice cream covered ice, and scuff a car upon it (not that I ever do that). That is the kind of craziness we lead. Despite the ice and snow, so many others will go to their zombie lives and try to drive their tires on that mixture even if it means sliding around, even if it is the definition of dangerous and disaster.

Sometimes, at times like these, I wonder about the wisdom of even going outdoors for a morning. The wind is whipping and the chimes turn it to music, the white is there, the slipperiness is beneath the reflection, and who wants to deal with that in their life and their shoes. It sounds like a good reason to just stay under heavy sheets and comforter and just sleep the dark morning, but the cats have woken me up with their hungry bellies and so I have to write this thing about my wishes of reality and the white morning that I have woken to.

November 30

Why am I trying

To put a shape and size

To label with a reason

This little heart

Of action

If I have to say it

Am I not jailing it

Am I not pinning it

Insect in a box

And it will not fly, butterfly

And it will not turn to soul

To action, to me

These rounds and sounds

And up and down

Are making my misty notions

Into motions

Into static things

Into something they are not

Into the same road gestures

Into the same ignition switches

When they could be all

My own

When they could be something

So special

I am not a fire

I am not a lightbulb

I have chemicals inside me

That flash and burn

And shiver at the morning

When I try to say it

So and so

When I try to frame it

As a picture

I lose my journey

My moment by moment

I put it into concrete

When it should stay in its mush

If it wants to have its power, its mystery, its truth

I take away my memory

When I code it into sayings

I reject my individual experience

When I reduce it down to anecdotes

When I tell my story

I am making it too easy

It should really be every moment

That staring time, that emptiness

December 1

Sloppy Books

Contact: E-mail me