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September 1

The real apocalypse is how we live our lives. The real end of the world comes daily from so many cars.

The price of gas has hit $3 after a hurricane has left many off-shore oil wells toppled and missing and coastal refineries destroyed. Hot gulf waters warmed by global warming intensified that hurricane. You could call that hurricane by is real name, Global Warming. Two major oil pipelines were damaged by the winds and storm, and entire cities are uninhabitable. The price of gas has gone way up but will it cause people to change their ways? Their global warming is intensifying the storm, but will that stop them driving? Their driving ways keep the war going in Iraq, and that takes away the National Guard that should be helping the victims on the gulf coast, but will that change their ways? The answer seems to be about as no as can be.

This is the year to stop the wheeled nonsense. This is the year to abandon the car albatross. When people tell me that I might be able to live without a car but they certainly cannot, all I can think is that you have to change your lifestyle if you want to save the world. Saving the world is tough business, and might mean some personal adjustments.

It will not come from government caveat. It will not come from over-arching policies. The change must come from each and every person, from all the arm-chair environmentalists who talk the talk but when foot comes to pavement, they take their car instead. They would rather up the global warming ante than change their lifestyle. They say and say again that they cannot do without their car, until they believe it, until their body tells them that this is the only addiction way. Millions and millions of car commercials have pummeled that car propaganda into their brains until they cannot escape it, tho it is the thing that will change the world the most.

I have blown my aim, which was to stay out of cars this year. I have taken about a dozen rides this year, and the year is three-quarters over. I need to hold the line from now on. My goal was to avoid cars but their pull is hard, but sometimes they seem to be the only option. I have to make each day a day that does not require that option. Almost every day, I keep my global warming legs down. I keep them clear on most days. It is not that difficult.

September 2

Where do we start? Where do we begin to clean up this mess? How do we stop the water that has inundated New Orleans, that has turned the gulf coast into a disaster movie? How do we stop the global warming that is now visibly and phenomenally destroying us? How do we stop this war that is pulling us apart as a people?

Last night, I heard someone on Democracy Now say that it was not a matter of individual action, but instead a matter of working to change government policy. He said that it is not worth making individual changes, because for the real changes we must change the fossil fuel priorities of our government. But I say that we will not be able to sway government to change its policies until a significant number of Americans have changed their individual policies.

How effective it would be if millions of Americans gave up their cars. Would that not shake up the government and the oil companies that they represent? Would that not have an affect on our global world assault on nature? Think about how effective that would be to slow down the carbon emissions that cause global warming.

A single small car puts about 60 tons of CO2 gas into the atmosphere every year of its life. If ten people stop driving, that is 600 tons less gas. If one hundred people stop driving, it is 6,000 tons less. If a million stop driving, it is 60,000,000 tons less CO2 released to the atmosphere every year.

With the recalcitrant, pig-headed evil government that we all know that we have, that government by and for the oil companies and coal companies, for we the fossil fuel exploitation heart of darkness, that government bent on destroying the world thru war and storm and global warming, the only thing that can start to change things is individual action.

Again, yesterday, I rode the bus to and from the state fair. Many other people adjusted their usual car from here to there habit to get to the fair and be all together. People who never ever ride the bus rode the bus to the fair and they were not all killed by the experience. They could see that transit works. They could see that sometimes that car is not the only answer.

The price of gas is up to $3 a gallon and maybe now people are beginning to grumble enough to change some of their destructive habits. Maybe some others will ditch their cars and join the world carfree majority, the 92% of world citizens who are not taking down the whole globe with their selfish driving and global warming, the majority that know how to use their own locomotion, or can travel all together more efficiently.

September 3

I made a bike train bike ride to Uptown yesterday to see a film. Before the film started, I walked around the area, on the sidewalks, with many other pedestrians. I approached a curb cut for a small alley. I was walking along the sidewalk and about to walk into the curb cut portion of the sidewalk when a huge truck vehicle pulls right onto the sidewalk, almost into me and a pedestrian approaching the curb cut on the other side.

I am a foot or so away from the vehicle when it pulls nearly into me to take up the whole sidewalk, its bulk and weight stopping us in our tracks. As pedestrians, we should have had the right of way, but the big truck vehicle had the right of weight and murder.

Not only did he almost run right into us, but the driver, a middle age mad guy, was gesturing and talking, like he was trying to talk loudly and harshly to teach me something. I could not hear a word he said because his windows were all rolled up, but he seemed angry about something in his silent moving mouth and gestures. I do not know if he was swearing at me for trying to walk in the sidewalk or what, but he was saying and gesturing something as his big truck completely blocked the sidewalk. I did not want to listen to his gestures, so I and the other pedestrian ended up walking around the back of his truck, just barely able to make the squeeze between his tall steel sides and the alley brick building.

What hit my mind at that moment was that I wanted to tell him that his global warming was killing people in Louisiana. I wanted to shake some big car nonsense out of his big truck steel head. But I just walked on my way and he eventually must have cleared the sidewalk when he found a chance to join the thick traffic on Lake Street.

All the car traffic thru that intersection, thru that neighborhood, was frightening. The big steel boxes are threatening and smash down the quality of life. They put us, tender bony fleshy people, continually at risk with their big steel oil explosion need to butt forward in line, to smash the world and street down, to take complete metal control over the place. They can take a perfect late summer blue sky day and fill it full of grinding asphalt curses, smoky global warming farts, and the threat of smashing death. What a great place this would be without them. What a nice day of people we would have if they all ran out, if all the cars just vanished.

September 4

Yesterday was another day at the state fair with a bus ride to and from. At the fair, people leave their cars behind and walk down the streets between the attractions and the fried food. As we were leaving the fair grounds, I was telling my friend and co-worker H about how I thought it would be nice if there would be this kind of thing here all year round, and he said that Minnesotans have it in them. Altho they always complain that they need their cars, that they cannot get around without their cars, they have it inside them to do without them and live in a place with street culture, and take the bus to get there. They can live in a European city even if it is only for barely two weeks a year, even if it is only temporary. They can do it once a year and keep on coming back.

It is raining hard this morning. It seems like it has been raining for much of the night. The sky is cracking with bolt after bolt of lightning. The sky is rumbling. The sky is groaning. As we were walking away from the Technology Building at the fair last night, I could see that storm approaching, the dark clouds stabbed with glow after glow of lightning. The threat of the storm has moved over us and stalled.

The rain is pounding down on our rooftop and gutters. It is tapping down on the metal awnings over our windows. It has been falling enough that there must be flash flood warnings somewhere. We live on ground near the Mississippi River but up high enough that we should not have to worry. I am thinking about New Orleans, on the other side of the same river, with houses up to their second floor in polluted water, in the polluted oily gulf water, into the disaster that a hurricane made, a hurricane egged on by global warming.

Mostly I am thinking about how tenuous our hold is on this planet. The rain falls and falls, the sky just does not give no for an answer. We do not know what we are getting ourselves into with our sky-bating, with our global warming lifestyle, this back and forth and spewing the air with gases. We are messing with something far bigger than our structural analysis, something that we will only be able to talk to with disaster relief. We might think we are very special, but we will lose if we keep on taking this attitude. We might be a bully, but we are not quite as tough a bully as we would like to think we are sometimes. We have got the sky to answer to. It is the sky that we are bullying with, and maybe you do not want to bully the sky.

September 5

It is Labor Day and a good day to bring up the old Ivan Ilich thing about how fast you really go in a car if you count up all the hours you spend paying for that car transportation.

Cars are expensive. To drive in a car, you need to work. You need to pay for the car itself, for the gas, which used to be cheap, but now that is changing. You have to pay for car check-ups and car repairs as if your car were one of your children. Some people spend more time money attention on their cars than they do on their children. If you add it all up, it costs something like $7,000 a year to keep and maintain and use a car.

If you add the hours that you work to pay for that car driving to the hours you spend in that car going places, and divide that number by the number of miles that you drive in that car, you end up with a true economic speed for your car. You divide the number of miles you go by the miles you spend in your car and working to pay for your car, and you get a true speed of car driving of about 2 miles an hour.

Two miles an hour is about walking speed. The true speed of car transportation is the speed of feet. That is pretty fast. You might as well give up on the car and just walk instead.

Last night we went all the way to downtown St. Paul for an Eritrean wedding reception. The bride and grooms were friends, and we had a chance to share some of their culture, including a grand wedding entry march with tree branches and swords and clapping and a one step dance march.

We took the express bus between the downtowns to get there and back. Going to downtown St. Paul can seem like a long trip, and it really is. I only end up going there a few times a year. it is like going to another city, which is really what the trip is. I do not think I have been to St. Paul since I went to the transit funding rallies earlier this year. But we made pretty good time last night, and our bus ride home was probably almost as fast as if we had taken a car.

We had to leave the reception earlier than many others so we would not have to wait too long in downtown Minneapolis for the transfer to our local bus. We took the 10:05 express bus out of downtown St. Paul and in downtown Minneapolis immediately caught the 10:30 bus to our neighborhood. We made the trip from downtown St. Paul to our home in about 45 minutes. If you factor in parking lot times, that was probably about how long it would have taken if we had driven a car instead.

Many people here say they will not give up on their car because the transit system here is not that great. But when you make a good connection, the transit system here can work beautifully. Our trip home last night was a good example of that, plus we both got a chance to get some reading done.

September 6

A day in the garden, we spent the day in our garden, at home. We did more canning, making grape jelly from the grapes in the backyard and more pickles from the cucumbers in our garden. I thought I picked so many of the small grapes on our vines but then I looked again at the vines and there were still so many more to ripen in the next few weekends for the birds and the squirrels and for us. I picked the ripe grapes off the clusters and then squeezed the juice away from the skins and the seeds. The color was so dark purple. My hands were stained until I had washed them a few times. We added sugar and stirred on the stove and filled four pint jars with jelly. After we had filled the jars there was a little of the sweetened grape juice left and we poured in into wine glasses and drank the sweet syrup. In addition to that distinctive grape jelly flavor, it had a nice extra tang from the wildness of our wild grapes.

We had friends over for a barbeque dinner. The friends walked around the corner from their house to our house. They live one block away from us. Our neighbor S stayed to help with the canning. We filled five and a half quart jars of pickles with our garden cucumbers, stuffing the jars.

There are many grapes left on the vine, for winemaking and maybe even making more jelly. Home canning is hot and hard work. We were careful about the timing of everything, and about the temperature, and about sterilization. We needed to make sure that everything was clean and hot enough to seal, that it was sanitary, and the steam and heat filled up our kitchen. When we had finished, it was dark night outside but we had to sit out on our patio to feel the cool wind of another storm moving in.

Earlier in the day, I stood and sat out in the garden animating some of the post-it note animations I had drawn all spring and summer. I made shapes and pictures move and change. I pressed each note in a rising pile on an old storm window propped up on one of our backyard chairs. Thru the window was our garden. In the foreground was an animation. I will call it "Garden Richter 5," after Hans Richter, the dadaist and abstract filmmaker.

The eye can see clearly from one edge of our house to the other. The eye can easily see from one edge of our garden to the other. These are small spaces, but they hold a world of adventure. There are limitless variations between our walls and fences. There are thousands of kinds of life and situations between the ends of our city lot universe. I treasure those days that we keep to our garden. I treasure those days when I am rooted to my home.

September 7

I am counting down. Three weeks to go. Less than three weeks to go until I make my traveling odyssey of 2005.

In three weeks I will be riding the rails. I have a North America rail pass, and I will be using it to make a great bowtie tour around the U.S. and into Canada. I will be traveling for a whole month, and a little more. I will be making many short sampler stops at various cities along the way. I will be visiting and sometimes staying with friends and family along the route, and also staying at hostels at places where I do not have close friends. I plan to ride as much public transit in those different cities as I can, and to shoot some video for my On Transit public access show, to investigate the transit systems in these many and various places.

The journey will start with a long stretch train ride from Minneapolis to Philadelphia. I will be in Philadelphia for a few days for a conference. Then I will go up to New York for two nights, visiting a friend there and having a quick Manhattan day. Then up to Montreal, which I have never seen, for three nights, and that will be a great adventure. Then on to a night in Toronto, and a few hours in Buffalo, and then to Chicago, to visit my sister and her family for a couple days.

Then I will go out west on the long ride out to Denver. I will spend a couple days in Denver and Boulder before hopping the train again for the long ride out to San Francisco. I will be in San Francisco for barely more than a day before I head out again on the train up the coast to Portland, where I will spend a few days with my family there. Then a short visit to Seattle to say hi to my friend R, and then up to Vancouver for another day, and then across the Canadian Rockies all the way to Winnipeg, which will end my travels by train. After a day to check out Winnipeg and its transit system, I will take the bus from there back to Minneapolis.

I am counting down to the trip. I can barely hold back my suspense these last three weeks. I will be riding the train and seeing new sights. It will be the complete opposite of most of my life, which usually revolves around my home and my workplace, and the short commute from one to the other. I hardly ever break free of the east side of Minneapolis, let alone the Minneapolis city limits. I will be away from home for a month and a little more, and will get way behind on this daily journal, for I will be traveling light, with just a small backpack, and will not carry a computer.

When I get back home, on the day before Halloween, then I will have to catch up typing, for I hope to be writing and drawing the whole trip thru.

September 8

There is rain again this morning, as there has been for the past three mornings. The rain is good for plants and the land, and it seeps into the soil to refresh it like a cool drink. But because of the rain, I have not had a chance to sit out in my teahouse the last three mornings, and that is an important part of my day in the months of summer and spring and early fall.

The teahouse structure was built just over two years ago, during Labor Day weekend 03. I set up four 4X4 posts and made a frame of four 2X4s as the crown. Four more 2X4s made the illusion of walls and doorways and a brace for a table ledge, and one more crossbeam on the roof. In the middle of the teahouse grows a grapevine that has since grown up to make another virtual interior wall, and a roof for the teahouse with all its vines and leaves.

I like to have my breakfast in the teahouse. I bring the newspaper and my tea and granola on a tray and I sit out there and spread the paper out on the desk ledge. I light some candles and a stick of incense and enjoy some time in the thick of my garden.

There are two chairs in the corner of the teahouse, and a little table, back where the shade is thickest. When I am done with the paper and my breakfast I retreat back to one of these inner chairs to read whatever the latest book is that I am reading. I have the shade around me, and thru the ledge's picture window the entire view of my small backyard garden. The birds come and go in the vine roof and the garden scenes, and squirrels make their way, sometimes within inches of me before they note my presence and change their route.

The neighborhood cats come to visit me on their way across the yard. Sometimes a neighborhood cat will sit down at my feet for a while and also view the garden from the shade of the teahouse vine roof. I can think in there, I can meditate, I can grow new ideas, or I can just relax. These last couple days, when the rain has chased me from the teahouse, I have felt a little more tired, a little less centered, and certainly not quite as complete.

Here's to tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow morning will once again be a teahouse morning.

September 9

The seasons are changing. The nights are getting cooler. We have days of rain and then days of sun. The leaves on the grapevines are growing a white mold. Some are taking on yellow spots. Soon they will be falling.

The sun waits longer before it decides to show its morning face. It gives up the job a little earlier every day. In between, I ride my bike to work or to someplace else, but as it gets cooler, I think more about leaving the bike in the shed and riding the bus to work instead.

People from a flooded city are scattered everywhere. Not many want to come to Minnesota, for that is getting too far from their old home sweet home. Hurricane season is not yet at its peak, and even the poorest countries in the world are offering aid to the stumbling awkward giant, which can be very arrogant, but cannot get its act together this time.

The price of gasoline has gone way up this year, but people still want to blow it out their tailpipe as if it were a forever thing. They continue to blow it up for trips that are completely pointless, completely back and forth. The last time I bought any gasoline, it cost less than a dollar a gallon. That was for a lawn mower. Now I have a lawn mower that I push and the blades turn. It needs no gasoline, but still it cuts the grass.

There is another way, but so few people want to even know it. There is a safer, saner way, but most people keep on acting so dangerous. There is a way to make the streets and sidewalks safe but people would rather race the huge beasts that keep running over their children. There are ways to do it that do not change the global climate, but people still insist on taking their monster automobiles and brewing up the atmosphere for more mighty mischief.

I have a day and it is today. I have an explanation for anything, I guess. I can be as full of shit as anybody, but I think I just might have a point this time.

September 10

A bicycle has a frame and on that frame you will find some wheels. A bicycle has a frame and on that frame you will find a seat. A bicycle has a seat and on that seat you will find a rider. A bicycle has some pedals and you will find feet on those pedals pushing them around in a circle to turn that chain to turn that back wheel to turn that front wheel to cross some distance.

A bicycle has a frame and on that frame you will find some brakes. A bicycle has a frame and on that frame you will find some handlebars. A bicycle has handlebars and on those handlebars you will find some gear shifters. A bicycle has gear shifters and on those gear shifters you will find gear shifter cables. A bicycle has all kinds of things revolving around that frame, and some are secured tightly to that frame and other parts swing away from the bike and into the outer universe.

A bicycle has a frame and when you want to lock your bike up, you thread a lock thru the frame. A street has a streetpole and when you want to lock your bike up, you lock the frame of your bike to the streetpole. When you are at a comic book opening party, and there are lots of people spilling out of the building and onto the street, more than one bicycle may be locked onto the streetpole. I locked my bike on the pole first thing first and then somebody else parked their old fashioned Schwinn on the streetpole second thing second. When she locked her bike there, she strung her lock thru one of my gear shifter cables. I only noticed this when I had totally unlocked my bike from my lock but I still was not going anywhere.

It was hot last night, but there was a nice breeze. The music at the event was a white jumpsuit guy with a giant siren strapped to his back on a frame. At one point he even turn in a circle like a police siren going round. I looked a little at the art inside the building, but mostly I stood outside on the sidewalk talking or listening to people I knew. The gallery was very crowded.

When I realized I was going nowhere until somebody else unlocked their bike from mine, I decided to take a closer look at the art until I heard the announcement about bike locked to bike and then the other bike locker made her appearance and went out to unlock her bike from my shifter cable.

She said she was kind of drunk when she locked up her bike, and was very apologetic. I could have stayed even longer at the gallery and really looked at the comics and the art, but now that my bike was free, I figured I would go. I rode my short bicycle ride home, my body connected to my seat connected to my frame connected to my wheels which rolled a thin line on the street.

September 11

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