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September 11

Four years ago on this date, as the images of the planes and the towers and the falling and dead, I kept hearing people say that Americans would change, America would change, this nation would never be the same again because of the events early that day. My response was that I hoped America would change but I did not think so. What I did not realize at the time, but now I see from those four years' distance, was that what I meant when I said that American would change was completely different from what those others were meaning when they said we would change.

When I thought of change on September 11, 2001, I thought of a change away from a fossil fuel lifestyle. It was that, that oil addiction, that was the root cause, it seemed to me so immediately, it was that addiction of ours and all its far-ranging effects that drove those men from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to drive loaded passenger jets into loaded office buildings in suicidal rage. If we were going to avoid such disasters in the future, we would have to change our fossil fuel ways, and tho I hoped that change would come, I was skeptical that it would happen.

The change that everyone else seemed to mean, and the change that has indeed perhaps happened, was that Americans or America would grow in brashness and swagger, would act out against those it considered threats and enemies, would bully the rest of the world to stand its ground. The change the others meant was that Americans would demand that the rest of the world change to fit the world demanded by the American dream of market competitive capitalism under American domination. This was a change that would not mean changing that fossil fuel lifestyle. This was a change that would mean embracing it all the more strongly, and instead of cutting back meant investing in larger and larger assault vehicles to keep the world out of the wind in the American hair. We would grip onto that fossil fuel lifestyle even more firmly, would curl our dying fingers around the vehicle of our own death.

Last night I went to a fundraiser to help offset medical expenses for a neighborhood woman who had gotten in a car accident and broken her neck. I rode my video equipment on my bicycle to the venue to record some highlights of the night and messages by her friends to her on tape for her hospital bed.

Accidents. Crashes. That is what cars do. They main people, they main nations. They paralyze individuals from the neck down and paralyze millions from the true costs of their commuting and joyriding. Our whole country has gotten into an automobile accident, our whole nation has been paralyzed from the neck up into thinking about the long term effects of our practices. Our caraholic lifestyle is killing the planet and killing us.

But the oil is running out, like the time is running out on the madness. It will have to stop some time, and soon. If falling towers will not change us, the prospect of the last few drops of oil will.

September 12

I do not know what to say today. I have no imaginary story to give this morning some propulsion. I do not want to be angry. I just want to sit outside and be a part of nature. It is Monday and that means a commute to work, that back and forth treadmill trip that everybody, or many people take. I will take it on my bicycle, just like I took a couple back and forth trips yesterday, one to buy groceries, and another to see a movie. I had to bike safely to avoid a close collision with a car. It would have been deadly for me, that is why. Everything about cars is deadly.

I spent some time picking grapes off of the backyard vines, picking clusters off the vine and then the grapes, small and one at a time, off of the clusters. I listened to a French training tape as I picked them off, my hands red and red. I squeezed out the juice and today I will add the yeast to make it make itself into wine. It will not be the best wine ever. Our wild backyard grapes have a bit of a wild odor taste to them. But I hope it will be drinkable wine, that it will do something when accompanying dinner, will clear the palate with its acid or not pollute it so much.

All the plants or many of them, are in decline. Not the tomatoes and the peppers, which are at the height of production and will most likely be frightened and accosted and troubled and taken by the first frosts. By then I will most likely be on my long train trip and will not see the leaves curl up. The other plants, or many of them, are jumping that gun, are getting brown spots on their leaves, are curling their leaves, are looking cooked, slightly or mostly. When the wind comes up, some trees even drop a few leaves, just so that we know that it is coming, just so we realize the fall is on its way.

I do not have anything to say this morning that I have not said already. Time and the seasons and the tragedy and the peace. The war and the ignorance and the life that goes on taking. I just have to say some words as the flowers get spindly, as they brown and crisp and fall. As the grapes grow round and sweet and some of them shrivel, as I press the juice out, my hands completely red with their blood.

September 13

With rain falling yesterday morning, I left my bicycle in the shed and took the bus instead. Rain was forecast, off and on, for much of the day, and when I walked out of my work cave at the end of the day, at 10 pm, the streets and sidewalks were glistening and there was a hint of drops in the living air.

I walked two blocks to my bus stop and waited there. I took on my waiting routine. I could have taken out the book in my backpack and read from it, but I did not even think to do that. I just stood there at the corner with the bus bench to my side. I was hoping that the bus bunch would stop a car if it came unglued from the lanes and veered toward me and the sidewalk, that the bench could save me from collision.

I did my waiting routine at the corner of Central and University Avenues. I looked backward at the clock of Union Bank, the time and temperature display in lights, and took in the whole cycle of the current time and the temperature of the air, both in Fahrenheit and Celsius. I turned around to look in the direction of the bridge, in the direction of downtown, where the bus would be coming from, to watch for its pattern of lights. Instead I saw only the usual headlights of usual cars and trucks slowly rounding that bend and growing bigger to get to my corner.

I turned quickly to look at the dark sky suddenly flash up with lighting, flashing an entire cloud, flashing the entire town as if somebody or some god could have been taking my picture. I swung my closed umbrella around a little, changing my hand rest back and forth on the curve of its handle. I worked it a little like Charlie Chaplin might work his magic cane, and I turned back quickly at the shadowy man waiting behind me inside the bus shelter. I made a quick Chaplin body gesture in case he was watching, and then turned back to face the wet street, famous with my threat.

I glanced back at the clock, noting that the temperature had not changed, either F or C, and that the time was... yes, the bus was running late. I looked kitty corner at the closed up grocery store and strip shopping mall that was now set for demolition. I figured that over the winter and spring, as I waited for the bus ride home from work, I would day by day watch the slow time lapse of the new condo building go up there, floor by floor, month by month. I glanced back at the bridge to see a bus coming, not my bus, but mine would certainly be behind it.

This was all like a kind of practice for the months coming up, when the weather will change and I will feel too cold on a daily basis to ride my bike, when I will feel the streets too snowy for my bike. Then I will be doing my waiting routine like this on a daily basis. That is coming up in a matter of weeks as the world goes round. It will certainly get old, this waiting routine, if repeated daily, but now it was a refreshing new drink, something old tasted once again, dark and wet and serious.

September 14

I read about a study by a toy company. I think the company was Hasbro. They did a study of the play habits of European children and found that Dutch children play outside at a rate twice that of the average of the rest of Europe. And when they asked the Dutch children where outside they played, the place outside they were most likely to play was the street. The children of the other European countries were much less likely to play in the street.

Dutch children play outside more often than other European children because they can play outside, and they can play outside because they can play in the street. They can play in the street because the streets are safe for playing.

The Dutch have a tradition of making their streets into something called a "living yard," where cars are not the boss, but a guest. Streets are filled with obstacles that keep the car from racing thru. The street holds continuity with the front yard, is part of the front yards of the houses on each side, and not a strip of speedway down the middle of the front yards. A car can drive down that living yard street, but it has to be slow and careful to make it by. There might even be a playground in the middle of the street that a car has to be very careful to maneuver around. Because the cars are going slow and watching out, Dutch children can play out in the street, and thus they are more likely to play outside.

The street is a great place for children to play, and before the cars took over streets, the streets were where kids all over the world were most likely to play. Children playing in the street are easily observable from the windows of the houses around the street. Because they are playing in their street, the adults who can observe them are their parents or their neighbors, people who know them and can call them on it when they act inappropriately. The street, being enclosed by the fronts of the houses on either side, can be an outdoor living room, a safe and limited place. The street is close to the houses of the children, unlike a playground that may be blocks away. It is easy to get to the street, and it is easy to go back home if they need something, or if the weather changes.

Last night, when I was riding my bicycle home in the dark, I felt the danger of the street here in my city and in the U.S., where the cars are boss and use all their power. Cars were going fast with their headlight eyes and blinded me as they went by. The cars seemed so bold and threatening, big bears, so in charge, so dominant, so unsafe for bicycle me in the middle of the street with my small bicycle lights that could barely stab out at the darkness. If only we could free the street from these dangerous cars, if only we could run out of them, get rid of them, run them out of town, or tame them.

September 15

A couple days ago I was listening to the local community radio station. They play these short new bursts from the BBC, and there was a report from a British government official who announced that the reason for the rise in the price of oil is due to demand outstripping supply. He was asking for the oil producers to increase their supply to bring down the price, for the high price of oil was causing hardships.

That was a good piece of ostrich head announcing. Even the Bush administration folks are not so in the dark that they would share such toddler theory. Of course demand is outstripping supply. That is why the price is high. But if oil nations were to increase their supply, it would cost them money to build new facilities, and that money would be money poorly spend, for the real extra reason that the prices are high is that the world supply of oil is beginning to diminish. Any investment in facilities to increase supply would be a short-term investment and would probably never even pay for itself. Such investment would only ensure that we would get to the last drops sooner and even less prepared than we would otherwise. You may be able to make such things fit in with the hallucination that is economic theory, but that is not how it goes in the world of nonrenewable resources, where you just run out of a thing sooner if you step up production.

It is difficult to believe that such ignorance walks the halls of international state, but it does. That kind denial of oil reality exists everywhere. It exists in my town and it exists in most people I know. I still see all those cars going everywhere despite the reports that we are running out of oil, despite the reports that global warming is having an impact, is making storms stronger, sending the hurricane namers all the way across the alphabet, scattering the citizens of New Orleans into their own modern Diaspora.

There is a simple solution, and it is for folks to just give up driving cars. There are bicycles, there are buses and even better, rail transit, and there are pairs of legs to get you around. My bicycle took me on my simple ride to work yesterday and back to home again last night. I had to deal with the cars on the streets. They barely let me thru. I had to figure out my quick ways around their noise and their brutality, and their oil-burning monstrosity. But I also know that I will not have to deal with that for much longer. The problem is that all those oil-addicted folks are not getting ready, are not reading the writing on the wall. They are still acting like happy gamblers inside the Titanic who will not look out the window despite the reports, that are thinking that the leaning is just their own sense of balance slightly off, and they can easily ignore it, and have a crazy last dance.

September 16

Red sun rising in the morning, rising over the housetops, breathing thru the exhaust particles. Red sun taking on the housetops and the sky, lighting up the streets, in the valleys and the trees on their legs. Red sun in the morning glowing the sky from side to side, leaking a big light box on top of my head so I can trace my fancy with my many thin ink thoughts. Red sun in the morning making us see a sheet of paper, bleeding the words and ways with shadows, all these things in the mountain crag of red sun.

Red sun in the morning – does it know something we do not see, has fire for eyes so many million miles, and a loud knowing smile if there were the air to hear it. Red sun stretching its spectrum all the way from summer to fall, it does not need a car to drive its arc up, it just stays there and lets all the planets spin its head. And if you know how to say relativity, you know the secrets of its travels.

Red sun in the morning rising high and makes the sky color with its sunness. Orange over the roofs and invisible mountains, magenta balancing clouds and telephone poles. Red sun making that chimney glow, pulling the parallel sides together with its strength of light, catching the waiting eye just a little off guard and drawing the edges on flower stems.

Red sun in the rising morning makes its way thru windows and curtains and blinds, makes its presence known first thru color and then thru brilliance – better save your eyes for more of its tangerine. Red sun in the morning, taking its time for all that light and it never needs an ignition switch.

Red sun up there but trying higher versus the cars that sound on the horizon, having to put it all in perspective from the crowded freeway to more crowded streets. Red sun in the morning been glowing long before there was so much congestion and still will be glowing when all the highways are empty and when they will be cracking and when the red sun can burn its own shadows and not have to seep them thru so much car fume. Red sun just said so, with all its shadow and its color, just by pecking me in the nose and face, just now, around that bend and into my headroom. Red sun just did it, turned the paper into chicken flesh, turned me on to some more stories that stay as much in place as it does.

September 17

I have been reading Upton Sinclair's book, "The Flivver King," about the rise of Henry Ford. The book is also about the impact of his manufacturing process on the workers of his company. Altho he paid his workers a high wage for the time, he subjected them to repetitive demeaning work that gave them a good enough income so they could buy the cars they made, but that also burned down their bodies and their souls.

Mass car manufacturing gave birth to the assembly line, where each worker repeated the same gesture, where each worker turned himself into a cog to roll just a bit into another cog until, cog after cog, an entire car was built in record time. The car and the assembly line go hand in hand, one made the other possible.

As Ford's invention and its manufacturing process changed the country, he saw things like music and souls change as well, and Ford bashed back at the changes. He was changing the world with cars but the cars were changing the world of morality, and Ford hated the changes that were coming as flowers out of the changes he was making with steel. Thru spies and income incentives, he tried to force his workers back into traditional family structures and recreations just as his invention was ripping apart all those conventions. He wanted to bring back a life of church and family social functions just as his manufacturing process was turning life into speed and servility and crime.

As the success of the Model T spread, he built bigger and deadlier factories to build a car from ore to honk. As his factories grew, his workers were subjected to even more dehumanizing conditions. He wanted to bring 19th Century morality back to a life of repetitive steamy boiling anger labor. He wanted to stop thru espionage the huge ball that his money-making was rolling.

His factories, his cars themselves, did what they did to the air of his towns. His factories and the repetition of his cars and how they changed the mind of a nation. He wanted his new invention in the minds that saw things in the horse days of his childhood. But the car and its air changed things, it grew people up into machines. It was the beginning of the post-human. The only way to fight that is with force and with espionage, so violence became a part of the family way, big thick automatic weapon violence became the talk of the country, and still is.

Cars are the war of the world, they drive their users to a war mentality, they drive their users into machine ways and avenues. They take the human out of work and life. Their morality is death and destruction. Maybe Henry Ford finally realized that. Maybe we are finally getting it thru our country skull.

September 18

I (dream) had so many things to put away before I could get on my bicycle to get home. And I did not have my bicycle trailer with me, tho I did have my panniers, which looked like they might expand the more I fill them.

There were so many things spread out next to my bike. There were so many things I had to deal with so I could load up and go. There were bags of uneaten apples. There were dirty dishes. There were full plates of appetizers. As the students, wild and on their way to their first classes, walked by, some asked about the apples. I let them take a few bags, but I also held on to a few bags for myself. I took one of the plates of appetizers and passed it around to the students sitting nearby on the grass. They filled their hands and mouths with the zucchini and cheese and crackers. I found another plate of appetizers and handed out all I could, all that the students would take. There were also some toaster pastries open on a plate. I hoarded those.

I threw away some of the left-over food, just some rice and some of the stains and I started loading up my bicycle saddle bags. There were still more things, both to load and to clean. As I loaded, more things to carry seemed to appear out of the mists of the grassy college campus. Somebody yelled, and then another yell roared out, and I guess that was my sign to get going.

Last night we had organic apples and a plate of cheese and bread and a cooler of drinks and I took out a few bottles of my home-made wine to sample. It was our first ever wine harvest festival, and the polka band down the block for the church festival played some background music, and my friend G came with his ancient mixing turntable to send some polka music and spaghetti western music back. When it was dark and turned into an ideal night, we played "The Good The Bad and the Ugly," and with my garden animation as the cartoon before. We played the movies on the white sheet screen waving in the slight breeze, and we laughed and sometimes we had to avert our eyes.

Groups of bar crawlers went by on the sidewalk below. Some of them were screaming with the wildness of the wild night. A group went by, yelling and waving, and riding on a farm trailer. They were all pulled by a tractor lawn mower. We heard that mower approaching when it was more then a block away.

Then we had to just sit outside and do nothing but look at the sky. The harvest moon was only slightly less bright than the sun would have been. It was full, and the werewolves were out. Huge clouds were lit orange on their bellies by the lights of the alive city. The sky itself was only a dark blue, and not black. But there were a few stars shining out of that challenge.

The sky was a strange combination of sunset and night and day. It was a day for night sky from a technicolor movie. The clouds went by and sometimes hid the moon with their orange glow. They were massive and they were low but we never felt stifled. We could only sit outside for so long before we were veiled with tired and had to sleep.

September 19

If you wait, sometimes it comes to you. Yesterday, along with a day of jelly and wine making, getting fingers red as blood picking and then squeezing the juice out of the grapes of our wild grape vines, we walked down the block to see the church festival. The polka band was playing and under the tent they were selling polish sausages and potato pancakes. They have a famous rummage sale (famous to us, at least), with the last two hours a dollar a bag scatter. We picked up some folding chairs, some books and wine glasses and a few other odds and ends.

We have far too many things in our small house, but that also makes it cozy. We can fill our shelves and basement and refrigerator with cans of food and bottles to drink because we will consume their contents and then again we will fill the container. We can sit in the garden with the grapes and the vines and listen to the polka band playing in the leaves above us. Sometimes a car will go by and we have to put up with that rubbish, but at the church festival itself they have blocked off the street so that people have a little more room for just plain old walking and standing and sitting in place.

The nuns work the crowd under the big top and around the round old wood tables. There is a lot of black and little gold crosses. I cannot believe how big some of the bellies are on some of the men. Their families may have settled here a hundred years ago but many have since moved north into the suburbs, and instead of walking and biking and taking the streetcar like their forefathers did in this neighborhood of modest homes, they only now walk to their suburban driveways and get in their car.

Instead of the Polish that used to be the main language of this neighborhood, I now hear a woman walking by and speaking Spanish to her son. But it is a good thing that the Polish families did not take their big brick church and convent with them up to the suburbs. They have to drive to their festival, but we can walk the few steps there and rummage thru their rummage and bring some old items back to the old neighborhood.

September 20

I am serving on a task force to develop and review the work on the city's ten year transportation plan. Transit is a vital, overwhelming focus of that plan that will be delivered late next year. Part of the work involves considering some options for bus service downtown to simplify it and speed it up. Now north south buses downtown are scattered on many streets, including a two lane bus mall where the bus speed is barely faster than walking speed. An option under consideration includes closing down another street from car traffic to create a four lane bus mall.

The central theme of city-wide bus service is the concept of the Primary Transit Network (PTN). The PTN lines have frequent service, and also have the density along them to support that service. For the most part, they follow corridors established by the main streetcar lines of the past, which have been maintained by the major bus lines for the last half century.

In this plan, the PTN lines are the lines that will be strengthened. More resources will be put into these lines to make them serve their riders even better. Frequent service increases ridership, so these lines will be the areas of major growth of the transit system, and thus they will be awarded financially – a big feedback loop. Because of that, resources may go away from other lines that do not serve as many people, lines that are not part of that Primary Transit Network.

On the initial map up for consideration, the PTN lines are drawn in red. You will see many of them in the city. They run on the primary north-south streets, and there are even a few east-west ones. In the part of the city where I live, a big chunk of the city, there is only one PTN line, the one that runs on Central Avenue. This part of the city, Northeast, is nearly a third of the city's area, but has a low density, in part due to large areas of land that are currently industrial and occupied by the city's train yards.

Where I live, there are two north-south bus lines six blocks apart. Together, they might have the ridership to serve as a PTN line, but apart they are just two minor bus lines with thirty minute service frequency. One possibility could be to combine them into one PTN line that runs on University Avenue. University Avenue is the street that the city has designated as a community corridor, a major transportation street that it sees as a site for future growth, for future density. These corridors are usually corridors with transit lines. University does not have a transit line that serves the city.

But moving those existing lines to consolidate them would make many people unhappy. I mentioned this possibility at a community meeting last night and somebody who works at a social service institution along one of the lines was quite upset, even tho the bus line would only move two blocks away from the facility where she works. I do not know where to go next on this. I do know that I am doing this work because I want frequent transit service somewhere near where I live. It is really a matter of whether I can continue to live here or not.

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