transfers

i went out last night, and talked to friends and heard music and saw movies behind that music. and when i go out i have to get back home, and because i do not drive, and because i did not take my bicycle, that meant that i either had to walk or ride the bus. i rode the bus home.

some people tell me that they would ride transit here more if we had a better transit system, and that would be nice, but i do find that i get around pretty well on the transit system we have here with a few accommodations. the first one was just to be a little aware of what the transit schedules were. it took me two buses to get me from dinkytown to home, and both of those buses were only running every half an hour, so if i didn't make a quick transfer i would be waiting a long time outside on a cold night. it also meant that i left not at the end of the show, or even at a natural break, but when i would have to leave to catch the bus.

people are always making accommodations for their car travel, so you inevitably have to make some kind or another if you choose another mode of transportation. so i rode the bus and shared the ride with a few others. everytime i hear somebody talk about their car, or see them get into a car, i see a polar bear sliding into the water and into death. for me it is worth leaving a show a little early for that.

and it didn't take me that much longer to get home than it would have if i had gone by car. my waits for buses were about five minutes each, and the bus was warm and i could read a couple pages on each short leg of my ride home. and i also had a few blocks of good healthy walking in the trip. now what could beat that that doesn't involve an inordinate amount of global warming?

waiting

the bus i had stood outside to wait for had broken down downtown, i heard, so i had almost a half hour wait for the next one last night. but the time went rapidly for i had a nice long talk with a friend who was also waiting for that bus.

the view of the skyline across the river was stunning in the dark evening, the cold was cold but not so bad, and the talk was nice. the only bad thing about that half hour was the traffic speeding by just a few feet from where we were standing on our feet. if you step back and think about it, it was really quite a dangerous situation to be in, only the slightest error in one of those tons or more of car and we would have been smush, but it didn't happen this time.

the price of gasoline is going down, which will help out alot to make global warming worse. and i spend a few hours last night making drawings for my new animation project.

bus and books

i rode the bus on a couple of long trips Saturday. the bus was my library, my reading room with amazing walls of transformation.

transit and reading have been linked for me from an early age. when and where i first started taking the bus, in Billings Montana, when i was in seventh grade, i took the bus downtown to go to the library. this was my saturday routine: i would stand at the bus stop and read, i would read on the bus on the ride into downtown, i would go to the library and read there, and also eye the shelves with all the thousands and millions of volumes that i had yet to read, and i would read on the bus ride home.

on saturday, this saturday, in my home now, i tore thru a long book on my bus rides. i was disappointed that i finished it too early, i finished it with one long leg of bus ride left.

transit is a great place for reading, it is a place where you can fall into yourself as the world surrounds you in all its territory and people. the wonders of the book i am reading and of the outside and the bus inside all play roles in the drama of the book of bus, and the bus of book.

i can really only fatasize about what the trip is like for a car driver. but i do remember my small car driving experience, the few drives i took during driver's education class in high school. what i remember well is the role that faith, not reason, played in the whole experience. you drive by looking forward and having faith that your car will go where your eyes are looking. you grip the wheel and you have faith that you do not jump the curb, or run into that car in the lane beside you. you have faith that you will go where you are looking and it all seems crazy to me today, just like it seemed to me back then when i was actually doing it.

the fantasy faith that i would rather have is one of falling into that interesting book while riding or waiting for a bus, and not that of hoping and dreaming that i do not crash my ton of car.

20 years

i do not so much remember stories, as in he did that or she did that. i remember a few images, as stark and formal as a photograph. but mostly i remember feelings, the particular emotion i felt at a particular day or place or with a certain person. these are the strongest transmissions that break their way thru the brick of time.

it was twenty years ago, not today, but yesterday, or a couple days before yesterday. it was january 2nd or the 3rd, i don't exactly know, but i do know that it was 1987. i rode the greyhound bus to town, to minneapolis, my new home, my new old home, the place of my return. i arrived at the old greyhound station, which is no longer there, and the place where i spent my first thirty minneapolis minutes, a bus stop bench, was on a block that has since died and been reborn.

i must have had things, i must have had a suitcase or two of clothes and notebooks to last me out my first few months in minneapolis, but i don't remember them. i remember myself, and the feeling i had.

i left the bus station and had just a couple blocks to walk to the corner where i was to catch the city bus that would take me to my friend Greg's house. i was almost at the bus stop when i saw the bus go by. i saw the back of it all lit up, and i knew i would have to wait a while for the next one. it was six o'clock in the morning, it was january, but not so cold, and it was black with growing lights, but still quite quiet. it might have been sunday morning.

i waited that half hour sitting on a bus stop bench at 6th and Hennepin. Shinder's News store was then on that corner. I saw all the magazines inside and the neon light. i sat on that bus stop bench for a half an hour, or maybe it was an hour, waiting for the next number 14.

what i remember the strongest is what i felt at that moment. i was a little frightened, for this was the biggest place i had ever tried to live in, this was a big city to me, i had no idea then really how big it was. but i also had a stronger feeling: the feeling that i was ready for anything, i was ready for my fate, and it was going to happen to me, and i was going to let it happen.

mid night wake up

it is so warm these days. the furnace was on very little last night. i heard it start up and stop, and i heard a car go by. i was laying wide awake and thinking about global warming. once that starts, it is hard to fall back asleep.

these have been very warm days for january in minnesota. it is comfortable, but it is frightening.

i lay awake last night thinking about what we were doing to this planet, and it just kept on hitting me hard and hard and keeping me awake. who can fall asleep with that horrible thing.

i thought about global warming all nine times last year i rode in a car. it made me a little nervous about it, every time. it also made me think about all the people who drive every day, or take multiple car trips daily. do they think about global warming, about all the greenhouse gas they are spewing out when they take those trips. do they even connect their own transportation habits with the climate of the whole world.

i finally did fall asleep, only to wake up to the clock radio telling me about a car bomb that went off in Bagdad. several people died. that's another car connection that i am happy to distance myself from. i'll stay out of a car today. getting in one would be my own part of that car bombing. driving a car would be too much of my own global warming.

start

there is no such thing as new year but i'll still borrow it for a reason. it's only tuesday morning, but it is time to start a new thing.

here is my story, so old and so bugs. here is my story of life and animation. will i walk or will i take the bus, and what advertising will i cut to pieces on this day - that is a story in words and in reality, of making some grunts from the markings and the spaces.

last year it was nine car rides the whole year. i tried to minimize it and this might have been the all time low number for my life. mostly i get by with walking and biking and mass transit, and that is the locomotion in my life. i don't know if i'll be able to go so low with car rides this year, but i'll try to avoid them as strong as i can. global warming and so many other reasons are the reason, you know.

and i start up a new animation project. still working on the script. still working on starting up the thing. have characters drawn, have thought about the paper sets. of making layers of near and far go by, hopefully i will say more in the future.

Exile

I was a presenter at the Transportation Future Meeting at the Northeast Library on Wednesday, November 29. I thought the meeting was well-organized and inspiring, and some other attendees I spoke with felt the same.

In the question and answer period after the presentations, a person in the audience suggested that I move to Europe if I hold the views that I hold. I was very nervous when I gave my presentation and felt that I stated many things poorly or awkwardly, so I would like to restate some of the major points of my presentation to see if I do indeed deserve the sentence of exile.

I started with a picture of my driveway, which is now a garden. My partner and I grow food in what was our driveway because neither of us drive and we own no car. I have never had a driver’s license. This is because I decided when I was a teenager that I would never drive. My initial reason for not driving was because of what I considered the poor engineering at the heart of the automobile, but my reasons for not driving have been strengthened repeatedly since then.

I showed something called the green transportation hierarchy, which is a triangle, just like the food groups triangle, that can be used for neighborhood planning, and also for personal life planning. The hierarchy suggests that the more environmentally friendly forms of transportation, like walking and bicycling, be given greater priority than the less environmentally friendly forms of transportation, specifically single occupant motor vehicle use. I compared this transportation triangle to the food group triangle, and said that I think about walking and biking like my fruits and vegetables, and car rides as my sweets.

And car driving is not very environmentally friendly. A single car will put more than 20 tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year. This is the gas whose growth in the atmosphere is melting the ice of the poles and of Greenland, and altering world weather patterns.

I talked about how historically, streets were the center of community. But we have given our streets over to cars so that they dominate them. I suggested that cars were violent bullies, because they dominate the streets that once accommodated multiple uses. I meant that they were bullies in the way that someone who takes over the jungle gym and won’t let anybody else on it is a bully. As someone who was knocked to the ground by the car when I was a kid, I can tell you from experience that there is a certain violence about them. Cars weigh a ton or more, which is much more than pedestrians or bicyclists weigh. This weight is a useful tool for cars when they are displaying their bullying behavior on streets.

I suggested that we might want to look at ways in which streets could be shared by multiple uses, such as walking, biking, art, community-building centers, commerce, and motor vehicles. I showed a number of examples, both in Europe and the U.S., where this was already happening.

The person who told me that I should move to Europe said that she was on the citizen patrol. I think that what the citizen patrol is doing is great, but it is necessary because so many people do not walk, do not see walking and biking as the fruits and vegetables of their transportation diet. Crime levels tend to be lower in cities with higher levels of walking for transportation.

I hoped my presentation would get people thinking about ways that streets can be shared, and that this will make our streets into places where we will want to be, where we will want to walk, rather than the transportation infrastructure that they become when we let traffic engineers define them as street types, like collectors and arterials. These street types seem to exclude all other uses of the streets, and words are powerful things that affect how we see the world. If we think about streets as places where we want to be, rather than as transportation infrastructure that we want to pass through, I think we will have stronger communities.

So if these views are sufficient to sentence me to European exile, I suppose I accept my sentence. But I love Minneapolis, and just hope that someday it is a place in which it is easier to live the lifestyle I have chosen to live, a lifestyle in which I don’t drive.