She was practiced at the art of deception

Kunstler is effing mad if you ask me.  I saw him on Colbert and he takes himself so seriously that he couldn't or wouldn't let himself stand down and let Colbert do what Colbert does.  he was escalating the dialogue!  it was a little awkward to watch.

anyway, I was definitely struck by his book, Home From Nowhere back when I was living the pro-bike racer lifestyle.  I had a 20hr/week engineering gig and was riding 15-20 hours per week living basically alone in an apartment where the rent was $205/month.  it was ideal to say the least.  well some of the facts and figures he brings up in the book were kind of astounding (to me) back then.  for example, if you drive a half hour one way to work and work 250 days a year then that calcs to ten full days a year that you have spent in your car.  nuts, right?  try sitting in your car for ten straight days. 

back then I was also really digging sustainability. . .it was at the time the latest buzzword dribbling from the mouths of the professoriate.  I was headed to grad school to study sustainability, in fact.  so Kunstler's book got me thinking about how we have our society set up and one of the things that struck me was that we require these massive vehicles to live most of our lives.  these are, on average, 2,000lb hunks of steel, plastic, heavy metals, glass, rubber, so on and so forth that come with quite an environmental burden, if you study the life cycle.  and most people, at least in this country, require one to go about their day as usual.  we're hurtling along our roads in these 2,000lb vessels.  do we really need to be?  do we really need our own personal 2,000lb box of metal and rubber and plastic simply to live our lives, to go about our daily tasks?  that's a lot of material, a lot of mass to move one or two or three or four people.  is it necessary?  I don't really know, can't really say, because it's there - it is what it is - and you can't avoid it.  given the option of. . .well there's few people who have the option to not drive.  (how else can I visit half the people I know?)  they're out there, but for the most part, people buck up and drive.  so I found this in my gmail reader this morning, posted by a friend.

After a gripping narrative (we have some pages from the opening of the book, below) the book concludes with statistics of pedestrian deaths and injuries, laws and regulations, pedestrian injury prevention effectiveness and so on. But Phoenix doesn’t drone on – he just presents the hard facts and they stay imprinted on your mind.

By 2020, for example, road traffic accidents could outstrip strokes and HIV as one of the main causes of preventable deaths.

If Rumble Strip has an aim, it’s to make us realise just how much power we wield in our cars.

it definitely defeats us.  and the scale of the entire project is staggering as well.  3 million cars are sold per month in the United States alone. 

most people don't know anything about the materials or energy or chemicals or processes that went into the what they're driving, nor do they internalize and digest the what they take for granted to simply live their lives (if the current societal set up is what the "free market" has provided us, then we're seriously fucked).  they don't question, don't understand, and don't really care - they'll pay you to make it work, and they'll listen to you so long as they get to go about their day.  this is not an indictment so much as an observation - what the fuck do you want me to do about it?  what can I do?  knowledge is not power, at least transformative power, as far as I can tell.  having all of this understanding and knowledge and fact only really makes me feel better about myself and my situation.  big whoop.  self improvement is masturbation.  so is blogging.  one person can only do so much, you know?

and if you think our car centric society is ill and ugly and dangerous, just you wait until necessity dictates that we abandon and dismantle it.  that's the part of Kunstler's crazy that I can't wait to see come to fruition. 

oh, and fucking duh. 

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[Agi]

I could always skateboard to work Marty McFly style...