"You a man?" a three year old asked my preschool-teacher friend John. "Got a car?"
John reported the little kid's question as funny story, but it was pretty clear he felt slightly emasculated by the answer. He is a man, but he does not have a car.
Can this be?
I'm not sure how to approach this... this, desire of mine to muse on this moment when we've just had a sharp reminder of the perils of fossil fuels.
Maybe I could approach it as if I were collecting notes or snapshots for a memoir or a social history about Life in the Era of Fossil Fuels I will write in twenty years,
or notes for a sci-fi novel...
There's so much gloom––how about if I write a comic sci-fi novel,
How We Avoided the Apocalypse!?
Unfortunately I'm no fiction writer.
For my notes, I could record, for instance, that on Saturday my coworkers told me there was a terrible car crash on the corner, half a block from the thrift store--one car had flipped over and the woman driver was trapped inside, they said.
We call such crashes "accidents", as if people just happened to get into enormous (and expensive) metal vehicles fueled by explosives to travel at speeds guaranteeing that any impacts could cause life-threatening damage.
An accident is something that happens "by chance".
Driving a car isn't an accident, and the nature of humans guarantees that cars will crash.
[Side Note: I love cars, they are great inventions!
I wish that long ago we had arranged American society so that there were, say, a couple cars per city block––I don't know, something like one car per 25 people?––and people shared them.]
After work on Saturday afternoon, I went to wait at the bus stop on the same corner. The police were still blocking a lane, and the wreckage of two smashed, empty cars was still being cleared away. The windshield of one car was almost completely stove in.
The street is a busy thoroughfare: the many cars, buses, bikes, and foot traffic force vehicles to move at a relatively slow 20-30 miles per hour.
I couldn't imagine how such a massive crash had happened at this speed.
Some bad mash-up of physics happened.
As I sat there, cars took turns navigating around the crash, guided by traffic police, and pedestrians stopped to look, . . . and life appeared to go on as normal.
(Of course I can't know that the crash had no greater impact. Maybe some witness went home and declared they are never driving a car again.)
"Normal."
It's normal to see car crashes in this city and other American cities. I see (or hear) some fender bender at least once a week, I bet. Bad crashes less often, but maybe a couple times a year?
No one intimately close to me has been killed by a car, but I know plenty of people with crash injuries (esp. bad necks) that linger.
It's not so normal to see wounded people hanging upside down by their seat belts, as my coworkers reported, no––but it's within the realm of the acceptable norm.
I'm the odd one in my culture, because I don't drive.
People ask me why--my abnormality makes people curious.
The truth, as I posted about the other day, is that when I was young I was too lazy to bother with all the work of paying for and owning a car. I never had ambitions that required a car to fulfill. I mostly wanted to read books and write at home or coffee shops, or go see movies--places I could get to on foot or by bike or bus, almost for free.
As I've gotten older and the population, and hence cars, has increased, I also find cars more and more frightening.
I used to think I'd eventually get a driver's license, but at this point I never want to drive.
I do happily ride with others in their cars--and chip in for gas.
I accept the risk occasionally for the pleasure and expediency of things like going out of town, or taking trips to the grocery store to haul heavy items such as laundry detergent, or going to movies across town in the dark cold of winter.
Here's my favorite example of high-carbon life that people in my futuristic comic, sci-fi novel will find almost unbelievable:
People drive cars to gyms in order to exercise on electric machines.
John reported the little kid's question as funny story, but it was pretty clear he felt slightly emasculated by the answer. He is a man, but he does not have a car.
Can this be?
"Starsky & Hutch" action figures, with Starsky's famous car--
even I who care naught for cars know it's a Ford Torino
______________________
I'm not sure how to approach this... this, desire of mine to muse on this moment when we've just had a sharp reminder of the perils of fossil fuels.
Maybe I could approach it as if I were collecting notes or snapshots for a memoir or a social history about Life in the Era of Fossil Fuels I will write in twenty years,
or notes for a sci-fi novel...
There's so much gloom––how about if I write a comic sci-fi novel,
How We Avoided the Apocalypse!?
Unfortunately I'm no fiction writer.
For my notes, I could record, for instance, that on Saturday my coworkers told me there was a terrible car crash on the corner, half a block from the thrift store--one car had flipped over and the woman driver was trapped inside, they said.
We call such crashes "accidents", as if people just happened to get into enormous (and expensive) metal vehicles fueled by explosives to travel at speeds guaranteeing that any impacts could cause life-threatening damage.
An accident is something that happens "by chance".
Driving a car isn't an accident, and the nature of humans guarantees that cars will crash.
[Side Note: I love cars, they are great inventions!
I wish that long ago we had arranged American society so that there were, say, a couple cars per city block––I don't know, something like one car per 25 people?––and people shared them.]
After work on Saturday afternoon, I went to wait at the bus stop on the same corner. The police were still blocking a lane, and the wreckage of two smashed, empty cars was still being cleared away. The windshield of one car was almost completely stove in.
The street is a busy thoroughfare: the many cars, buses, bikes, and foot traffic force vehicles to move at a relatively slow 20-30 miles per hour.
I couldn't imagine how such a massive crash had happened at this speed.
Some bad mash-up of physics happened.
As I sat there, cars took turns navigating around the crash, guided by traffic police, and pedestrians stopped to look, . . . and life appeared to go on as normal.
(Of course I can't know that the crash had no greater impact. Maybe some witness went home and declared they are never driving a car again.)
"Normal."
It's normal to see car crashes in this city and other American cities. I see (or hear) some fender bender at least once a week, I bet. Bad crashes less often, but maybe a couple times a year?
No one intimately close to me has been killed by a car, but I know plenty of people with crash injuries (esp. bad necks) that linger.
It's not so normal to see wounded people hanging upside down by their seat belts, as my coworkers reported, no––but it's within the realm of the acceptable norm.
I'm the odd one in my culture, because I don't drive.
People ask me why--my abnormality makes people curious.
The truth, as I posted about the other day, is that when I was young I was too lazy to bother with all the work of paying for and owning a car. I never had ambitions that required a car to fulfill. I mostly wanted to read books and write at home or coffee shops, or go see movies--places I could get to on foot or by bike or bus, almost for free.
As I've gotten older and the population, and hence cars, has increased, I also find cars more and more frightening.
I used to think I'd eventually get a driver's license, but at this point I never want to drive.
I do happily ride with others in their cars--and chip in for gas.
I accept the risk occasionally for the pleasure and expediency of things like going out of town, or taking trips to the grocery store to haul heavy items such as laundry detergent, or going to movies across town in the dark cold of winter.
Here's my favorite example of high-carbon life that people in my futuristic comic, sci-fi novel will find almost unbelievable:
People drive cars to gyms in order to exercise on electric machines.
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