Beans and Cabbage

The Monologues recently received word that there are more readers than just this author. Fascinating. This is just the lone ranting of one man, and truthfully there can't be much of an audience that wants to hear that our American way of life is truly negotiable.

This was starkly evident last week when I went to the, get this, the All American Speedway in Roseville. All American. That your author routinely criticizes the NASCAR mentality of this nation while engaging in the same activity locally, well, you're just going to have to resolve that cognitive dissonance on your own.

I do enjoy the races. I always have. I always watch the Indianapolis 500 (now just two weekends away) and the Daytona 500 in February. I don't get into many other NASCAR events because I really only like the oval track. I also like drag racing, both funny car and top fuel. As a kid I regularly went to motorcycle racing (I always liked Dwayne Yarro, the Purple Guy) and drag boat racing in Redding and Chowchilla. My next door neighbor races the flatbottom gas Dago Red boat. A coworker races at Excelsior Speedway in a modified Mopar. I have always wanted to own a 1970 GTX...that car can shit and git.

I don't have any inherent aversion to burning energy this way. Entertainment venues. I own a boat and I'm going to use it this summer. If it costs $400 to fill it up, well, so be it. I also don't have any problem flying to remote locales on holiday. This form of energy has always been a part of my life and there's no reason to think that it won't in the future. Cheap energy is the catalyst for why I can get my molars taken care of when they break, that I use an insulin pump rather than having to boil-sterilize glass syringes, that I can blog and criticize others.

It is a common fallacy to assume that treehuggers and others of my ilk find it a requirement to not use any fossil based energy. Bullshit. What about the 1960's counterculture - how could they have possibly engaged in any rebellion were it not for the normative energy consumptive culture? They required a society of consumptive energy users to rebel against. And as far as I can tell, they needed fossil energy to drive their VW vans to and from their war protests and they needed coal to power the amps driving the bass lines of Joplin and Hendrix.

This has never been an all-or-none proposition. I just think that we can and should find ways to live sustainably. If you really want to take it to the gnat's ass then breathing should be banned. All we humans do is exhale carbon dioxide, a GHG, and if we ate cabbage and beans the night before, we also produce a whole lot of methane, 25 times more potent a GHG than CO2. The only issue in my mind, the only issue, is that we should emit only so much pollution that our local environment can absorb. Anything beyond that is setting ourselves up for a future catastrophe.

So I will never be made to feel guilty about taking the car out to pick up a tuxedo for a wedding instead of taking it home on my bike rack. However, I don't drive to work every day in my own car, because I feel that this is not a sustainable pattern. Everybody cannot do this. Sooner or later we will realize this.