Dahddy

Riding my bicycle into work today was again blissful, thanks to another Furlough Friday. I'll maintain that my odds of an accident with a motorized vehicle are much lower due to all our "laid off" state employees, as well as due to you being unemployed. Thanks, by the way, if you happen to be reading my blog because you have the time to waste because you're unemployed.

Interestingly, today was forecasted to be a spare the air day, meaning that our Sacramento regional air quality is forecasted to be...well, shitty. I'll be comparing yesterday to today to see if our Furlough Friday's are having any effect on air pollution. Both days are similar weather-wise -- one hundred degrees with little wind. If today our AQI is lower than yesterday's, then I thank you for having been temporarily laid off today and not driving into work. Spare the air day or not, you could hardly give a shit about alternatives to driving, isn't that right? Won't do it anyway, regardless. You are too beholden to your vehicle to think of anything less else. "From my car here, the air is plenty clean enough."

Funny. One recommendation on spare the air days is...bike to work! Yeah, bike to work and ostensibly keep the air clean, but to do so puts your health at risk. So what do our citizens do? They mitigate the health risk by driving to work and then driving to the gym to work out. On the worst air days it makes perfect sense to drive for the sake of our health.

One interesting thing about our region's air quality is that the bad air generally concentrates around Folsom and Placerville; that is, the foothill region. They get the worst of it because the bad air tends to get pushed by the [light] winds and it stays put over the foothills. Auburn, Ione, Grass Valley, Placerville, Jackson -- all these places suffer worse air quality than my car dependent Elk Grove. But you know, the vast majority of these city's residents earn their living in the valley, or worse yet, in the Bay Area. So fuck 'em -- they live 35+ miles from work so they can live in the 'rural country' with 2 million other people who also want to live 'outside' the city. Their air is bad because they drive through or to the valley. They shouldn't wonder why Little Lisa damn near dies from asthma attacks playing out on the family's 7/8th acre "horse property" in Rocklin. Not when there are three vehicles in the garage.

While my bike ride into work today was blissful and while my odds of dying are indeed lower, it wasn't without danger. My closest encounter with the Grim Reaper this morning came by way of a Land Rover pulling out of Christian Brother's High School -- driven by a teenage girl on her fucking cell phone. What are the odds that this $50k+ rig was actually hers and not Dahddies? What are the odds that this oblivious driver actually works to pay for her cell phone bill, that it isn't paid for by Dahddy? Does a teenager on a cellphone who's "hooked up" in the eyes of God (i.e., passed first communion and confirmation) give her the right to overtly break the law and plow over a bicyclist who merely questions the moral authorities? She knows that this is illegal but she does it anyway. This is what her superior moral upbringing gives society.

Another case of why I think Christian Brothers actually creates worse people than if they didn't "enter to learn." They don't learn how to be decent people. Perhaps sufficiently decent to enter heaven, yes; but to interact with 'lesser' folk, no. I've not encountered a worse group of drivers than these people who think nothing of erratically driving a $53,000 rig through destitute South Sacramento and not giving a whit about cyclists, pedestrians, or anyone else. She can always look to her Dahddy on earth and her Dahddy in heaven to bail her out.