A Real Car

My little Honda Civic is falling apart, yet I hardly ever drive it. The radio stopped working last week, the driver window doesn't "roll up" into the weatherproof liner, the roof paint is badly fading and peeling, the rotors got overheated and are warped, and there's an unmistakable exhaust leak starting. It's only nine years old with sixty thousand miles, forty five of those put on by the previous owner.

This is why bicycling to work is a pointless economic exercise, because not only do I have to fix and maintain the bike I have additional work to do on a car that just sits there most of the time. And while I'm not using it, I'm still insuring it. Man, what a waste.

But because I live squarely in suburbia, right in the middle of one the most car dependent cities on earth, it would be problematic to jettison the car altogether. Because no one else gets around without their cars, public transportation is scarcely viable, and we hardly have gorgeous year-round weather here in Elk Grove. To eliminate a car while living in extreme car dependency would be draconian to say the least, especially when transportation is so heavily subsidized. No, it still makes sense to hold on to the damn thing.

The way around this, of course, is to live in a city where I don't need a fucking car to begin with, where it isn't required for every facet of human existence. Of course, I can't afford to live in such a place -- around here, the few we do have have become the most desirable places to live, places built to human scales, to human speeds, to human endeavors. They also cost twice as much.

Nope, I can't afford a real place to live, at least not yet. In the meantime, because we subsidize road building more than anything else we do, it's cheap to live fifteen miles from everything...cheap to live in Elk Grove. I suppose that living with a cheap broken down car is just something I'll resign to having to live with for as long as I choose to stick it out in this city, unless I decide to join the rest of you and just accept extreme energy dependence and go out and get that new Highlander on credit and stop bitching about all this nonsense of bad urban design, etc. Nope. I can afford a real car to drive, so why don't I?

Energy Independent Yet Car Dependent

I drove to work today solo, as I missed the last bus this morning having overslept and I was in no mood to ride the bicycle again. Furthermore, I drove myself and a friend to a restaurant for lunch, where we overheard a woman at the next table tell her friends how she had to get that new Highlander in the parking lot after having her first baby. As we exited the restaurant and admired her beautiful new rig, we wondered why, now that her family was one unit larger, her family needed seven new seats.

I really don't know how this nation is going to become energy independent while remaining so car dependent. I don't think these two can be, or more precisely ought to be, reconciled. I drove the car today because I slept too long. She drove a bigger car today because she needed more space for her 18-month-old. These are discretionary actions carried out by people with discretionary incomes and are being woven further into the collective fabric of American life. That is, this lady will only require more per-unit energy to move around in the future as her Highlander becomes used, at which point she'll be out buying the next new rig to shuttle her and her child around Sacramento.

This evening I again watched another commercial on TV touting the "greenness" of a particular model of car...how you would "save the environment" if you only bought one of them.
The myth of energy independence and car dependent. I don't see it happening.

Bathtub Full Of Ice

I shudder to think of my kidneys failing from complications from my type I diabetes in the future. I try to limit alcohol, I am eating right, but they still might fail regardless, a common problem with people who have the diabetes.

I should hope that in the future I might be able to contract directly with someone willing to sell a kidney. I might want a kidney more than I want my money, and a donor wants money more than he wants his kidney. Seems like a good exchange, eh?

I love these moral arguments because I am rarely on the side society chooses. In my world, I'd legalize the selling of organs -- supply would eventually reach or exceed demand, the price would drop, the price would normalize, 15,000 fewer people would die each year and 15,000 other people would have money to go blow at the casino. These arguments that the poor would be put at surgical risk, the assumption being that they would be the first to donate: I don't buy this argument because no one is forced to donate. If they weight the costs and risks associated with donating a kidney (a legal option for anyone today), why should anyone else care? Everyone would have to assume their own risks if they did. Is it the government's place to limit a poor man's risk? Suppose he also likes to skydive...you know, in between stints at the homeless shelter. Should we be limiting that, too?

I also don't buy the argument that it would create a black market for organs, that people might wake up some evening in bathtubs full of ice.

Black markets exist for products and services not freely available, such as for vicodin, sex, lungs, caviar, snuff films, knives, cigarettes, pirated videos, roll-your-own tobacco, firearms, fuel, currency, and in times of war, rubber, coffee, metal, beans and butter. If it were legalized, I'd expect the supply of organs to dramatically increase, to the point that a black market wouldn't be a viable business proposition.

I mention all this, because in my dreams I dream of a modern day depression where black markets would dominate, and I wonder how I'd personally manage through one. It makes sense to engage this though experiment because a depression isn't outside the realm of possibility, not with a government spending one point three million million more each year than it takes in, with a constituency that's conditioned to consume five times the resources per capita of every other nation. It is possible. And I wonder -- what would I be able to offer on a localized black market for the things I want?

A kidney?

Whose Responsibility?

Every day I ride my bicycle past this "development" on Franklin Blvd., each of the housal units within are probably worth $231 less than the day before:

Only now we also get a nice pile of brush at the end of the walkway -- and why not, this is an empty field alongside a collector road at the end of a county-code mandated sidewalk that no one has or will ever walk on...so pile it on. This "public realm" means nothing if the public ain't using it.

Who, exactly, would be responsible for this pile of brush? Who would I call to have this taken care of?

The developer?

No way. His/her responsibility ended at the beautiful capped end-post.

Street maintenance division?

No way. Their responsibility ended at the curb cut.

The county?

No way. Their responsibility would have included the sidewalks, but because there ain't no sidewalk here, they have no jurisdiction. They couldn't even step foot on the dirt.

Public works?

Again, where's the public? Where are the works? Because there aren't any of either, they most certainly have no jurisdiction. No way.

Economic development?

Hardly. It's a major stretch to be calling the development development, let alone a brownfield across from vacant strip retail. Not a whole lot of an economy going on, either. So, no way.

Traffic Bureau?

The brush is not a menace, either now or anticipated to be, to vehicular traffic on Franklin Blvd., so, no way. While it could be argued that it is a menace to pedestrians, the traffic bureau, via carefully crafted language in their code, has deemed pedestrians "obstacles to traffic ...not traffic per se."

Street Sweeping?

No way. It's not on the street, remember?

Garbage & Recycling?

No way. There's no billable address here, and besides, the brush isn't contained inside an approved green-waste container, so the truck has no way of loading it in without...sigh...human labor beforehand...and it's not their job to be loading brush into containers. Understandably so.

So, the brush, tumbleweeds, Jack In The Box hamburger wrappers, go-gurt tubes, Sunny-D plastic bottles, and the dilapidated chain link fence will sit, underneath a beautiful new banner every six months proclaiming how the housal units within are only becoming cheaper by the day. You might wonder who would buy one of these units today. I don't wonder. They are people who have never seen this progression of banners from $300,000, to under $200,000, to $149,000, and who probably assume some sort of guaranteed taxpayer government intervention if horrors! housal prices fall even further so they won't be on the hook for an underwater investment. Freddie or Fannie will take over the mortgage if, in another six months, a new $119,000 banner is hoisted.

In every detail, from the government guaranteed backed loans to the pile of debris to the lack of integrated community development-- no one is responsible.

Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition!

Imagine the unemployment that might have been, if not for our dual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Five hundred and fifty servicemen and contractors, supporting perhaps a thousand more family members, are located just fifty one miles north of my Elk Grove at Beale AFB, the new home of the MC-12W surveillance airplane...the Liberty:


Thank God for war, eh? What a boost to our regional economy! These airmen and airwomen will soon be blowing their incomes on popcorn and movie tickets at regional theaters, $1.50 hot dogs at the local Costco, and because housing on the base east of Marysville is in short supply, they will blow a fair percentage of their incomes on private automobiling to shuttle themselves to and from Placer and Sacramento counties. Detroit and BP must certainly be fond of war, too. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

I garnered this information from a recent Sacramento Bee article, an article written by a Dale Kasler who, frankly, doesn't give a flying fuck (pardon the pun) about the need, the purpose, or a description of the use of this aircraft -- no, the article only describes what sorts of economic benefits the servicing of said aircraft provides for a Northern California community. If these things just sit in a Bagram hanger for the next two decades, or if they assist in the killing of a few thousand pajama-clad Mujahideen, hey, either way, at least those Marysville Dress-4-Less stores will benefit.

Hey, if these aircraft help us kill more Afghani infidels help our local economies, well, we shouldn't question their purpose, now should we, and we should all just stand behind the men and women working to keep this equipment operational. Do you think the Air Force would need these planes if we weren't actively at war? Would we really need 37 of these Beech 1900Ds-on-steroids at a cost of $17,000,000 a piece, plus whatever the ongoing maintenance costs are (to include these five hundred and fifty maintenance personnel)?

Doubtful.

Again, I give thanks to our Christian God above that he gave us Muslim extremists, so that our economy doesn't feel quite so bad. Praise the Lord, and pass the spanner wrenches.

Twenty Grams

There is no need to wonder why medical insurance rates are rising at an annual double digit clip. Today I just cost my insurance company somewhere around a thousand bucks, all on account of the mis-allocation of twenty grams of corn.

Knowing I needed something other than the fructose in my morning cherries and bananas prior to yoga, I grabbed a cup of Tuerca De Maiz and took insulin for 48 grams of carbohydrate...when indeed my serving only had 28.

This extra 20 grams, or more precisely, the extra insulin for these 20 grams caused my sugar to crash at the end of my yoga class, I wandered around the SMUD parking lot for an hour until someone responded, at which point the paramedics were called, and a thousand bucks were pissed away, all for half a dozen firemen to deliver me fifty grams of sugar (Gatorade!), among the cheapest foodstuffs known to man.

Knowing that diabetes is one of dozens of American diseases directly related to our ever increasing diets of processed corn syrup and soybean oil (because, hey, we want our food cheap above all else), this nation is primed for another sixty five million type II diabetics come 2050...and many of these will suffer hypoglycemic events that people around them won't know how to handle and for but several pounds of sugar, several billion will be spent rescuing them.

Twenty grams...

The Un-Entitled

Wa-hey! Our economy just continues to grow and grow, doesn't it? 2.4% for the last quarter, a raging furnace of productive activity from our workforce.

And hey. And hey. This last quarter marks four straight quarters of growth, so our little recession has now been over for a full year. But somehow, 2.4% ain't good enough. Why would that be? Last time I checked, the interest rate on my Wells Fargo savings account was 0.6%. The GDP growth rate is four times greater than the interest on savings, and that it grows under all this deflationary credit destruction, well, seems like it should be good enough.

Although it seems remote, my hopes for a continued another recession and depression still exist. I hope for these to mold a better nation on the back end, to build a nation of the un-entitled, to build a nation full of people willing to work with their neighbors to achieve a greater sense of resiliency and security (rather than a nation waiting around for unemployment check number 156 to be direct deposited).

Today we don't count on anyone else because the way we've laid out things we don't have to. Here in suburban Elk Grove I have no need for my neighbors; indeed, they only hinder my own access to things. When I go to work via my own private vehicle, all my damn neighbors are hogging up the freeways. When I go to the store, all my damn neighbors are in line in front of me. No, I don't count on them -- I only count on cheap, plentiful gasoline convienently and strategically positioned at fill stations near my freeway entrances, feedlot beef in nice little packages at the grocery, cheap Chinese shit at the WalMart and well maintained asphalt road surfaces.

If I'm thrown out of work, I still don't need my damn neighbors. Indeed, I'd be competing with them for a slice of that barrage of borrowed unemployment compensation, borrowed from the next generation of workers.

Of course, it is our neighbors who are paving and engineering the roads, keeping us overweight with corn and soybean derived processed foods, packaging in plasticwrap all that pork shoulder, and stocking the shelves at WalMart with cheaply manufactured imported Asian merchandise. We don't need our neighbors in a direct sense, only indirectly...and truthfully, this whole affair could just as easily be outsourced in the future. Perhaps prefab road beds that snap together will someday be manufactured in Laos. Perhaps the concept of a big box store is only the first step -- perhaps future shipping containers will simply be expanded apart at the touch of a button with finished goods lining the insides. This way, finished cuts of Chinese grain-fed pork can be displayed in a consumption depot alongside ninety thousand other containers, where the consumables are sold to American consumers without having to pay American wages to re-package all these imported consumables, where the containers can then be flattened out for their return trip to Asia. This way, cheap Asian labor can barcode the merchandise, cheap Asian labor can display it, package it, and advertise it. All the American has to do is push a fucking button, which is all the work he'll become accustomed to doing in the near future. And when legal Chinese immigrants are hired to come over and push buttons for a fifth of what the American says he needs, well, it'll only get cheaper for everyone.

The building of this new America, with its consumption depots and snap-lok roads, will all come with growth. Growth! Granted, this growth will occur outside the U.S., but hey, that's been happening for the past twenty years as it is.

And guess what...you'll have even less need for your button-pushing neighbor...