mailbag

(1) Besides "certain death," a trusted colleague from Pittsburgh observed, commuting by bike would amount to "16 mile[s] over various rivers, mountains, and non-bicycle-accessible highways."

All fair enough.

Although I had not asked. Since HotU blog launched, I have heard this response several times over -- often defensive, always unsolicited -- about the need to drive. That leads to an important point. We as a society have created auto dependency. For many of us, living without cars is not an option. Not open for discussion. We burn gas, regardless of the ramifications. We also fail to understand why people want to fly airplanes into our buildings.

(2) Two readers responded to my decidedly unpractical choices in "Carrying Capacity of a 47 Year Old Man." Kip, a neo-thoreauvian, sent me a link for panniers. And a young radical named Josh kindly offered his kid-carrier, which would do fine for groceries. Thanks gentlemen, I will pass for now, balancing stuff on the handlebars is part of the fun.

(3) Which leads to my son's bicycle shutdown. I am happy to report that the front gate is fixed, and that kid and I rode to school all last week. More on that in the near future. My friend Merle, an environmental ethicist friend, relayed his own experiences while biking with a child in foster care.

The kid under his charge loved the adventure, though sometimes too much -- and took off into a busy intersection one day.

Thanksfully the kid made it. He survived the mishap and is now adopted.

But is that not the great lesson for young bicyclists?

"Both hands," I am often reminding my son, "you are traffic." Traveling by bike is pure joy. Bicycling involves risk. We weigh risk against adventure. And what more important lesson is there for a child to learn: how to balance danger against reward?

Thanks for all the questions and comments. Please keep those thoughts chuning and those wheels turning!

Twitter-ific

If you have a Twitter account, you can now follow this blog on Twitter. For my part, I think all you have to do is click here and opt to "Follow Me."

On a car-related note, I've decided to allow myself to drive one day a week. This week I drove three times. I suck, but not as much as I could, so there's your silver lining right there, dammit. The point is, the scooter is so easy and the bike is so continuous (it's physical work, but I can pedal without a lot of stops and starts) that between the stick shift (and I'd be lying if I said I was good at driving a manual transmission; it's actually painful to my passengers) and the traffic lights, just driving is exhausting. Give me a bus any day now: I can read, sleep, or daydream and no one gets hurt.

Hopefully, Dr. H and our two new contributors will add this blog to their Twitter accounts, so you can follow us all and we can be one big happy car-free (in my case, car-minimalist) family.

tough love all around

Son and I were looking forward to riding our bicycles to school. We have a safe route -- sidewalk, neighborhood streets, and bike lanes almost the entire way. We started this last year. I got good exercise. He and I bonded over a favorite activity. And he got to his fourth grade classroom on time, with an aerated brain, energies worked out -- and with a healthy jolt to his self-esteem.

So the routine was supposed to start this morning. (Yesterday, the first day of school, was simply too hectic.)

Except we had a bad night. The stress of entering the fifth grade -- "Rules, Rules, Rules!" -- proved to be too much. In a fit of pique while putting away his beloved Chopper, he busted our front gate. Long story short: he cannot ride his bicycle until the gate is fixed.

Which means we had to drive to school this morning.

Bummer.

I sure hope that gate gets repaired soon. The punishment is killing me.

Compromise

It looks like, no matter how you slice it, it's going to come down to compromise.

I drove Tuesday night.

That sounds, even to my ears, like an alcoholic confessing to a Ketel One martini, extra dry but extra dirty. Not, of course, that I would know.

While Dr. Hallock's been trying to carry a kegger's worth of food home on his bike (you can dress it up any way you want, Dr. H, you're part of the Florida Studies program and we know your black little secrets), I was gambling on whether or not the city council meeting I had to cover would end before sunset. See, I wanted to take the scooter instead of the bicycle (let's call me lazy), but the lights currently operate on island time. They come on when they want and turn off as the mood strikes them; not safe.

I gambled – wisely – that the meeting would last past sunset and took the car. I was right not to count on not needing a headlight – the meeting lasted well past sunset. But, damn it, I've taken the car at least once a week since this started.

Perhaps the key is compromise. As a former coworker used to say, nothing is going to move closer Oklahoma to Orlando. We will always need cars. But maybe the key is to need them a lot less.

I'll still try not to drive through the end of the month. But I'm not pleased with how easily I resort to jumping behind the wheel of a car, and I'd like to see if I can get past that. Suggestions welcome.

what is the carrying capacity of a 47 year old man on a bicycle?

Eight bags of groceries. Or somewhere thereabouts.

We were having a cookout. Friends were in town. We had been away for a month. There was family to see. So I volunteered wife and me to do some grilling.

Come Saturday morning, we needed provisions.

I rode down the Third Street bike lane towards Publix. Crossed campus. Pulled onto Second. Made it back, four bags hooked over the right handlebar, three over the left, ice and juice boxes in my trusty Jansport. I had everything on the list except for beer. Our friend likes Heineken. Won't mention what Junot Diaz says about Heineken. But the bottles would have to wait.

I made it home by 11:45, fifteen minutes before folks were to arrive.

Wife had wanted me to take car. Pity the wife here. This whole carfree experiment has been a burden to her. While I am holding to my principles, reducing emissions and saving the planet, wife must fret over late-arriving groceries, general procrastination with (what I would call consolidation of) errands, and logistical screw-ups in our already harried life.

I am a slightly shorter, bald Ed Begley.

But I made it back. And the beer problem solved itself.

Just in case...

... I was thinking about taking the car to city council tonight, but now I don't know...

Click here to see my hesitation.

I mean, I hear he hogs the radio and won't roll up the window.

Everybody Has a Story

Despite Dr. Hallock's assertion that writing for money ruins writers, I prefer writing for money to almost anything else. Of course, I'm trained for little else that pays a living wage, so I find myself writing for survival. I'm OK with that; I understand that I'm not exactly Keats or, sadly, even Dorothy Parker. Oh, how I would love to be Dorothy Parker. My friends could call me "Dot" and I could assault them with my rapier wit... but I digress. I write for money, period. I write for myself, too, but it's a Maslow-type situation here: I have to make sure I have a roof over my head and food to eat before I can get creative.

So, of course, I found a small way to turn this carless experiment into paid work. No, I'm not writing about going without a car for a month – I did that last year and, anyway, lately you can't swing a bankrupt media empire without hitting a first-person journalist report of reducing one's carbon footprint.

No, I'm writing about stories. I've long been fascinated with people. I believe that everyone has a story, and I'm nosy enough – Thanks, Mom! – to pick at the edges of people's lives. I don't want to know what happened to them when they were eight or where they went to high school, but I like to taste the flavor of other people's existence.

Every time I ride the Beach Trolley I end up smushed elbow-to-elbow with those existences. Finally, it dawned on me: I'm not the only one. We are a society of voyeurs. People love stories. That guy with the mullet (I'll let you decide if I'm referring to the fish or the haircut) on the bus? Yup, he's got a story. The old man with a walker and Navy tattoos? You betcha.

Every other week I'll write Trolley Tales for the Pinellas Beaches Patch, an AOL company that's made the plunge into local news. Click here to read the first one, published today, with apologies to Dr. H.