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The hybrid car is a lie. Do not purchase one. - The only reason the hybrid car exists is to allow auto manufacturers to continue selling grossly wasteful and polluting vehicles to consumers. Because California law requires an overall emissions target and minimum quantity of zero emissions vehicles, a manufacturer has to sell hybrid or electric powered vehicles in order to continue selling large commercial trucks to consumers as toys, and other sins.
- Purchasing a hybrid vehicle pays off the owner's conscience in the best American way: with a unique product. The buyer feels a sense of moral superiority, the seller makes some money, and the essential problem continues. It's no wonder the name of the most popular one sounds like "pious."
- Buying a hybrid car means buying a new car. Don't buy a new car. It's true that as your hybrid car runs it will put less direct pollutant material in the air and water. It's also true that it will use less gasoline. However, you have just bought a very large machine which was manufactured new. Add up the steel and aluminum, the machining and casting of parts, the chemicals used and dumped, the nonrenewable resources consumed or used to build the car, all the energy used to build a car and carry its materials around, the energy used to move the car around by ship and truck to the dealer, all of it. Making a car is a very top heavy resource-hungry industrial process.
And your car doesn't go away. Unless you have it artfully crushed into a cube as a coffee table, or personally supervise its recycling, your car is sold to another person and stays on the road. And that person's car is sold down the line too, until we arrive at unusable or junked cars, which then go to a graveyard to be broken down. Everything about the car is toxic too, just in case you're curious.
So now you've brought a new car into the world (they'll make more!) and given a nice big fat gut punch to Mother Nature in doing so. Failure.
- Keep your old car instead. If it's not so run down that the mileage is shot, and it's passing the emissions tests, it's a better deal for "the planet" and for you also. It is not as demonstrative of your love for the GREEN GAIA to continue with your serviceable older car, but trust me, she appreciates it.
- nstead, do things that don't burn fuel, or burn less. If you're physically able, ride a bike more to short drives. Use public transit. Even in Southern Californian Heck, where I live, I can (and now I do) take the train into Los Angeles when I am able.
- It will be a great day for this country when Americans can look at a serious problem and do something other than pick up a lifestyle magazine and look for some product guides. Buying things is a terrible solution to so many things.
Tags: commerce, politics
Current Mood:  sleepy
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My great-uncle Lee spent his last few months in a well-run County hospital in the California high desert. At least once a week we'd make the drive there to see him. The hospital was a few miles out of town, next door to a prison. Lee was in the quietest part of a quiet hospital, both inside and outside his room. Gardeners worked on the landscaping outside, but that's all the activity I saw. The grounds were very well-kept. After I talked to Lee, I'd go outside and wait for the others. Nothing ever happened at that place, so I have no idea how long I'd been there. It was just me, the constant desert wind, and some plants and flowers flopping gently around. I could hear the lines clanking on the flag pole. Periodically there would be an engine noise, or a gardener would go by with some machine or tool. This week i've spent some time ill. Because my back and shoulder went out on me, I am in a different bed and bedroom than usual to get the big flat bed. It's a quieter and darker end of the house, and the big window opens onto the back yard. The weather has been very warm. My neighborhood is quiet, and not much at all happens there. I found myself flat on my back, not wanting to move, and listening to the clink and clank of hanging plants, wind chimes at near dead stop, rustling leaves, and distant suburban background noises like lawnmowers and pool parties. I felt as though Death Himself had arrived. Time to sit up, stand up, move into the other room, and hurt more. I know what happens if you get stuck in a slow, warm, quiet, breezy Southern California day full of manicured plants and long silences. YOU DIE, THAT'S WHAT. Tags: death, me
Current Mood: blah
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I did not know Richard well — he was a friend of a friend and I met him only twice — but I remember everything about him. We were both in our mid to late 20s and our mutual friends were a circle of artistic types, dreamers, dropouts, and successful people who wished they were the first three things. Richard was special. He was an effortlessly brilliant writer and illustrator, and he had a breadth and depth of knowledge out of proportion to his age. Talking to him was like a guided tour of a great library. He was usually doodling on something and the doodles turned out as perfect little cartoon stories sometimes. This was in the golden age of the "new comix" between Gary Panter in free weeklies and Art Spiegelman on coffee tables, when new styles of comic strip art were showing up everywhere. Richard could have done well, made a living or better, made a name for himself. But he refused. He was not lazy, or disorganized, or dumb about money. He explicitly refused to show his work to a wider audience or to be paid for it. I remember someone joking that he was Kafka and some Max Brod was going to disobey him and publish everything, and he became very upset. So Richard was poor. Very poor. He and his girlfriend basically cleaned toilets for a living. It wasn't clear to me why he dived that deep into the working class, since he had no romantic delusions of proletarian slumming. I think he just hated office work and liked being left alone to do menial labor. Richard drank and smoked, a lot. Really quite a lot. I knew some hard drinkers at the time, but Richard was a full-service beer drunk. He never seemed to lose an intellectual edge, but his eyes were heavy-lidded and he swayed a bit when he walked. He was living in San Francisco in the late 1980s, doing but not selling a long graphic novel and working his down and out job, when he and some friends took a night off and hung out on the top of a tall building downtown. They watched the city, and drank, and smoked, and drank some more. At some point Richard, who was having a great time, was dancing around on balancing on something and stepped where the building wasn't, not seeing the gap between it and the next one. And that was that. It still is not clear if there was explicit intention. Did he jump? Did he fall? Did he start to fall and then just decided to go with it? Did he even know what was going on? Was he in that situation half-hoping that something would kill him? No one knows. He left behind a life incomplete in every way. Incomplete in years, incomplete in his art, just truncated. Everything about him was rolling along this curve towards something big — good or bad — and then stopped in mid journey. Richard was a very sophisticated person, and the kind of artist who worked on multiple levels. Sometimes I wonder if his entire life, the shape of it and its end, could have been a work of art about truncation and incompleteness. On the other hand, he was a drunk. And his father had committed suicide. So he might just have been a smart guy with some bad luck and some bad decisions. I don't know. There are so many fakes and ridiculous twits playing at "tortured artist" who say and do things that sound a lot like Richard, but he was all real. And I believe he got what he wanted as an artist. I'm still not convinced, though, that he wanted or needed to die on the concrete of a San Francisco sidewalk that night. Tags: art, friends, personalnarrative
Current Mood: blank
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