Axoplasm❦

On Monday I rolled over 10,000 miles on the Vanilla. Sadly I didn’t have a camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. An occasion like this is a good time to reckon what my mileage is like over a long period.

vs.

Right now I have 10,030 mi. on the Vanilla and 3516 mi. on the Soma. I know that I’ve ridden 3365 mi. since September 11, 2007, because on that day I rolled over 6666 mi. and blogged about it. 869 days have passed since that day, so I can get weirdly accurate numbers for my aggregate mileage:

This leaves off a few miles I’ve ridden on my newish Kona mountain bike, which I never bothered to fit with a computer. Also, I’ve changed the batteries on both road bike computers, which means there are a few miles off the books for those bikes as well. But really, I can’t imagine I have more than 100–200 mi. unaccounted for.

This year I resolved to ride 100 mi./week, every week, without rolling miles from long weeks into short ones. Which means I have to dig up an extra 44.58 mi./wk.

I can do a wee bit more math, this time less precise. I have previously calculated that, for my weight, and over the hills I usually ride, and at my usual pace, I burn about 550 kcal/hr. riding my bikes. (“kcal” means the same thing as “calories” in general usage.) This lets me reckon the following:

So, and not to put too fine a point on it, the excess mileage I’m making to meet my resolution lets me drink a hard case of New Belgium Fat Tire beer every week, and still lose weight.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent sentencing of Antonio Cellestine in the hit-and-run death of Gordon Patterson. Mr. Cellestine was, by his own testimony and subpoenaed cel phone records, texting at the time (and smoking a cigar). He was also driving with a suspended license, and had previously been arrested twice for driving without a license and driving without insurance. Mr. Patterson, a popular high school teacher, regular church-goer, father of three, and by all accounts swell guy, was riding his bike home in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. Judge Roger Bennett sentenced Cellestine to 5 years in prison, with a special plea bargain to ensure that this doesn’t count as Cellestine’s “first strike” in Washington’s Three Strikes system. He also has a special dispensation for early release, meaning he’ll likely be out in two years. He’ll never be able to buy a firearm in Washington, but — and this is galling part — he’ll be eligible to renew his driver’s license a year after his release.

As a fun parenthesis, consider Cellestine’s girlfriend — a wonderful piece of work in herself — who held a carwash fundraiser for the victim’s family but may have used the money to (try to) post bail for Mr. Cellestine.

I pay pretty close attention to all the cyclist-involved collision around Portland, for reasons of self-interest as much as advocacy. But this one really struck a nerve. The discussion around this case, and its outcome, suggests a peculiar myopia in regards to the moral weight of killing someone with a car.

On Tom Vanderbilt’s How We Drive blog, Vanderbilt relays this bit of drama from the courtroom:

The text-messaging motorist who struck and killed his former high school teacher told the court: “This was not intentional. It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”

Clark County (Vancouver, Washington) Superior Court Judge Roger Bennett didn’t buy it.

“I’ve heard the term ‘accident’ used quite a bit today. But this was no accident.”

This led to an interesting discussion where famed bicycle framebuilder Dave Moulton, one of my personal cycling heroes, objected to Vanderbilt’s insistence that car crashes aren’t “accidents:”

I’m generally uncomfortable with the hijacking of language for the purpose of demonization. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an accident is “an unexpected undesirable event,” “an unforeseen incident,” “lack of intention; chance.” Seems to me that the crash described probably fits this definition, as well as the definition of a crash (the two are NOT mutually exclusive). I have no opinion about whether or not the judge was right to convict, or whether the sentence is appropriate. I do have an opinion about the judge’s apparent lack of literacy.

I joined the dogpile on Mr. Moulton (who, I must say, has a certain point about the “intentionality” aspect of “accident”):

There’s a lot about this “accident” that was eminently foreseeable. Like Mr. Cellestine driving with a suspended license. And driving without insurance. And he had two previous convictions for driving without a license. And surely his license was suspended twice for reasons of some sort (I don’t know what) — in Washington that pretty much means repeated convictions for reckless driving, or Minor in Possession, or drug offenses. And consider that he was only 18 years old, so he had only two years in which to generate this sparkling record.

...

But there are more people culpable in this instance than Mr. Cellestine. This was not an “accident” on his part, because he knew the dangers of driving while severely distracted. And it was not an “accident” on the part of the State of Washington, who damn well knew he was a menace but failed to keep him off the road, and will fail to do so again in 2-5 years. So not only was Mr. Cellestine’s “accident” completely foreseeable, I’ll go one better and foresee his next potentially fatal “accident”, unless Washingtonians get their crap together, pass some tough laws and tighten up their licensing requirements.

Mr. Moulton had a rejoinder (“an event can be both an accident and negligent”)...but this seemed lacking to me. I tried to get the last word in, something I usually loathe:

It’s interesting that one seldom hears the phrase “airplane accident.”

People believe that when a plane crashes, someone is culpable — designers, flight crew, maintenance crew, traffic controllers, weather monitoring systems, terrorists, terrorist-minded security personnel, etc. This attitude — “there are no ‘plane accidents’” — has led to a situation where the most potentially dangerous form of transportation is actually the safest.

But somehow car crashes “just happen.” “It was an accident.” Y’know, just like knocking over a glass of milk.

Everything about Mr. Cellestine suggested he was a menace and incapable of safely driving a car, thus his suspended license. Simply getting behind the wheel that night was an intentionally hazardous act. That he no longer had a valid driver’s license was his signal not to drive, yet he disregarded it. Even by Mr. Moulton’s conservative definition of “accident” this was no accident.

I see Mr. Moulton’s point here — Mr. Cellestine had no intention of murdering anyone. But he committed the legal equivalent of pointing a gun in the air and pulling the trigger. This was Judge Bennett’s whole point. That bullet was gonna land somewhere, and it had the bad fortune of landing on a nice guy like Mr. Patterson.

(All of which, of course, leaves aside the “running away” part of this crime. Mr. Cellestine, upon committing a fatal crime, failed to own up to it. If that doesn’t negate the sense of “accident” as “unintentional” here, I don’t know what does.)

If government — if laws, and police, and courts — have any fundamental purpose at all in a free society, it is to protect the weak from the predations of the strong. It is to keep Swell Guys like Mr. Patterson safe from Raging Menaces like Mr. Cellestine. If Antonio Cellestine had indeed fired a gun into the air and “accidentally” killed Gordon Patterson, I doubt anyone would find fault in this logic. A Raging Menace killed a Swell Guy and deserves harsh punishment, after all that’s what laws are for, right? But somehow, when the weapon is a car, that logic gets turned off.

Mr. Cellestine might be a Swell Guy in some other fashion, but in regards to his abilities and judgement related to driving a car, he has amply demonstrated that he is indeed a Raging Menace. If stuff like “laws” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have any meaning to our society, those meanings should be clear in this very case. That Mr. Cellestine could be back on the roads — our roads — inside of six years suggests that, in regards to cars, “laws,” and “morality” and “personal responsibility” have very little meaning.

On the bikeportland blog, I tried to express this notion a bit more pithily.

Everyone who ventures off their own property — by foot, bike, motorcycle, or car — ought to consider how easy it is for someone like Mr. Cellestine to keep getting back behind the wheel. In 2-5 years he’ll be back there again.

It's far too easy to get, keep, and regain a driver's license, and we are far too lenient on those who thumb their noses at the law and common human decency.

...via a music-related internet discussion group consisting mainly of people I know in the Real World™ (i.e. 30- to 40-something white people, mostly male). Prior to today all I knew about Lady Gaga was the name. Based only on this information I thought Lady Gaga was either a children's music/puppet thing I was thankfully not yet exposed to, or some kind of British cross-dressing comedian a la Dame Edna.

But apparently Lady Gaga is something really big. Something like the “new Madonna,” which prompted this pithy analysis from one of my friends:

"The new Madonna" is pretty accurate. She's a media phenomenon that exists at the marketing nexus of fashion, celebrity and music. I'd argue that she's not as creative as Madonna, but that may be my age talking.

In the interest of education for anyone as tragically unhip as me, I just spent four minutes studying 30-second free clips of Lady Gaga tracks on iTunes. Based on this exhaustive research, I would amend my friend’s description a little:

Lady Gaga is what Electroclash thought it was going to be but it took pop culture seven years to get stupid enough to catch up.

...has not apparently rendered Oregon drivers any less inattentive.

I’m all YAY for this new law but it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Hell, it feels like writing a strongly-worded letter to the White Star Lines home office regarding the disposition of seating arrangements on the Titanic. My usual hobbyhorse regarding the scatterbrained drool-producers who do crap like text while driving down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue (which I witnessed this very morning...) isn’t:

“we need more laws against driving down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue while texting”

but rather:

“getting and keeping a driver’s license should be so difficult that people stupid enough to drive down the bus-only lane on Sixth Avenue while texting will be unable to do so.”

All of which occasioned me to reflect on how little I’ve had to do to prove myself worthy of pushing two tons of metal around at 75mph.

When I was sixteen years old — the same age at which I thought it was a good idea to cut my own hair with dog clippers — I took a driving test that lasted 30 minutes. And I passed a written test that I could have opted to have read to me in case I were illiterate. (Can I suggest that, just for starters, you need to be able to read English to take a driver’s test?). That was in 1987. I passed these two tests 22 years ago and that was apprently good enough. FOREVER.

In 1996 the State of Oregon, in order to verify that the State of Nebraska had done its job nine years earlier, made me take their written test. Which was on a video. And which I could again have read to me. They also checked my eyesight.

That was the last time — 13 years ago! — that I had to demonstrate my mental or physical capacity to drive a car.

Is driving a “right?” That’s not was Mr. Seng told me in Driver’s Ed, 22 years ago. His exact phrase was “driving is a privilege, not a right.” If it’s not a right, why do we go so far out of our way to make it easy to pass the driver’s test?

Cars are ultra super deadly. They are the most common cause of death for people under 25 in the United States. 35,000 Americans die in car crashes every year and another 100,000 are injured. This is serious stuff. Driving a car is difficult and potentially fatal.

So, YAY for the new hands-free law. Now that we’re discussing the deck chairs can we direct our attention back to the iceberg?

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.