Davauerdotcom

The most amazing thing happened to me recently. I was going about my business of life as I knew it like most of the others around me and then it happened. I kinda saw it coming a ways off but it still hit me like a lightning bolt out of the blue. Indeed, like Ben Franklin himself I think I’ve discovered something about the world that’s going to be huge.

I’m sure there will be some out there that insist I didn’t invent this phenomenon, that they had heard of and possibly experienced this already. It’s hard to believe though because it feels so profound to me, I think this must be a unique occurrence. I want the masses to be able to enjoy my discovery so in the interest of the world at large, I will reveal the secret on this widely viewed public forum.

Becoming a dad is absolutely most amazing thing that has ever happened.  There have been other landmarks of course involving moons and walking on them and most recently a particular man becoming president but this, believe it or not, is more amazing. I called the papers and for some reason they didn’t want to run the headline: Man discovers fatherhood. I suppose they think people might not be impressed.

That’s just it though… becoming a father is personal. There are millions and millions of kids but I am this one’s dad. From my perspective this is the only kid on Earth and thankfully I get to be her daddy.  It’s like my own personal expedition to the Moon and I get to be Neil. Each moment is a revelation. She slept! She burped! She stuck out her tongue because I stuck out my tongue! Eureka!

I suppose as time goes on it will seem normal to have a kid. Things won’t make headlines nor will I want them too. Exclusive: Teenage girl talks on iphone for 6 hours and doesn’t do her homework. But here at the beginning, I feel like Galileo must have felt. Ah ha! So this is what it’s all about. A man’s life revolves around his daughter not his job, his stock portfolio or his car.

Work is easier because I know why I need some money. Success isn’t important because it could never compare. Things… well they’re just things and they always will be, but this… this is Evelyn. That’s why I do what I do now. That’s why I live. That my friends is the secret to life. I share it with you all for two reasons: One, I want you to make this discovery and two, I want Evie to have some friends.

Scientific Proof of Ground-breaking Discovery

We’re looking into different neighborhoods around Milwaukee. Why? Because of the economy stupid! Honestly though, some places are more friendly to the income challenged. We checked out a great house the other day that seems like a great deal. Is it some governmental stimulus deal to get us a new house without endangering the worldwide economy by offering us a mortgage loan we can’t afford? No, of course not. It’s just a nice place in a quaint little neighborhood with among other things, really high crime.

Crime sucks. Luckily, our high-rent digs here in Shorewood come with an ever present police force. Want to go for a walk at 1 a.m? No problem, you can probably be followed by your own private squad car. We’re wrestling with the idea of what it’s worth to always feel safe in your neighborhood. It’s worth a lot for sure, but how do you run the numbers exactly?

For the time being we remain, as does the bubble boy, in our little sphere of safety. Tonight the skies were filled with amazing lightning. Scary too. Not scary like crime though. It was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of living near the lake and living in such a safe neighborhood. We walked over to the park to watch the storm pass over to Michigan.

A crowd was gathered on the bluff. The scene was incredible. I had my camera ready and began to take pictures. Within minutes Shorewood’s finest came in two cars to let us know the park was closed. Not closed as in: Take your time and enjoy the incredible view of the storm over the lake from the safety of Shorewood, but closed as in: Yeah that’s really amazing but get the hell out of the park.

What trouble they were thinking we could have gotten into while standing there looking at a lake I don’t know. I suppose the whole problem is that they weren’t really thinking at all. The ordinance said the park was closed so the park was closed. I pleaded for more time.

“This is kind of a unique situation though don’t you think? It’s a rare opportunity to witness something like this.”

“The ordinance doesn’t say anything about unique situations.”

“Well, can we hang out for a few more minutes?”

“No, I’ve got better things to be doing right now.”

Hmm.. how much better I wonder. The fact that they came with two cars makes me think the one thing they don’t have is anything better to do. But alas, this is the price we pay for our safe neighborhood. It’s a nice feeling to know you can safely go for walks at any time of the day. It’s almost as nice as watching a thunderstorm blow across Lake Michigan.

Prior to the mid 1980’s George Lucas was the greatest movie genius ever. He basically created the trilogy as we know it. the fantasy adventure movie series that you can watch over and over and over and then play dress up and watch again. But that all ended in 1989 after The Last Crusade, or arguably, in 1981 after Raiders of the Lost Arc. Let’s face it, Return of the Jedi, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade weren’t great movies. Each one was an unsuccessful attempt at recapturing a prior movie. That means he really only wrote great stories for three movies ever. Then he wrote three mediocre stories (ROTJ, Temple and Crusade) that we’ll give a pass because we love the idea of the trilogy and they were made close enough to the others that it at least looked the same story and had the same people in it. Then he made three shit movies in the form of Star Wars prequels. Clearly, too much time had passed, too much money had been made and he had lost all perspective on what was cool about the cool movies he had made. Now he has made Kingdom of the Crystal Suck. We’ll get to that later. He is listed as having writing credits on over 40 projects since Raiders. Every single one but three of them are some spin off of Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

1. Captain EO. A weirdo movie starring Michael Jackson as Captain EO (really? yes really!)
2. Willow. Not bad. Probably the best thing to happen to midgets since R2D2.
3. Radioland Murders. A storyline I actually think is better than all the prequels combined.

So basically, he’s exclusively been beating this horse since 1977 when he wrote Star Wars. Before that, he had vision. He did American Graffiti, a social commentary that won academy awards. He did THX1138 a true scil-fi movie that investigates the what-if future that is heavily borrowed from by movies like The Matrix. My point is that he used to have a variety of ideas. And not just any ideas, he had a variety of good ideas. Star Wars was supposed to be just one of the ideas he had. A space movie that was more like old cowboy serial novels than it was like Buck Rogers or other sci-fi of the time. The problem being that it was so successful that he never got back to his pre-Star Wars self. After that movie, his life became a single track where the goal was to churn out as many Star Wars related ideas as possible. The Indiana Jones thing is actually a smaller version of the Star Wars thing contained within the Star Wars thing. It’s his one truly good idea since Star Wars and it just became another successful idea becomes bad idea factory story. So, 31 years go by, 46 stories are imagined and 43 of them are about Star Wars or Indiana Jones.

I don’t think he ever wanted it to be this way either. He wanted to be an art house film maker. He wanted to make movies with clever ideas that said something we could all relate to. Like any good art student, he wanted to make a statement about the world and money be damned. One possible explanation for The Crystal Skull is that he is getting back at us. We made these movies this popular and in turn it made him so successful he was unable to make it back to his real film maker self. He had to keep meeting our obsessed, fanatical demand for more Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It didn’t matter if it was a good idea, we needed our fix. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a punishment bestowed upon all of us for making George Lucas what he is: A fat, rich, chin-less Star Wars/Inidiana Jones factory that can only churn out a rehashed 30 year old idea over and over and over and over.

“Look at what you’ve done to me! Now sit there for two hours and suffer the horror that is this movie! You like your precious little Indy do you? Well here he his talking to an alien. Take that. You can make fun of me all you want, but I am still the god of your geeky worlds and i can crush you like a bug with scenes of animated gophers and flying nuked refrigerators! it may be a lame, played out world but it is my lame, played out world and you are just tourists. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so obsessed with the good ideas when I had them. Maybe you shouldn’t have painted your car like a land speeder. Maybe you shouldn’t have pretended your prom date was Slave Leia. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent months building a Bobba Fett costume when you’re 35 years old. But you did, and now you are my slave.”

George Lucas has basically become Darth Vader. He was supposed to be something better. He had greatness in his blood, but then he got mutilated by fame and the power of holding your own merchandising rights and became the dark lord of his own empire. Bitter that he is not loved for being an artist, he travels the galaxy destroying audiences with his Death Star crappy movie ray.

“No! They’re a peaceful audience… they have no weapons!”

“Initiate preview sequence. Begin movie.”

“Nooooooooooooo!”

My only hope is that we can all be there next to him at the end with ILM and Lucasfilm crumbling around us. We shave off his beard that’s supposed to make him look like he has a chin but isn’t fooling anyone and see him for the genius he once was. He tells us thank you and to try and save ourselves, but we insist on saving him too. We take him home and burn him on a giant pyre and there is no party that follows. There are no muppet bears playing the congas. We don’t go out and run into the girl we broke up with a long time ago and marry her. There is definitely no hint that in a decade or two we will meet young George Lucas and learn about how he became old George Lucas. It is over. It’s the end.

Come fellow traveler and travel though the portals of time. Come with me back to a time when the world was a simple place. A time of answering machines, MC Hammer and CD walkmen. Come my friends to the early 90’s, to the time of… (insert dramatic orchestra swell and echo effect) No Internet!

I know it’s hard to believe that one could even survive such a trip, but trust me, I’ve been there and back and lived to tell the tale. The first morning I awoke in this bizzare past I found one house mate reading a book and the other playing the piano. It seemed as though we had traveled back an entire century in just one night. Would we be playing parlor games this evening I wondered?

The installation date wasn’t for a week so I began to wonder what we could accomplish in this time free of the burdens of email and YouTube featured videos. Maybe we could learn to ride a unicycle, speak with a perfect New Zeland accent or drive a car on two wheels like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins. All worthy endeavors that could be accomplished easily without the nuisance of the attention demanding internet.

Alas, it was not to be. For a life without the internet is but a half life. A life spent in coffee shops for hours using someone else’s internet. It’s like sleeping in someone else’s bed. It’s better than no bed at all, but it still smells like someone else. It’s a life spent desperately trying to find other technology to fill the void. A whole night spent trying to see if T9 input is really better than multi-tap.

Another night spent trying to have a “conversation.” Just minutes into each attempt, I would find myself referring to a YouTube video. With no ability to show said video, the conversation would just become a description of that video. I realized 99% of everything I currently think about revolves around a YouTube video. The night degraded into some perverse group therapy where each member would bring up a classic YouTube that everyone knew, while the rest of the group would laugh and agree how funny that video was.

What did I do most of the time in 1993? I remember being there surely. Was it something involving the outdoors? I suppose I spent most of my time in school being educated in all sorts of subjects that are entirely unrelated to YouTube.

There are few people without the internet nowadays. Almost any village on the globe, even ones with using wooden plows to eke their living out of the Earth are online. The current young generation will not know life without the internet. I can only hope for their sake that when they have to change internet accounts, Time Warner has a faster turn around time than a week.

I awoke this morning anticipating the arrival of the van with the ladder on top. It was kinda like Christmas morning. I now sit happily with my internet looking out the window at the beautiful spring day. It’s inspiring. It’s inspiring me to look up some good spring weather videos on YouTube.

What will make tonight a little different for my wife will be the fact that she will go to sleep with a younger man and wake up with him having left her. In his place will have appeared an old man. Well, not old really, just old-er. Same age as her in fact so maybe she won’t feel weird at all. The old man will feel old though.

How old is old you ask? How many teeth does the average person have in their mouth I respond? Too difficult for you? Well how about this: It’s the smallest number n with exactly 7 solutions to the equation φ(x) = n. It is also the sum of the totient function for the first ten integers.

I thought this was a no-big-deal age to turn, but thanks to The Internet, it’s feeling much more significant. It all depends on how you look at it I guess. It’s pretty epic to turn this age in binary. The ripe old age of 1000000… sounds pretty old though, I prefer to think of it in hexadecimal, a refreshing, wide-eyed 20.

You gotta take the good with the bad. That’s what getting older is all about.

Good: The number of completed piano sonatas written by Beethoven. Bad: the country code to direct-dial Belgium.

Good: The bit size of a databus commonly used in computers. Bad: Jesus’ age when he was crucified.

Good: The year of this century when John Spartan (the Demolition Man) will be removed from cryo-stasis to help deal with Simon Phoenix. Bad: The very same year will be the assassination of John Connor by a T-850 series Terminator. (One possible future.)

As I go to bed a young man, the age of which there are Baskin Robins flavors, the only thing I hope for is that tomorrow there will be less ice to chip off the driveway. Ironically, I will wake up the age of which water freezes in degrees Fahrenheit.

Anyone who wanted to be a politican in Greece would study the art of speaking from a master orator. This was absolutly necessary before you tried to convince the people to follow you to a better future. I suppose first you had to have a good idea of how to make the future better, but people wouldn’t follow you unless, through the art of speaking, you could organize and relay your idea.

In the 19th century presidential candidates would travel across America on a train giving speeches off the back of the caboose. They would sell them self and their idea to the people through the power of their speech (and possibly the height their stove pipe hat).

What happened?
Now you need to buy a lot of TV commercials. You also need… no wait, you just need a lot of TV commercials. You can have difficulty forming complete sentences let alone eloquent ones and still sit in The White House for eight years. W clearly never rode across America to dazzle us with his oration skills. In fact, I don’t think he’s even seen conjunction junction what’s your function?

Say what you like about any of the presidential candidates, but you have to give Barack Obama props for his old skool oration skillz. It’s a simple rule that hasn’t changed since the Greeks. You don’t really need a tall hat, or even a $500 hair cut. If you want to inspire people, master public speaking and deliver some stirring speeches.

They do say pictures speak louder than words though. Here are some pictures of Barack at his latest rally in Milwaukee.

Someone contacted me recently to see if i was still alive. It had been so long since a post to davauer.com that she thought I might have died or something. I feel flattered that someone must have logged on to the blog more than once in a six month period, but burdened by the idea that i must post to keep myself alive.

I know blogging looks like the most glamorous thing in the world right now with all the press it gets from confused adults above 50 but it ain’t like being a movie star or anything. Will Smith may be the most liked man on Earth in both movies and music, but hey, he doesn’t have a blog. “That’s because he’s the most liked man on Earth and doesn’t need to desperately write to no one in particular to get attention” you say, well… yeah, so? Anyway, I understand the burden under which I’ve placed myself and I plan to rise to the occasion. How am I going to quit my job and live on Google ad click-through revenue with only four posts a year?

It’s Orion’s first birthday today. I had planned many posts about the singular hysteria of the first year of first-time parents. The year seems empty now. No crazy diaper stories. A lot of nights with plenty of sleep. Seems weird to think my one year old son would be babbling incoherently while I write this.

A year from now though, I will be posting for three. In fact, starting in September I should have plenty of stories that revolve around the complex topic of doo doo.

(No worries, from day one the baby and the pee-stick of destiny have been under the protection of the fearless and noble Sir Gawain)

I’m sitting with my niece in the hospital writing this post. To be more accurate, I’m sitting with my sister in whom my niece sits. I figure I’ll try to write something before I become a part-time babysitter and have even less time to do things like write vague essays to no one in particular. My niece is being coaxed out into our cold world by none other than the Iron Chef himself. He seems in quite a hurry to get his dish done by the deadline. We all watch anxiously, empathizing with his efforts. My sister also has something that needs to get done and the deadline is now. The oven is off and the bun is done. It’s just a few short hours before I’ll have one more loyal, related reader.

It won’t be long before the baby realizes she has mad cooking skillz. I’m already looking forward to Thanksgiving twenty odd years from now. That’s going to be good eatin’. So many of our best qualities are are inherited like a chicken breast inherits the flavor of the bay leaf. We stew in our families while young taking on all kinds of flavors. The final dish can be so subtle you don’t know why you do what you do and like what you like, but you know it has something to do with those years in the family crock pot.

The snow came down hard this week. It wasn’t so much the each-one-is-a-unique-individual type as it was the clump-together-and-git-r-done type. It was beautiful nonetheless. Huge globs covered our landing strip of a driveway. No less than eight cars share the tarmac between our house and our neighbor’s. My friends to the south think, “That must have been beautiful. All that snow piled up… just like a painting.” My stout and sturdy colleagues up north think, “You have a snowblower right?”

No, I don’t have a snowblower, but I do have my mitts. Like recognizing a flavor in the Iron Chef’s Porcini Crusted Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine Reduction Sauce, I recognize my grandpa in me while shoveling. It wasn’t so much that he taught me how to work hard when work needed to be done. It was more like I just existed around him and pretty soon it soaked in. He always worked harder than anyone I knew while complaining about working less than anyone I knew. The work wasn’t easy work either. It was backbreaking crack-o-dawn work.

As many people as there are running around the city doing things that make them money to pay the bills, there just isn’t that much hard work being done. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people doing things that are hard and putting in long hours but it’s still not life on the farm. Sometimes, like when the snow piles up on the driveway, I can go back to the farm and life becomes clear for a while. It becomes a simple equation: Hard work/Time=Job Well Done. It’s a chance for me to see my grandpa again. I see him when I come back in and my back is killing me but I know it doesn’t matter. I see him when I wake up and there’s twice as much snow as the day before and I think, “Well, looks like that driveway needs shovelin’ again.” For the next couple hours, I know exactly what life holds.

My niece will be a whole new spin on the family recipe. I’m seeing an intelligent, well traveled, multi-lingual chef with a great smile. Hopefully I can get her out to shovel with me a couple times.

“She’s got some sugar on top and some really nice carmelization” That she does Iron Chef, that she does.

I decided not to go to bed last night. It was late and getting later until the later turned to earlier. I decided not to because I could. I didn’t have anything to do in the morning or late morning… or early afternoon. Going to bed seemed more optional than usual so I chose the unusual option.

The sky was an amazing shade of blue-green. As if the world had sunk in the darkness of night and everyone would awake that morning looking out their windows to the eerie glow of the sun above a million gallons of water. I struggled with the choice of whether to follow the glow or not for some minutes until finally abandoning sleep for the mystery of light.

I left our house as if leaving an airport. A strange country awaited on the streets of Dawn. It was garbage day today so the highly manicured streets of Shorewood were lined with overflowing buckets, baskets and boxes of junk. It wasn’t so dissimilar for the world of Dusk of which I travel on a daily basis, but it was also foreign at same time. Maybe due to the fact the light was backwards. Or that there was not a single person in sight. It seems a fact that there is little travel between these two worlds. If you travel Dusk, you will rarely make the journey to Dawn.

I snaked through the streets on my bike like lanes on a board game imaging how may points I might get for turning this way or that. The green was turning to blue and the wind in my hair reassured me I would not drown riding a bike. I came to the edge of our world and watched the new light introduce itself to the cold, dark lake. “Hello old friend. I see you’re still here.”

The problem with photographing a sunrise is that you don’t know when it is at its best. You have to keep taking another picture just after the last. Alas, the effort is wasted as you know it won’t capture the glory of it no matter how many you take.

You are either predator or prey in Dawn, depending on your biology or perhaps your social persuasion. The stars cast a silence on the world that one could use to roam about with little worry of discovery. This same silence could be employed to help one sneak about with thoughts of mischief, deceit and even death. As the sun raises the stars from whatever possible tragedy or comedy they are background to, those who would set out to accomplish their silent deeds are for a moment revealed to one another. Who is friend? Who is foe?

First, it was I who saw the coyote. He trotted seemingly secure under his cloak of diamonds and hush. Then he caught notice of me. He did not figure me for friend nor figure me at all really. He wasted no time in disappearing because all to a coyote in the city of Milwaukee are safely assumed to be unfriendly. If he only knew how afraid I was of him. He may have seized the opportunity to press on me just to watch me cower for a bit. A fun story of Dawn to tell the wife and little ones.

It seemed for the smaller part of a second that the world split in two. It seemed that for the shortest and all together longest period of time you had a choice of whether to believe you were standing on your feet or your head as the sun began to mix it’s colors for the morning masterpiece, the Lake explaining what went where or was it the other way around?

The little silver fish were not flickering in delight as I did truly wish they were. Playing with the pale light on their sides as only a swimming mirror is meant to. No, they swam the slow circles of death. Closer and closer to the surface until the circling becomes floating and the mirrors become tarnished. Some evil in The Lake will not abide them anymore. I hope that they can watch their final sunrise with their one sky bound glassy eye.

The deer like me, may have spent too much time trying to decide if he wouldn’t just walk about the day as he did the night. Or maybe he felt that his call to the woods before tomorrow arrived was as optional as my forsaking the comfort of my bed. For he could remain in Dawn as easily as he could leave it. And why shouldn’t he? It is a bit unorthodox for a deer to stroll through Milwaukee in daylight, but it is the Upper East Side after all. He would be as likely pet by a small child as anything else.

I believe as I watched the sea of birds I could watch one split into two and two into four. My eyes rapidly trying to count, figure and organize this city on wings would only find birds where there were none and countless where there were any. A great jealousy filled me as I watched them soar about what is by now surely a somewhat mundane morning breakfast. I think of my own breakfast. My uninspiring trip from the bed to the fridge to some chair-shaped object or even possibly back to my bed again. What I would give to soar above the house in the washed out light waiting for my moment to swoop down through the window and into the cereal cupboard.

As for most who whisper about the dark though, it is the other who is up to no good. It was me who would catch the deer and bestow some cruel punishment as soon as I had the chance. It probably has something to do with the biology of an eyeball sensing movement, but it does seem that a deer will first defer to you before making his next move. “You seem to be standing still. I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you will continue to stand still indefinitely, but if you so much as twitch, I am going to haul tail out of here faster than you can possibly imagine.”

I did share a moment with this fellow traveler as might two passing in the customs’ line. He is leaving, and I am coming. He knows the now quickly rising sun will only cause more of these uncomfortable situations to occur. Staring down people all day would make getting anything done impossible. And what is there for a deer to do in Milwaukee anyway? In a split second he took two great leaps and then floated over a chain link fence thrice his height pausing for a moment as if for me to regard his grace and consider it’s value compared to our brilliant but quite clunky frames. For all of our paintings, airplanes and libraries we can not sail our bodies through the air without the slightest hint of doubt.

I did fancy myself a deer as I glided home on my bike, peddling through the warm crabapple blossom currents. I am faced again with the decision of whether or not heed the call of my bed. I will, of course, sooner or later, but I savor the choice for the time being. What I have decided is that I will remember the coyote’s meek silhouette, the fishes’ glittering facets, the birds’ casual loveliness, the deer’s graceful leap and the sunrise’s modest blessing for as long as I can. And hopefully when the strange light of Dawn calls me to the window and seduces me away from my bed, we will meet again and be for a moment less a stranger to one another.

The telephone I had growing up had the big dial on it. It came in one non-customizable color (beige) and only had one ring tone. Our computer was even worse… wait… what computer? Technological advances in the last 25 years have been incredible. So what the hell is the problem with gas mileage?

The current manifestation of any given technology hardly resembles it’s not-so-distant relative. And this is just for things we all see day to day. The advances of things like weapons, satellites and home coffee brewing machines are beyond our wildest dreams. Gas mileage, you would think, being nothing more than another automobile technology, would have advanced right along side it’s more stylish peers like in-car entertainment, climate control, fuel injection and brakes. Our cars glow in their nethers and even hubcaps are moving in a whole separate plane now. The only technology besides gas mileage that seems to be left behind is cup holders. They really are never in the right spot.

Let’s compare Honda Civic you would have drove off the lot in 1973 and one you would drive home today.

1973 Civic:

Not much in terms of amenities actually, and probably not too comfortable either. Radio sucked I’m sure. Heat? Maybe. But it got 40+ MPG!

2007 Civic:

(Straight from Honda’s website) With cutting-edge looks and the latest Honda technology, the Civic will get you there with style. A two-tiered instrument panel and available XM Satellite Radio with Navigation System make driving a true pleasure. And its i-VETC 16 valve, 1.8 liter engine with Drive-by-Wire throttle system will make sure you arrive early.

So they’ve been pretty busy in the last 34 years. Got a whole other tier on the ‘ol instrument panel. Thank God. I don’t even know what a Drive-by-Wire Throttle system is, but I’m sure it’s complicated. Sounds like a bonafide space ship that would make George Jetson proud compared to the ’73. What does it get for mileage though? Oh, 35 overall miles per gallon.

Is there any, and I mean any technology that has gone backwards in the last 34 years? I’m not talking retro, I’m talking just plain worse. Now, maybe the car is safer and handles better and is more powerful and all of these things require going backwards in fuel efficiency, but I don’t think so, because you see, everyone including Honda is trying so hard to make vehicles that have even better mileage than a ‘73 Civic. They are working on it. They are working hard. They are figuring out the problem.

They’ve created a car that has two different power sources and can switch between them and use one to charge the other and has a digital display that shows you live what’s happening inside your technological wonder car. Wow, that sounds even more amazing than a two-tiered instrument panel. So, 34 years later they have used all the amazing advances in technology and applied them to the fuel economy of a car. What did they get with the 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid? 48 MPG. That’s about seven, possibly eight miles better than the ’73.

Cars can see you coming and unlock after “sensing” your digital fingerprint, hot-sync to your phone as you get in the car, automatically adjust your seat, dictate directions on how to get to the McDonalds drive through, shift automatically while pretending to let you shift, entertain everyone in the car with as many DVD players/Xboxs, break for you if you aren’t paying attention, beep at you if you didn’t check your blind spot and parallel park for you because you obviously know how to spend money better than you know how to drive, but they can barely get you better mileage than a car that was basically a cardboard box strapped on to a motorcycle. What has really been the focus for the last three decades?

It’s sad to ask that question because I know the answer. The focus is on useless junk that makes us feel important. This can be seen by looking at the home page for the new Civic. Even today when gas prices are a “big deal,” there is no mention of the car’s economy on the main page, but at the very top, in bold are the words: “Ready for a little attention?” Attention to the world and it’s environmental issues? Attention to our country and it’s political issues? Oh, attention to yourself and your instrument panels. Yeah, that. Nice.

I joke but it’s not even that funny. All of these cars need oil to run. Even the amazing hybrids need just about as much oil as my wife’s 16 year old Honda (clocking in at 40 MPG regularly.) This oil has to come from somewhere because you don’t have it, and I know I don’t have it. Maybe you don’t care about polar bears and wildlife refuges, but would you destroy an ecosystem if you didn’t even have to? Maybe you’re afraid of terrorists and want the troops to get ‘em before they get you, but would you even consider having someone die for your oil if there was even a remote chance that’s what is really happening?

What if things could be better but someone isn’t letting them get better. Here’s a page out of our recent gasoline history:

A year after the National Academy of Sciences reported that leaded gasoline is the largest single source of atmospheric lead, the Reagan Administration’s Task Force on Regulatory Relief (chaired by Vice President George H. W. Bush) proposed abandoning the planned phase-out of leaded gas.

But then, the EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch admitted to a gas refiner that the agency would not enforce lead limits. The resulting bad publicity prompted the Bush Task Force to abandon its proposal, causing an unplanned speedup of the phase-out.

Exposure to lead negatively affects children’s cognitive development and behavioral skills. Between 1976 and 1980, as the amount of lead in gasoline dropped 50 percent, blood-lead levels in children dropped 37 percent. The decline continued. (http://zfacts.com/p/35.html)

So, not too long ago the gas we were burning was not just poisoning the world but actually poisoning children’s minds and the Vice President of those children’s country didn’t want to stop it. Why not? What’s in it for him to poison children? Oh yeah, truckloads of money. He was an oil company millionaire when he opposed the lead gas phase out.

There are powerful people that stand in the way of technology doing what it does best, namely: get better and better. Powerful people that are willing to do what they do best at any cost, namely: make money. Luckily, there are alternative ways to “get attention” in your car while still paying attention to what actually needs attention. We need to expect as much advancement out of fuel economy that we expect out of each successive generation of iPod. Fifty-something miles per gallon is not alternative living. Getting a car that has more to do with what’s outside rather than inside is alternative living.

In part two of this post, I will bring you one such alternative. You are what you eat and now you can drive what you eat. (No, Marty McFly, it is not Mr. Fusion. But you can still wear the raincoat and sunglasses.)