No blood for oil.

I sold my last car not long after watching 'Shock and Awe' on television. The peace chant 'No Blood for Oil' did somehow get to me. I thought of it every time I had to fill the tank. I not only watched the mainstream news media version of what was going on in Iraq, you see. I'm one of the small percentages of people who gets their information from "other sources". You know, the one's that don't have to worry about auto industry consumer confidence. The one's without all the bullshit and lies. I almost convinced myself that I was 'making a stand' for peace, too. The reality was it more about economics. That car needed more work done to it than it was worth, so I had to ditch it. I got a thousand bucks for it. I don't want to tell you how much it cost me.

The cars I've owned have cost me well over a hundred thousand dollars. Fuel costs, insurance costs, maintenance, registration, steal belted radials all paid for with added GST. I've now got nothing to show for it. That's only the cost to me personally, the true cost of cars is something I could never estimate. Smelting, polluting, gassing it up for smooth ride on a planet being more and more paved with a nice hard crusty surface to drive on. No blood for oil, I finally figured out what it means; stop the militarization of the worlds energy resources.
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Scooter commuter
Neil Keene gets in a spin over the scooter craze.
Newcastle Herald 24/08/2004
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My first car spun around really quickly one day when another car hit it. I Never even saw it coming. I remember wondering why small change and other bits of my stuff started to float around in the interior. Then I wondered why I couldn't see anything anymore. I never saw that car again.

A surgeon once told me that two of the main causes of cancer today were obesity and diesel fumes. I see junk food advertisements for kids. I see a subsidized diesel industry. A man holds the metal tin and asks me to aid cancer research. I think about DNA terminator drugs and see people asleep at the wheel, with dangerous climate change up around the bend.


I still love you.

My next car was an HZ station wagon. The V8 trimatic was quite a different experience from my first little car. I could accelerate that thing to over 250kph on a quiet open road at night. I'm lucky to be alive, I know it. It was just natural though. Why have a car like that if you're not gonna open her up now and then right? Surely, they wouldn't sell them like that if it was wrong?

Another car I had was a fuel injected 323ie. Beautiful shiny gold thing. I felt good when I drove it not only because it drove well, but it just made me feel good to drive it. It was a dream, only I didn't realize it was not my dream. It was someone else's dream.
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Beaut scooting
SOARING petrol prices have given the Australian motorcycle industry
a chance to push its claim for cost-effective motoring of the scooter variety.
Newcastle Herald 04/09/2004
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So not only do we now have cars bumper to bumper on our roads, their advertising has monopolized our media.Television, radio, and outdoor media. You can't read the news paper without seeing a car advertisement. If you use a commercial news website you will soon have cars bopping around your screen. All alternative routes have been blocked off. The roads have been closed.

"You walk around the block, you come back and you've seen a collage of fragments. You haven't seen a sequential narrative or picture. Your consciousness is cut by random factors. This is a process that is happening all the time."

If you consider your subconscious mind, as William Burroughs did in many different states of consciousness, its easy to see how everything we see and hear becomes a part of how we think about the world. How even the most educated person could start dreaming somebody else's dreams. Go for a drive on any city arterial and see what you don't see.
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Scooter ban ends monkey business on roads
MINI-motorbikes, petrol scooters, motorised skateboards and other motorised
toys will be banned from Victorian roads and footpaths by the end of next week.
The Age 11/12/2004
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Burn your cars.

I know for a fact that I would not be saying these things about our beloved combustion engines if I still owned one. Everybody hates an ex-smoker with a 'holier than thou' attitude towards life. I'm fortunate because public transport serves my A to B needs pretty much. Where I live was a conscious decision I made in relation to that. So is government policy when it comes to selling lots of larger style petrol driven cars. It was in the fifties when manufacturers decided to produce more of the American style larger vehicles instead of the smaller more economical cars. That is no accident.
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Law pedals scooter scare
MOTORISED scooter riders have been put on notice by police,
who have handed a 36-year-old Central Coast man fines totalling $944.
Newcastle Herald 29/12/2004
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"Those idiots who chain themselves to trees", a friend of mine says to me, "don't they know we need them. We've gone to far to turn back now. We need to use all the resources we have to get off the planet. What are you going to do next, trade your laptop in for a little rubber band spinning around a pinwheel?"

I had to laugh. He had a point though. Surely people are aware what we're doing to the planet is detrimental to our environment. Are we really asleep at the wheel? Or have we actually made a collective unconscious decision to ensure the survival of the few...in outer space? For the rest of us on the ground it seems it's going to take more then setting the wheels on fire to ensure a habitable planet. It'll take a true revolutionary to explode this machine.


GM Statement:
There will be 50% more cars on the planet by the year 2030.
"oh God" said somebody in the audience.


Well, you know, we're all doing what we can.




Author's Note:
Thanks FRSC, street artist: BANKSEY, Critical Mass, Adbusters and "other sources"

I know Che rode a motorcycle.
My only crime was to ride an electric scooter on roads I helped pay for in Australia.