DB: Horse and Buggies

This Sunday marked my birthday and as it does once every handful of years it simultaneously fell on the day we have set aside for Fathers. Any other holiday that tried to infringe on my special day would find distain on my lips and pen. However, if it were not for fathers, there would be no birth for me to celebrate, so I try and contain my annoyance at the conglomerated picnic type celebrations that ensue on these rare years. This year I called my Father a few weeks in advance in order to arrange a sort of co-op get together that we both could enjoy.

We made plans to barbeque at his home, where I spent my teen years in Bonney Lake, which according to google maps is 17.1 miles from my front door here in downtown Tacoma. I guess he does not read my blogs, because he was unaware of my long gone Honda Civic and therefore was surprised that I could not drive myself to the suburbs. Herein we began a conversation about oil and he informed me that the democrats were preventing us from drilling into the wealth of oil we have right here in our own nation. In the past, I would have began a long dirge of opposing information and spirited passionate conflicting data, but in the spirit of Father’s Day I held my tongue and allowed the man who helped shape me to speak his mind. I suppose this strange level of respect is a symbol of maturity, nearly as much as the strange level of body fat that did not fall off after Christmas. I suppose in some ways I like knowing what the ole-man thinks, even if I read most of it the next day on a blog by Chuck Norris.

My dad loves Chuck Norris, he taught me karate as I was growing up, and we used to watch Walker Texas Ranger back before we moved to Washington, when I was still being home schooled in Colorado Springs Colorado. I told my dad that I didn’t need a car living here in the city, I like the exercise of walking or biking where I need to go, plus its cheaper. He found this hard to believe. He said simply “you need transportation.” And that seemed to be the end of the conversation.

When I think about it, on certain levels, he is right. Even if the bus is what gets me out to Bonney Lake for my birthday party, that’s transportation, and its running on something, fuel or bio or whatever, its burning some shit to get me where I wanna go. If I’m going to be super honest, there isn’t a grocery store I want to shop at close enough to my house, and I borrow a friends vehicle every few weeks to get my shopping done, and there are things like cat food and litter that I am never ever going to be strong enough to bike home. I think to myself, “man lived for centuries without fossil fuel, I don’t need it.” But even in my own idolized urban existence there are no horse and buggies and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that occurs in the alley outside my house isn’t really realistic for me.

My dad called me back a few days later to say that he wanted to buy me a scooter for my birthday. He said he was proud of me, and in a really practical way he struck a balance between my aggressive anti consumption and his near religious four hour commute. On line I found some scooters on Craig’s list for sale in Kirkland. Conscious of the irony, I borrowed an old Ford Guzzler truck on Sunday morning, picked my dad up in BL and drove that beast @ 65 mph all the way to find out they weren’t worth the price the lady wanted for em. I think I spent about $50 in hypocritical shame’s worth of gas. Oh well, at least I got to spend a few hours with my dad on our simultaneous special day.

Let me know if any of you all are looking to get rid of your sweet scooters, pretty soon all of us will be practicing straddling our transport. By the way, how much do horses cost?