It's your world; I'm just redesigning it

I have recently conceived of a comedy act, a one-woman show. I keep thinking of bits, riffs, gags, that sort of thing:

One is a series of people driving around Boulder in their cars saying, "Who me? I wouldn't dream of riding a bicycle on bike-to-work day. Bikes are for losers."
"Yeah, that's why God gave me a job and a car. So I don't have to bike anymore."
Or: "Lopez girls [here an elegant strum of long fingernails] don't do bicycles."
Or even the more banal: "But I'm meeting so-and-so for lunch and have to pick up the groceries on the way home."
"I don't want to put a helmet on my hair."
"I'll drive to the gym at lunch today. Really."

We've just discovered the joys of riding together as a family. I'm so happy my daughter is ready to ride out into the world together, on streets and everything. But Boulder's funny: I spend a surprising number of thought cycles on whether what I'm doing is harmful to the environment. I don't even like going to Denver very often if I can help it. And yet I was noticing how I drive to east Boulder County far more than I ever did. If I didn't go out to Erie once a week or Lafayette or Westminster from time to time, our car wouldn't have exactly 100K miles on it.

I've heard that some people see the hand of God in everything, but some other people just see the finger.

"And when I complain I get thrown out of the restaurant"
-Neil and Tim Finn

I remember getting quoted in a newspaper article saying, "Not having a car makes it easier to not use a car." This was at my most idealistic time, when I was strongly influenced by my lack of a car. I considered for ten minutes the possibility of starting a catering business after I made some party snacks for a woman for whom a friend and I had done some organizing. But not having a car put the kibosh on that in a hurry. The day I had to do my shopping to cook for the event, it snowed 20 inches. It was just about impossible to get around, but I went out and bought my groceries, waited endlessly for a cab that never came, and then trudged home through the slush with my 40 pounds of groceries. This was long before the time of the ubiquitous cell phone.

Haven't you noticed that just about all the conversations on cell phones -- I'm talking ninety-five percent or so -- contain information about where the person is, as if they just can't resist telling you they're calling you from a place where they wouldn't have been able to call you before cell phones (or BCP, as in "Pong was popular about 30 years BCP. Pokemon came along about 10 years BCP."). And people today find it easier to say BCP than "Fin de siecle," or even "turn of the century." [sorry -- that last was a bit of Douglas-Coupland channeling. I'm just making it all up; I can't help it. I'm reading jPod. I love his books. :-)]

Do you ever think about whether you're fashionable? Would you carry a copy of The DaVinci Code on the subway (or is the subway "for losers"?)? Would you have carried a copy of The DaVinci Code two years ago?

Speaking of Coupland's latest literary work, it just occurred to me Monday that with alarming rapidity I am seeing Subway sandwich shops proliferating where other businesses have failed to thrive. I walked through a little town not too far from my own city at 2 pm one hot afternoon and found all the cute, family-owned joints empty and silent, but four people milling about in the Subway shop. They're like the Wal-Mart of fast food -- surprise! it wasn't Mickey D's after all! And it occurred to me at that moment that in just about every new development, I see a Subway. It's like moving back to California and remembering fleas. They're everywhere. You can't escape until you move away. I don't know where you could go anymore.

Close with Billie Holliday singing "God Bless the Child That's Got His Own"

but wait; there will be more