"The human brain is a humid bubbling culture of hypocrisy. The warm juices of our feeling seem to be riddled with the disease. The person can only be without contradiction in the way the petrii dish is without growth: in a sterile and suffocating environment."

I read the words once...twice. Depressing. The picture was no help explaining the purpose of the sign. The top left corner was missing, and a rip arced downward from there, severing the point off the top of a griffin's wing. I assumed the missing masthead would have been the title of some band or social justice event.

The griffin was iconic and crude as if it came from a mythology lexicon. A small symbol of some sort in the margin enlarged on the Xerox machine exponentially. I'm not sure really why it caught my eye.

"Yeah, you can bet he was sorry that he bought generic--" Chris then noticed that I'd stopped dead in my tracks and she'd continued walking for half a block without noticing. "What the...hey! Come on!"

There were some other crude scribblings, then the word "hoof" in the bottom right. I imagined that this was the logo of some marketing company that specialized in telephone pole flyers. I generally hate flyers stapled to telephone polls, but since giving up driving I'd noticed more details of the signs around me. Most of them were uninteresting, using mostly sex and shock value to sell like any other sales medium.

This increased awareness of what's around me was one small benefit of giving up driving for a year. Mostly my abstinence has been to my benefit, and there was only one frightening night where my lack of mobility had life or death consequences.

The strange idea on this sign, though, stuck with me for a while.

* * *

When I mentioned my plan at the office, my coworkers scoffed at me. "You're gonna do what?"

"Give up my car for a year, as a New Year's Resolution."

"Why would you do that?"

"To save money, mostly. I seem to be incapable of keeping to a budget on my own, so the only choice I have left is to cut down on my overhead."

"You don't have car payments, do you?"

"No. But the insurance is a hundred a month, and I could use an extra $1200 at the end of the year."

"Well, " went the typical response, "I could never give up my car."

I, like the majority of Portlanders who work downtown, take Public Transportation for my daily commute. Parking downtown is so prohibitively expensive that one has to be considerably wealthy or pathologically hooked on the convenience to drive to work downtown.

My office is so close to my apartment that, despite the other options, I often walk to work. It is a 25 to 30 block walk to the Hawthorne bridge, over the bridge, then 5 blocks further. It's a 45 minute walk, 60 minutes if I take the scenic route. When I tell others of my proximity to the office they usually don't consider 50 blocks to be "walking distance" and can't imagine losing an hour of their day for a walk to work. A lot of times, I find these same people will expend 90 minutes of their time going to a gym (commute, work out, shower, return home) to do 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise. Most folks aren't too good at seeing the whole picture, but I've told myself I'm not going to be so stuffy about everyday hypocrisy.

The ultimate goal of the plan is to save enough to buy a house, and my half-hearted personal pledges are not having any impact whatsoever.

What's the problem here? The problem is that I make a good salary, have a minimal overhead, and yet at the end of the month I am left with nothing more than I started with. Well, that's not entirely true. I am left with perhaps a couple new toys, and memories of good music, good food, good theater, and good times with my friends.

I know I have the mental capacity to learn how to manage my money. I can design large, complex computer systems and networks. I can read a piece of literature and discuss the style, meanings, and historical context of the work ad nauseum. I can be air dropped into any forest of the Northwest and readily identify the trees, shrubs, and general classification of the ecosystem I'm in. However, when it comes to money, thinking about money and managing my finances, Lord help me, my eyes just glaze over. I become acutely aware of cobwebs that need vacuuming from the corners of the room, the letter that is long overdue to a good friend, and my ficus tree whose leaves require individual dusting.

The shameful fact is that I am dense about money because I have no interest in it. Everything I know has grown out of natural interest. I consider myself blessed by a natural curiosity and joy at learning new things of all sorts. When I make attempts to study the workings of money, however, I feel as though the life force in my soul is withering away with each passing moment, instead of feeling enriched as I do with other topics.

* * *

The Number 19 leaves downtown, crosses the river and lands very quickly into one of the more posh neighborhoods that are "close in" as they say. It winds around the impeccable streets lined with upper-upper-middle class homes, passes by Reed College, and eventually emerges in the grimier Southeast commercial area that is 82nd Avenue. Riders are quiet, well dressed for the most part. The Reed influence on the line ensures a mix of young adults with a disheveled but non-threatening look.

I get off at 82nd for the connection to the 72, which comes almost immediately. Hopping on the 72 is like stepping into a bus in an entirely different city from the 19. The crowd is raucous, yammering mouths with missing teeth, flailing arms here and there to illustrate a point, and laughing. Children are poking one another and pretending to be annoyed. There is scarcely an empty seat, but I persuade a guy with headphones to move his bag from the seat beside him.

It takes me a moment to get comfortable with the whole scene and appreciate it. These crowds are most likely headed for the Clackamas Towne Center Mall and the surrounding shopping district.

A couple stops down the driver pulls over to let folks off and on, and I hear a woman's voice bark, "Jason!" which turns just about every head on the bus. She is a young mother, but not too young. The sound does the job of stopping her 2 year old dead in his tracks. He stands there halfway down the aisle, not looking back, perhaps wondering if he can pretend he did not hear if he doesn't turn around.

Mom pays the driver and lugs her knapsack and stroller down the aisle until she can grab hold of his arm and navigate him to a seat. In that moment I saw how it would appear in the book.

She saw the bus approaching and made a quick check that her money and her son were ready for boarding. The doors opened and he enthusiastically jumped on ahead of her. Busses were infrequent enough in his life to make them still very exciting, and this made it very difficult for Lucy to keep him well behaved for the ride.

As she paid the driver he saw a little girl in the next-to-the-last row holding the same model plane that he owned and loved. It was exactly the same as his except this one was red! His excitement got the best of him and he went tearing down the aisle.

"Jacob!" barked Lucy. She surprised herself with how loud she shouted, and noticed all the eyes turn toward her, some sympathetic and some much less so. Jacob had stopped, "Good boy," she said to herself. She went a little flush as she lugged her knapsack and folded stroller down the aisle. One of the things that vanished with her entrance into motherhood was her ability to be discrete. She missed terribly being able to blend in and just observe.

* * *

Someone in the group would suggest, "We could all meet in Timbuktu at, say, eight o'clock?"

"Um, that's not gonna work. Spencer doesn't have a car."

"Well, actually, I own two cars. I just don't drive."

Without further explanation folks will perhaps speculate that I have some environmental/religious objection, or maybe I don't know how. Sometimes, depending on the crowd, I will clarify, "I'm not insured right now." With this they might be left thinking, "Is this guy such a bad driver that he in uninsurable?" Trying to guess what people think and assume about you is an endless and impossible task, so I do my best to stop those trains of thought as soon as they start.

One of my cars is a '64 Ford Falcon, bought when I was 16 and chariot to most of my treasured memories. She is a big blue hunk of American metal with big windows, spacious comfortable seats, and a simple engine that I could take apart and put back together with a crescent wrench and a couple of screw drivers.

My other car is an '83 sub-compact Isuzu I bought from a girlfriend. I never actually wanted the car. She wanted to get rid of it, needed the money, so I thought I would do her a favor and take it off her hands. The relationship didn't last very long, and the sour taste left in my mouth after our parting returns a little when I look at the car. I have tried to sell it a couple times but no one seems to want to touch it for more than a couple hundred bucks. My only hope at this point is to get some credit trading it in when I buy my next vehicle.

* * *

The latch clicks and the Venetian blinds bounce loudly up against the inside of my front door. The tomatoes blossoming in the center of the courtyard send me off into the summer afternoon.

I head down the block, rounding the corner house with the terrible bright red painted cement porch, and then the steady ascent toward Hawthorne boulevard. There are countless variations in the route I can take through the Southeast neighborhood to the commercial center that fans out from Hawthorne and 39th.

The route I choose today takes me past a big white Greek revival mansion with a sign out front reading, "Sisters of Reparation." It has a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the expansive front lawn and the curtains are always drawn. In my nearly 3 years living in this neighborhood I have never seen anyone enter, leave, or tend to this colossal estate. It is exactly the kind of place that is fertile material for the young minds of the neighborhood. I can imagine the rumors and ghost stories that are whispered amongst the children.

As you take frequent walks in an area you begin to get a deeper understanding of what's going on around you. There are no less than a 10 houses in my vicinity where the curtains are never open, and even the adult mind wonders what goes on there.

* * *

"Rooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaoooooowwwwwww."

I am in the Quad of my Alma Mater. The sun is beaming down on a footbag circle dancing on the speckled concrete. The clock tower is two stories taller than I remember and is now made of glass. It appears to have been turned into some sort of McDonalds Playland. Children are riding spring-anchored plaster horses, careening down slides, and crawling through plastic, multi-colored tunnels that look like a twisting, pollopted large intestine.

"Rooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaoooooowwwwwww."

What the heck is going on here? Where is that noise coming from? Is the foundation of the tower giving way?

"Rooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaoooooowwwwwww."

I gradually gain consciousness and find myself in bed, under the blankets which have twisted around sideways. One of the kids on the slide was my cousin Jeannine, it occurs to me, and then I realize it is Rasputen making this terrible noise. Raz is my 14 year old Tabby roommate, and he is somewhere in the dark apartment making a God-awful noise.

I turn on the bedside lamp and cringe at the pain in my unadjusted eyes. As soon as I'm able to tolerate the light I look over the side of the bed and I get a glimpse of him scurrying under the bed. Something is definitely not right. Though I am nearly blind without my glasses I could tell that the way he was moving was not right.

"Rasputen, come here boy." I lean way over and rap the wood floor with my fingertips. "Come on boy, what's the matter? Upset stomach? Come on, boy. Come here."

More scurrying and howling and I figure this is nothing I will be able to handle from under the covers. On my knees I can see the flash of his eyes behind the rolled up carpet and dead VCR that collect dust under the bed. He does not look interested in going anywhere.

No matter what I do or say Raz is either unwilling or unable to come out from his hiding place. I grab one of the bedposts and pivot the bed away from the wall. I squeeze between the wall and bed but am still unable to get to him.

He finally makes a run for it, and out from under the foot of the bed he emerges. His movement is disjointed and crippled. It appears that something is very wrong with his right front leg. It juts out stiffly from his torso and he drags it behind him like dead weight.

He hovels down the hall and into the living room. He stops, breathing heavily, and a dark spot begins to form on the carpet underneath him. He seems to look up at me with a look of shame for having lost control of his bladder.

I stroke his head and begin to feel incredibly helpless about what is going on. Did he have a charlie horse? Did he jump off something and break his leg? I have lived most of my life with cats, but they have always been someone else's responsibility. Without a car, it then occurs to me, how was I going to get him to a vet? Even if I did have a car I didn't have a clue where a 24 hour vet was.

In that moment I felt like an extremely neglectful pet owner. I mean, I have a cat here who is undoubtedly "getting on" in years, and a health problem is something I didn't anticipate? What kind of clueless loser am I? Part of the reason I was taken by surprise, I suppose, is because I never made a conscious decision to be a pet owner. In fact, Rasputen is not my cat. I took him in when my brother's family adopted a dog who is apparently unable to look at a cat without seeing a meal.

With the new dog in the house Raz had to be kept behind closed doors or outside for his own safety, and thus began living a solitary life. I offered to take him in at my "no pets" apartment, and we have become roommates without my having thought through everything included in the responsibility.

Raz makes a clumsy run for the kitchen, where the contents of his stomach empty onto the linoleum. I know I needed help fast. It's a little past midnight and I say a silent prayer that Tara is home and awake.

Tara is a neighbor in my complex and a consummate cat person. She owns three herself, one of which was stolen from a couple in another part of town. She deemed them unworthy of feline husbandry for some reason or another, I don't remember exactly why. I wonder for a brief moment if her estimation of me will decline sharply when she learns of my helplessness and lack of preparation.

When the two of us sit on our front stoops on warm summer afternoons, grilling dinner and playing cards, she will talk at great length about her cats and their behaviors, but not in a sad "old cat lady" kind of way. She is in her thirties, smart, interesting, and can be counted on when there is an animal in need.

A wave of relief comes over me as I see light and hear her television as I approach her front door. "Oh, hi," she says when she finds I am the one knocking.

"Hi there. I'm sorry to bother you so late, but there's something wrong with Rasputen and I was wondering if you would come over and have a look at him."

"Of course," and she emerges from behind the screen door in sweats, T-shirt and bare feet.

"Look at his eyes," she instructs, "see them dart back and forth?" I hadn't noticed, but they were indeed looking left, then right. Left, then right. Over and over again, appearing out of his control. "That's usually a sign of a neurological problem."

"What do you think it is?"

"Oh, I don't know, could be a stroke or something. How old is he again?"

"Old."

"Yeah."

She looks him over a bit more, he does not appear to be in any sort of pain, just a great deal of stress.

"We better get him to the vet. I know a great place that's 24 hours. Do you have a crate?"

"Yes."

The ride to the vet seemed to take forever. In fact I was getting a little pissed off because I figured she was not taking us to the closest place, which might be putting Raz in more danger. What if he needed to see a vet quickly?

The cab of her truck is very small, and the pet carrier barely squeezes in and onto my lap. I have to move it around regularly so that she can shift gears. I keep talking to Raz to make sure he is still with us. The holes in the carrier and the way my arms are pinned down only allow me to scratch a 2 inch square part of his back, and I wonder if the continual scratching in just one area is starting to annoy to him.

The people at the vet are great, very friendly and reassuring. I tell Tara that she does not have to wait around, that I can take a cab back. She doesn't go, however, which turns out to be a good thing because she is able to ask much more intelligent questions than I when the vet finally speaks with us after the examination. The vet tells us that it could be a stroke, diabetes, or some other glandular episode. They want to run tests and keep him for observation for a day.

The ride back if filled with stories of pet illnesses past, and I begin a private mental preparation for either having to authorize Euthanasia if his suffering cannot be stopped, or caring for a crippled pet. Neither one is a pleasant thing to think about.

By the time we get home it is close to 2am. The stress and adrenaline still have me feeling wide awake and full of energy that needs to be spent. As we stand in the courtyard between our front doors our conversation is winding down. I thank her profusely. She offers to take me to the vet tomorrow, and I tell her that that won't likely be necessary. I explain that since Raz is actually my sister-in-law's, she and my brother will assuredly be on hand to help out.

As the moment approached to say goodnight, something completely unexpected and unprecedented happens. Tara moves closer, puts her open palm on my chest, and begins kissing me passionately.

I am shocked awake by a cat tail striking my face, and an unfamiliar cat tail at that. My eyes open and for a moment I have no idea where I am or who's bed this is. As the events of the previous night come flooding back to me I look over at the clock: 6:15am. I unwrap my legs from hers and make a groggy walk back to my place. I have 30 minutes to clean myself up and get out the door for the first day of my new job.

* * *

So here I am at the end of the experiment, one of the few New Year's Resolutions to which I've been faithful. What exactly have I gotten out of it?

I've learned that everything I really need is within walking distance. This, it occurs to me, is more the rule than the exception for the world's population. In a democratic sense, I have been more human this year than those around me. I don't need to go to Home Depot for brackets or electrical wire. The little hardware store 10 blocks down the road has everything I really need, and when I have a question I don't have to hassle tracking down an available fluorescent orange vested clerk in a 2 square block area warehouse and hope that they have a minimal familiarity with their stock.

Nowadays, the greatest inconvenience I have to deal with in my daily life is carrying kitty litter and beer, the two heaviest items I ever purchase, two blocks back from the corner market. I often make a separate trip for just these two items, since they can become too unwieldy when combined with other groceries. I must look like I'm having some sick sort of party.

Here I am now, middle of February, and I'm surprised to find that I am in no particular hurry to get insured and on the road again. This can be in part attributed to my natural inertia. But also, having witnessed car culture from the outside for a while, there's just not very much I have to live without being on foot. The biggest things absent from this last year were camping, trips to the coast to smell the salt air, and visiting my brother and his wife who live an hour away.

Now I wait for a reasonably dry day so that I can drain the old oil from the Isuzu, change out the plugs and filters, and give the battery a charge.