Cars make no sense to me. I understand that they get people from here to there and that they are an internal combustion machine (whatever that is). I guess I just don’t understand the sense behind them. What sense does it make to drive a machine into downtown Edmonton and pay to park it for eight hours while it sits idle, doing nothing? While it’s sitting there doing nothing, you’re paying insurance on it too. Don’t forget the fuel you paid for to get it downtown so it can sit there and do nothing. Never mind the taxes we all pay to build and maintain the roads the car drives on to get to its parking stall and do nothing. Maybe we should be teaching our automobiles some cards tricks or something to while away the hours in the parking stall. By the time we get back to it at the end of the day it may have hustled a few dollars from passersby to help cover all the money we put into its keep.

It’s silly isn’t it? A car spends 90 percent of its time in disuse but people tend to pour a large percentage of their income to maintain it. Some even make that inactive time for their cars more comfortable by allotting cars their own inside space. Cars just get to go to their rooms and rest after exertion. You would need rest too, if you had to take that long three block walk to the convenience store. Oh wait, you had your car to take you those three blocks so I guess you should just go do more work. You’ve saved the energy for it so you can work longer hours so you can make the money to keep your car happy.

It’s a vicious circle, our car-centric society. We need more expensive cars so we work more so we can afford expensive cars to park those cars for most of they day near the offices where we work to pay for those cars so we can seem like the type of people who drive those cars.

Keri lives and walks around in Boyle Street.

Myself, I walk. That allows me the time to look around this world and see what it is that I really value. I don’t work overly many hours because I would rather spend those hours with my husband and our cats. That’s something that can’t be bought even with a shiny paint job.