A Shocking Murder and Crafty Career Plan

On Sunday night, after I got back from Oakland, Tom and I watched Chris Paine’s documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, which focuses on General Motors, which produced the zippy little EV1 and then pried every last one of them out of the hands of their pleading owners and literally crushed the cars, claiming insufficient demand.

It turned out that GM’s “survey” of potential electric-car owners had emphasized potential drawbacks of the cars, drawbacks that owners, who loved their cars, disputed.

California had passed a zero-emissions vehicles mandate that would have required a certain percentage of cars by a certain year to be emissions-free, but, under pressure from auto manufacturers, the California Air Resources Board repealed the mandate.

CARB, at the time, was headed by Alan Lloyd, who some months before had signed on to head the competing fuel cell initiative, which is to say he had a whopping conflict of interest.

Upset electric-car owners actually staged a vigil, spending 24 hours a day for many days peering forlornly at their little cars behind a fence on a lot. Eventually, the cars were trucked away and destroyed. It does make one want to cry.

I have ordered up a simple AT&T phone that does almost nothing besides make phone calls. I hope I’ll come to love it in time, as I did the one that is now dead on my desk. And, per Lisa’s kind comment, I will also of course be ordering five Hummers soon, since I did go 44 years without even one. Or maybe I will at least buy plastic laundry soap containers with gay abandon, though probably not. I’ll buy them, but I’ll feel vaguely guilty.

Not long ago I mentioned sometimes feeling like jumping off the bridge, perhaps a figure of speech for most, but a genuine possibility for those of us who in fact live near the bridge. I should clarify that I actually never feel like jumping off the bridge. It’s more a matter of suddenly becoming completely unable to function, which I think falls into the depression category, even if I don’t necessarily feel depressed when it’s happening.

For instance, yesterday evening. After I got home from work, I meditated, and then I had intended to clean the bathroom, but suddenly everything was impossible and I got into bed with the latest Harper’s Magazine, and figured I would not: wash the dishes, do my stretching, pump up my bicycle tires or take a shower, and certainly I would not clean the bathroom.

At some point, the chore triage is performed: What must I do? I must give Hammett his medication. (This morning was Hammett’s final dose of Amoxidrops this time around, plus his monthly squirt of Advantage, to kill fleas, which as far as I know he does not have, but our vets at Mission Pet Hospital favor it, just in case.)

Another absolute must-do is tooth-brushing. I might go two days without showering and soon I may build up to more than two days; I might go a week and my embarrassed boss will have to do an intervention, but since I have been old enough to seize a toothbrush, there can’t have been more than one night that I went to bed without brushing my teeth, if that, because going to bed without brushing one’s teeth is disgusting, and will result in all of one’s teeth dropping out, clinking on the floor like Chiclets, and in the use of pesky dentures.

My parents were unable to stop me from smoking cigarettes when I was a youth, not to mention that which probably has something to do with my dreadful memory and complete lack of ambition, but they were extremely persuasive in regard to tooth-brushing.

I appreciate my parents’ efforts in regard to the cigarettes. It must have been frustrating to watch a child insist on doing something so harmful.

Lately I have come to feel a genuine bit of regret over what my teenaged brain endured, moderate though it was by some standards, such as those of my peer who took LSD every day for a year. His name, possibly not bestowed by his parents, was Space.

Last night I knew that at some point I would get up to brush my teeth, and then I wondered, per my practice of taking as many positive actions as possible, what other little constructive thing I might be able to do while I was up, and then I suddenly leaped out of bed and took a shower after all. It comes and goes just that fast.

I received an extremely kind compliment last week, when someone said I should be an NPR announcer and added, “ People must tell you that all the time, right?”

I said, “Actually, no one has ever told me that, but I totally agree that I should be an NPR announcer.”

It would be nice if you could email NPR and say, “I’ve decided I’d like to be an announcer. I’ll be in on Monday; thanks.”

I wonder if you can work your way up to being an NPR announcer if you start as an NPR janitor.