When I was 15 I spent some time with the school debate team. I wasn’t a member but my friends Jim and Tim were, and I helped them prepare for the competitions. The subject that year was nuclear power.

It was worth the time. Not only did we learn to be less nervous speaking in public and to be more courteous about what our opponents claimed; it taught me how to do satire. I learned that if I took a position with which I disagreed and then defended the hell out of it, what emerged was funny.

I’ll show you what I mean next week. I’m polishing and abbreviating an essay about cars which I started in 2003. But for now I’ll speak straight.

I don’t own a car. I walk for transportation. I have deliberately chosen my addresses so that vehicle ownership is not required (or even advised). But that does not mean I dislike automobiles.

In fact I love them. I was born in 1950 and raised in the suburbs. We were all about cars. Gas was 30¢ a gallon. Cars were our privacy, our club house.

But I hate traffic. We didn’t have much traffic in the 60s compared to now. It bothers me to see Bay Area residents, who pay more to live here because it’s so great to enjoy the place, hunkering down inside their homes and offices because there’s too much traffic, it’s not worth the hassle, who wants to deal with the bridge on a holiday weekend …?

And I loathe imbalance and injustice. It’s just not fair how rigged our culture is for cars and their attendant industries.

The fact is, my love of cars is nostalgia. And nostalgia is kind of like masturbation; it’s a harmless private indulgence but it’s not very attractive in public.

Imagining a transit system free
to all and drivers paying what it takes
to get their gas and highways honestly,
creates a dream of realignment, breaks
up clots of promised traffic, reels in stress
upon a spindle, handing us the clue.
Envision with me taking space up less
and feeling like there’s no admission due.

Attractive as that is, it’s not enough.
I’d uninvent belief and mayonnaise.
I’d have us walk. I’d jettison the stuff
we buy on credit and the many ways
we type us. Obviously I’m alone
with this agenda, hearing angels groan.