I had my hair cut. Ten years of old growth, swept away. I loved my dreads, but they were heavy in the heat. And I got the cue last week. I don’t want to bow to appearance, but I got the message: gray dreadlocks looked like affectation to the others. My hair’s short and clean and curling now, and my scalp feels free. I like this.

Three days have passed since the last entry, but it feels like a month in me. I’ve gone from solo saboteur to tyro-conspirator to propagandist. And I have a date with Jane. The colors today are acid-bright; the shapes are so sharp, they’re almost distorted. The world is an alien, miraculous place.

A crew of us committed miscellaneous mischief at the park Saturday night. Small rocks in accommodating hubcaps. Dilutions of paint in windshield washing liquids. If neither of those were possible, there was always the tiny message, etched with a key into the paint on a fender. We let some air out of tires. We bonded a bit. It was less focused than my old work, but it may have more future. In the course of it, Jane and I interacted some. We began to have eye contact. Even on that moonless night, I could see her eyes. I guess they’re hazel, but they looked green to me. Olive green rims, bright green inside, with a squiggle of copper running around them. Awesome eyes.

I was early to the wall today. Something about my new light head: I woke up on my own and with energy, and that put me on my bike, and that took me to the wall. Janie happened to be the next to arrive; she took off her helmet and her hair was brown. I guess the red and green were temporary and she washed them out, but all of a sudden the woman had shiny dark hair. And I had new hair too. So we laughed about that and acknowledged the coincidence, and both of us smiled a lot and acted awkward. Then Bert and Spot arrived.

Things peaked for me around 3:30 this afternoon. Joe and I were talking about Saturday’s escapades when Janie joined us. Ike arrived a minute later. As it happened, we had over half an hour before any of us got a call. We had an erudite discussion.

It began with Ike complaining about dangerous driver courtesy. He’d just seen another near accident, when a driver in the curb lane stopped inappropriately for a pedestrian. You know what I mean: the stopping broke the flow and even startled the ped, who was kind of forced by politeness to walk into the intersection, in front of the pausing car. No surprise: the inner lane driver did not stop; luckily the ped was experienced enough to anticipate the misunderstanding. But the event brought Ike’s sister’s death back for him. Five years ago she was mowed down by a guy in a black Pontiac, after she’d gotten off and then crossed in front of a bus. That’s why Ike hates cars.

“So you’re a practical autophobe,” I said as a bulb lit invisibly above me, “and I’m more theoretical.”

“Autophobe?” This came from Janie with a grin.

“It’s not accurate. It’s just what came to my muddling mind.” I hoisted myself onto the wall and held my bike with my right foot on the seat, my knee up. “Car-razed?” We laughed all around, but then I got my words together.

“When I was finishing college, over a quarter century ago, I did a thesis on misanthropy. This was the English department across the bay, so it was of course lit-based. I compared Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens to the old man on the hill in Tom Jones to Gulliver in the fourth book of the Travels. The first two were typical misanthropes; formerly wealthy and popular, they’d lost their money and their so-called friends, and they retired in bitter disappointment. Prototypical hermits. But Gulliver was a different sort. He’d never actually been injured or disappointed by his fellows. His misanthropy was objective; he became convinced of mankind’s inferiority by comparison to a better creature.

“I’m not putting you down, Ike, because what you’ve been through is awesome and I respect it. But my hatred of cars is more like Gulliver’s misanthropy. It’s not based on any bad experience I’ve had. It’s based on knowing, through history and imagination, something much much better.” At that point the bike wobbled under my foot, and it started to keel over. Janie caught it for me; as she righted the bike I put a bit more holding pressure on it with my heel, and she and I looked in each other’s face.

We all talked about subjective and objective car hatred for awhile then, until calls started coming in for deliveries. Ike and Joey got jobs first. When my radio chirped, Jane said she’d like to continue the discussion some time. It was easy for me to invite her to dinner tonight. It seemed easy for her to agree.

So I’m no longer a solo car terrorist. I don’t even think I’m part of an anti-auto conspiracy. That’s all looking like petty vandalism to me right now. I’m thinking about it, and it seems to me that the Loma Prieta quake taught us all that the only sure way to move around here is on the water. But that lesson didn’t lead to any real plans for more ferries. The stop-the-traffic bridge prank didn’t make anyone realize how vulnerable we are to these freeways and bridges. Those are much bigger deals than I can bring off, even with my new posse.

Nah.  I’m not pessimistic – in fact, with tonight to look forward to, I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been – it’s just that I’m realizing that I can be most effective as a propagandist. I can do more, and like it more, if I write it.  Somehow I forgot about that.