Why irony blows my mind and destroys things

I stopped in at Swan's to visit with Joe on Wednesday night (and last night too, but that's another story). Lana, who is a really nice girl is the only other pseudo-permanent employee there was working the floor while Joe was behind the wood. She's really nice, but said something on Wednesday night that really made me think.

As you know, Joe and I don't own a car, so during the summer most of our mobility is done on the bikes. I stuck around the pub until closing time and then Joe and I got our bikes ready to ride home.

Lana: "Did you ride your bike here? Are you riding it home now?"
Me: "Er, yes. I ride my bike everywhere."
Her: "Really?" (sounding incredulous)
Me: "Yeah. Riding at night really isn't that big of a deal either. And you can't get stopped for drunk biking."

I was thinking about this as we walked out the door. She thinks I'm nuts and sometimes I do feel like a big Luddite without a car (like, dude, where's my horse?). That was until I realized she was hopping into a half ton truck for her commute back to Cranston, a suburb of Calgary about 45km away at the south end of Deerfoot Trail. She's spending how much on gas to get back and forth from a service job? A slave to the vehicle because she has no other options to get around?!

I then realized, quite happily, that she's the crazy one, not me. I was about to say something about it until I figured out that her reaction to my statements would be about the same as everyone elses -- incomprehension.

The car slaves are normal, I'm not. I bike through rush hour downtown and see all the throngs of humanity locked in their comfort boxes, billowing out poisonous and greenhouse gases, going nowhere fast. And I think - how can all of this shit be considered NORMAL? It looks like frickin' madness to me. A madness that might eventually destroy us. I think if you could get any of these ardent commuters out of their metal 'reality deprivation' bubbles and get them to see how futile and doomed the system is, they might start thinking about options. It's not like the roads are going to get LESS congested over time (unless gas goes up to $5 a litre or something. I think you'd be starting to see quite a few more bikes around at that point). It's not like there's much more capacity to keep expanding the private vehicle transportation system bigger and bigger either -- even though the developers and politicians would have you believe it. It's not like we'd be able to plunk a brand new infrastructure in place overnight. We're talking decade(s).

I just can't fathom it though - why have we built our entire infrastructure around oil and cars, knowing full well that petrocarbons are a finite resource? We've known it all along. I guess it was because it was always plentiful and cheap, but now it's not and things are only going to get worse. Our entire way of life is dependent on that black gold staying plentiful and staying cheap.

"What's that you say? It's FINITE? What? I've never heard that before."

YOU DUMB FUCK! You've known it all along but were just too lazy to find something better and cleaner.

Meanwhile, we're releasing millions of years of trapped stored carbon sinks into the atmosphere in the span of decades, and there are people still not convinced that it's going to have irrevocable effects on everything that exists on this planet?

We've screwed ourselves due to our own laziness and ineptitude. And people won't change until they are absolutely forced to. And Lana will keep doing her 90km round-trip everyday because it's NORMAL. I'm appalled.