…from The Globe.

…and The Herald.

More fare increases on the way! Read all about it HERE.

I would say, “write the GM of the MBTA and your local and state reps,” but I’ve tried that before–even providing links to all of the above and suggestions for what to say, and I don’t think anybody did it. So this time all I’ve got to say is: “suck it up, suckas!”

Actually, just to be informnative and solution-oriented, as we here at T-Rage always, always try to be (how could you have failed to notice?), I will mention, for those of you too lazy or incurious or cool to click on the link above, that the week of May 15th there are a number of public meetings sponsored by the MBTA planned for all over Boston and the suburbs. You can find the schedule HERE, although I won’t hold my breath waiting for you all with T-Rage T-shirts at the door.

My monthly pass is set to go from $44 to $62, seems like, but I can probably bike six months out of the year, which’ll save me almost four hundred bucks. I mean, I find the very thought of forking out nearly $750 a year for what I’m already paying too much for at the current rate, with no improvements in service as part of the deal revolting. There are no words for how revoltingly revolting the idea of it is to me.

I recommend just buying a bike instead. It’s cheaper, healthier, and a hell of a lot faster than the T.

Everything you see, with the small exception of the Whole Foods paper bags in the center shot, is up to code, by the way.

Just wanted to keep you all posted on my cycling adventures on the streets of Boston.

I missed a week of The Dig, but read in this week’s issue that there’d been a “soapbox” on cycling in Boston, by a cyclist who was apparently slagging off other less-skilled and less fashionably attired cyclists than himself.

The letter to the editor responding to his article rebuts some of his noxious assumptions about other cyclists, but the one thing I don’t agree with the letter-writer on is that cars and trucks are always more dangerous than other cyclists. All of the near-collisions I’ve had over the past couple of weeks have been caused by run-ins with other cyclists, most of them riding on the wrong side of the street, on one-way streets, where I was riding with traffic.

I also ride the wrong-way down one-way streets sometimes. This is one of the perks of cycling in the city, rather than driving. And I make use of sidewalks, too, when they are relatively clear of foot traffic. But I also try to be aware of all the traffic around me.

Just the other day I had three run-ins with cyclists that pissed me off. It so happened they were all riding the wrong way down one-way streets where there was quite a bit of traffic, and I was riding to the right of the traffic, going the right way.

Two of them were young guys, one all tricked out in cycling gear, the other was a princess from the South End who obviously didn’t want to get his highlighted tresses mussed-up on his morning commute, because of course he didn’t have a helmet on. Neither of them so much as looked at me—even when the princess cut me off, and we came inches away from a collision (and bike collisions are so awkward and embarrassing, and are almost guaranteed to mess up your hair). Neither made any attempt to get out of my path, either. One of them acted like it was his right not only to travel the wrong way down a one-way street on the wrong side of the road, but also tried to go to my right so that I would be on the traffic-side, and have to swerve into traffic to get out of his way. It’s a little much.

Almost worse than these head-on encounters is getting stuck behind other cyclists. Especially in rush hour, there’s nowhere to pass. I don’t blame other cyclists for this. If there were proper bikepaths or bike lanes, there’d be a better way to pass.

The closest close call I’ve had yet was when I got stuck for several blocks in evening rush hour traffic behind another cyclist, who decided, without signaling in any way, to stop dead to let another cyclist cross from a side street in front of her. I had to brake hard, and my chain came off. She had no idea I was behind her, never looked back, and went along her merry way oblivious that I’d almost just smacked into her.

A big problem with urban cycling is it seems like everybody’s got his own set of rules—or more like expedients. And because the environment is so hostile to cycling, cyclists become hostile to the environment. But there is also a bit of the Bostonian attitude that says that everyone is an obstacle to whatever little end you’re aiming at.

I do agree with the letter-writer that Boston’s cyclists should lose the holier-than-thou attitude, but I have a feeling that those with attitude have it whether they’re on or off the bike. Personally I ride because it’s cheaper than taking the T. I mean, I’m so cheap, these are the lengths I’ll go to to avoid paying a buck-twenty-five for the T. Seriously. I know I’m not cool. I know I look like a dork in my fourteen dollar Styrofoam helmet. I have no illusions about any of that.

My solution is to try to find an idiosyncratic, out-of-the-way route where I’m as unlikely as possible to encounter cars, pedestrians, or other cyclists.

From townonline.com:

State Reps. Elizabeth “Betty” Poirier (R-North Attleboro), John Lepper (R- Attleboro) and Virginia “Ginny” Coppola (R-Foxboro) have just been informed that the MBTA has recently formed the ‘MBTA Rider Oversight Committee (ROC).

This committee is construed to include a diverse group of riders, advocates and MBTA employees that will communicate the requests and concerns of all riders as well as provide recommendations to the MBTA in order to assist the MBTA in providing affordable, safe and quality service.

Any individual, who is interested and able to make a firm commitment to the Committee’s mission, should iterate their interest in possibly occupying a current vacancy on the ROC. Interested individuals should keep in mind that the time commitment will include the ability to meet on the last Monday of each month, from 4:15 to 6:15 p.m., as well as the ability to participate in subcommittee meetings throughout the month for about an hour and a half (1.5 hours). Also, if a member so chooses, a member may serve on more than one subcommittee.

In addition, in an attempt to assemble the most productive committee possible, the MBTA is requesting that interested individuals provide them with some information (questions listed below) simultaneously with their letter/email of intent. The questions are as follows:

How often do you use the MBTA (and which services)?

What is your primary reason for using the MBTA?

How long have you been using the MBTA?

What do you think are the most important issues facing the T?

Why would you be a good addition to the committee?

If you are interested, e-mail your interest as well as to the answers to the aforementioned questions to Bburke@mbta.com or send a letter to Barbara Burke, MBTA, 45 High St., Boston, MA 02110.

I love this new idea the GOP’s come up with to ease our “pain at the pump.” Hand out a hundred bucks to every motorist in exchange for finally getting their hands on the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Nice.

I mean, who’s gonna turn down a hundred bucks? Free money, right? And in the end, who really cares about the wildlife? I mean, what have the Caribou done for you lately?

I often sit around worrying that Boston and its surrounding suburbs might not have enough “luxury housing” yet. Here’s an article about transit-oriented development from the Globe that reassured me that the impending “luxury housing” shortage was being addressed in Newton. Whew, what a relief!

It may surprise you, but here in Dorchester we have “luxury housing,” too. This row of condos here across from the cash checking place and a Dunkin Donuts was advertised as luxury living.

What makes it “luxury living” you ask? Is it the prime location at the industrial end of Mass Ave., just minutes from South Bay Shopping Center with its luxury shops like Marshall’s, Target, and Old Navy? Well, that could be part of it. But clearly the biggest draw, and the most obvious perk of living here is the luxury KFC less than a minute from your door. Open your window and you can actually smell that luxury fried chicken the Colonel’s cookin’ up!

Still have yet to emerge from my wireless crisis, so I was back at Bates Hall yesterday when in came a most annoying woman in head scarf and sunglasses. She was either one of these Western women who choose the veil or an overstuffed unglamorous version of the late Audrey Hepburn. I am guessing the former was the case. And the fact that she was clearly a convert was annoying, because when people are born into a religion, it’s somewhat understandable that they would continue to practice it, but converts are always out to prove something. And, as my dear old dowager friend, whom I met and mooched off of years ago in Budapest, Madame von K– used to say: “stridency in anything is unattractive.” I have not found all of her maxims to be true, nor even many of them, but this one definitely is.

Anyway. So she was annoying right off the bat. And I want to make it clear that it has nothing to do with the scarf. I have nothing against scarves. I have a colleague who is an authentic Muslim from the Middle East, and she wears the loveliest scarves. And she is really the loveliest person. See, so some of my best friends wear headscarves.

But people have an aura as surely as they have an odor. And this woman’s was rancid. She was conspicuous in the first place, but made herself even more conspicuous by the way she behaved. Bates is clearly a reading room, which means most people are reading in it. It’s a quiet place. Well, she sits down—at the table across the center aisle from mine—and starts ripping single pages out of her daily planner. One by one. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip.

OK, whatever. Clueless, right? Unfortunately, it just happened that this was the day I left my headphones at home. Meanwhile she busied herself very self-importantly ripping out the pages of her planner, and then ripping them up.

By the way, there’s a custodian going through now. He just paused, looked around, and then threw a bottle into one of the little metal waste paper baskets here. It made a huge sound, reverberating through the hall, which seemed to satisfy him. He sauntered to the other end of the hall, repeated the gesture, and then sauntered out. And they say the working class male is inarticulate. Well, people get their point across, don’t they? One way or another.

So back with Jameela the Ripper. I got used to it. I’m very adaptable like that. Then, after about forty-five minutes, this nutty-looking wiry little woman with a mop of frizzy grey hair came scrambling in, and went right up to Jameela—I thought sure we were gonna have a Bates Hall bum fight—and asked her if she minded her sitting down right across from her! Right across from her! It’s unheard of! Especially when there were free seats that were not right across from her! But The Friz had a laptop, and the tables only have outlets on the inside aisle-side, not the outside wall-side. It’s just one of those things. I mean, it made some kind of sense, at least.

And the Friz was nice enough about it. I mean, she could’ve just sat there. There’s no rule that says you have to ask someone’s permission to sit RIGHT FREAKIN ACROSS FROM THEM in a library reading room, after all.

But, check this out: Jameela the Ripper didn’t even acknowledge her, but immediately—without a moment’s hesitation she started very violently, noisily gathering her things up. I was like, damn, girl. Chill. Ol’ Friz is not that bad. You’re lucky Mohamed’s not here. (But, come to think of it—I have never seen Jameela and Mohamed in the same place at the same time—could it be a sort of wacky “Krippendorf’s Tribe” type thing, where Jameela actually IS Mohamed? The mind boggles.)

So here Jameela is gathering up her stuff in a noisy huff, and Ol’ Friz starts waving her hands in Mohamed–er, Jameela’s face (she still has her big, mysterious Audrey Hepburn sunglasses on, by the way) and Ol’ Friz is shouting, “Hey! Hey! You in there? Miss? Miss?!?” But Jameela refuses to answer, or even to look at her. “Yo! Lady! Can I sit here? Do you mind?!? Hello! He-lo-o-o-o-o!” Ol’ Friz is still waving her hands in Jameela’s face, until finally Jameela’s got all her little scraps of ripped-up paper gathered up and stomps off to another table, like, three tables away.

So was it a real victory for Ol’ Friz, or just by default? QOTD. I’ll tally all votes and get back to you.

Anyway, I got a little chuckle out of the whole spectacle, at least. But Ol’ Friz got the last laugh. That’s the thing about crazy people. So she ended up watching some kind of video, without headphones, on her laptop. It was just louder than whisper volume, which was the perfect volume to bug the holy hell out of anyone in her immediate vicinity.

Another day in Da Hall. Gotta love it.

So I was riding through the South End on my way back to Dot yesterday, and, lucky for me, it was the day before garbage collection and I happened to have my camera on me. I have wanted to record for the world, and for posterity, what the view from a million dollar condo in the South End is like two days out of the week:

Gorgeous, innit?

And this is a random sampling. I didn’t have to go looking for torn bags and rubbish strewn about. It’s all over the South End. Now, I don’t live in the South End, myself, but I still find this scene utterly atrocious and shameful for a city that insists it has some kind of class.

Last year I did a little investigating, and found that new “rubbish rules” had been issued in 2002. Unfortunately, this is one of those meaningless actions government takes so that they can say they’ve addressed an issue, when in fact they have done nothing to solve it.

The “new rubbish rules,” first implemented in 2002, and renewed in ’05, state that “There must be sufficient metal or durable plastic barrels for storing of refuse generated in building.” But on the next line, the compact says: “Disposable 2-ply [or heavier] plastic bags may be used instead of trash barrels for curbside trash collection.” This translates roughly to: “throw your trash out the window onto the sidewalk and street. Make sure it is strewn about all over the area in front of the building.”

There is absolutely no point in saying in the first breath that you should have adequate metal and durable plastic containers, and then in the next that you can substitute plastic bags for them, if you wish. Obviously—I mean, just look at the pictures—plastic bags don’t work.

Now, when I’ve brought this up with residents, they kvetch that if they spring for a trash can somebody will steal it. Or, where are they gonna store it? Or what’s to stop the rag pickers from digging through trash cans and tossing out the contents, too?

OK, so live in filth two days a week in your beautiful million dollar brownstone, and pretend that your neighborhood doesn’t look like Fresh Kills. Trash? What trash? Why, I don’t see any trash!

But this is not only a civic issue, a quality of life issue, and an issue of people pussying out on the challenges of urban living, of efficient and effective waste disposal, it’s fundamentally a public health and safety issue. And other cities have dealt with it, and dispose of their waste with some dignity. We’d do well to emulate them.

The first thing you have to do, though, is admit you have a problem.

It really is part and parcel of a public culture that takes little or no real interest or responsibility for its public spaces. I mean, seriously, how can you spend seven-hundred-fifty grand for a tiny condo in the South End, and live waste-deep in garbage two days of the week, every week, all year round? And still have that South End attitude, to boot?

We should start with more stringent recycling regulations. No more of this la-tee-da! Do I feel like recycling today? Look at it like this: the fewer recyclables you have in your garbage, the less likely those looking for recyclables in your garbage are going to be to find them, and the less often they find them, the less often they’ll come back looking for them, and after not finding them at all, they’ll stop looking altogether. Trust me. If we can train pigeons with “negative rewards” we can train the neighborhood rag-pickers.

That’s a start, but barely.

Cutting down on food waste is another thing. When you throw out large amounts of food, once your garbage has been riffled through for recyclables, the next wave will be animals and people rooting around in them for food. Use your garbage disposal, or make a concerted effort to cut down on food waste.

But for a comprehensive solution, the city has to get involved. What’s needed are uniform waste disposal containers, provided by/purchased from the city. The containers should be fitted specifically to refuse-collection trucks. Containers and trucks that go together like this are infinitely more sanitary than the anything we have on our streets today. They are also infinitely more efficient.

At the very least, rubbish disposal should be systematized, which means as little variation on a theme, as few individual options as possible. Another thing it would be infinitely easier to do with a better system is fine offenders. It’s a city government’s dream.

But here’s the thing. The city doesn’t give a shit, because as far as it knows, it’s citizens don’t give a shit. Maybe there’s a rumbling every now and again. But this situation has been the norm for so long now, that we seem to think it’s normal. It’s not. But the rule is: you’re willing—even eager—to live on a garbage heap, they’re certainly willing to let you.

When I sent my letter to Commissioner Casazza last year pointing out the need for a change in the “rubbish rules” themselves, I got a rapid reply from an underling that read: “Please contact Code Enforcement with this issue at 617 635-4896. They will send an inspector out and possibly fine the responsible parties.” The problem was, of course, precisely that no one was in violation of any code, and that, still, there was rubbish all over the sidewalk.

But it’s good to know they have some bureaucrats sitting around waiting to fill out the appropriate paperwork, generating more rubbish, should any violators of the virtually nonexistent rubbish rules ever actually be found.

Sitting outside the library this morning a few minutes before it opened, and looking out over Copley Square, I counted twenty-five cars, trucks, and SUVs, backed up, waiting for the light on Boylston to change. Every single one of them had but one single occupant in it. I think it’s a shame that it takes $3-per-gallon gas prices for the government to come up with real incentives to use public transit.

Now, apparently, there’s been a move on the part of the legislature to give individuals who spend over a certain amount on public transit per year a significant tax rebate. And it’s about time. Even the President, trying to score some points for his party in an election year, is touting alternative energy (hydrogen is his new energy source of choice) and incentives for hybrids. Is this the same president who, a couple years ago, was offering huge write-offs for SUVs? Yes, I think it is.

Whatever. People need a good kick in the balls, that’s for sure. The legislature should raise the driving age, too, while they’re at it. No one has come up with a good reason not to. In fact, the only reason I’ve heard, from our privileged classes, of course, is that American idol wannabes wouldn’t be able to get to their auditions if the driving age was raised to seventeen-and-a-half. Well, boo hoo. I mean, the obvious reason for keeping the current driving age is that youngsters work, but the youngsters whining about it don’t, for the most part. They’re the ones driving flashy Beemers and Lexus SUVs to their all-important after-school Idol auditions. Outlaw American Idol, too. Problem solved.

I have some sympathy for working people, from dual-income families, where mom or dad can’t shuttle the kids around, but that’s not really my problem. My problem is that the rest of us have to pay, in countless ways, for their inability to budget their time. And why do we have to pay? Precisely because their inability to budget is based on higher consumption, and we give absolute preference in our society to those who can—and don’t hesitate—to consume more. We are a consumer culture to the core.

I’m not saying anything everybody doesn’t already know, of course. The question is, does it have to be this way? And if so, why? I took a little hike around Walden Pond a couple weeks ago, and they were selling t-shirts in the gift shop with Thoreau’s injunction to “simplify, simplify, simplify” on them. When you have to buy a t-shirt with this message on it in order to get it—well, it’s a little ironic, innit?

I remember a few years ago there was a big “simplify, simplify, simplify” movement on. But mainly it meant the switch from Laura Ashley window treatments to Ralph Lauren. You don’t simplify by cutting down on consumption, you simplify by changing brands, just like you lose weight not by eating less, but by eating more low-fat foods.

Bitch bitch bitch. I know, even I get sick of hearing myself bang on about it, but come on. When carpundit asked, in apparent earnest, why I didn’t just get my own wireless connection, I thought it was obvious. If you live in a triple-decker and somebody has a strong enough signal for everyone, why not split the cost three ways? Why isn’t that our first impulse, rather than throwing money at price-gouging telecom giants who had no compunctions for years about stealing our roll-over minutes? What’s wrong with this picture? In lots of little ways, it’s the war of all against all, isn’t it?

One things for sure, it’s harder than ever to simplify. My dad was one of these comical old coots who was always coming up with overcomplicated ways to simplify things. He really seemed to believe that at the end of all this was some sort of suburbatopia of perfectly climate-controlled, totally automated homes run by clapper technology, sitting on self-mowing, self-raking lawns, with self-shoveling drives, and so on. The best part of it was his cooking. He had perfected exactly three dinner entrees from his big Betty Crocker Cookbook since his retirement that he would make over and over and over again for my mother, night after night after night, year after year, in a never-changing three-day rotation. They were minor marvels, exact replicas in three dimensions of the picture in the cookbook he had taken them from. And that was obviously the point for him, although my mother confided that she liked the breakfast she prepared for herself while dad was still in bed better.

My point? I forget. Hmm.

I guess even when we simplify, particularly through systemization, we usually find that it’s not the magic bullet, after all. My dad seemed to desire a completely controlled environment, the same one that seemed, understandably, to stifle my mom. The goal was never simplification, but control of his environment. We see the same thing with technologies that are touted as means to simplify our lives, when more often than not they come to represent a false sense of security, or control, in a world gone crazy on account of the self-same technologies creating the proliferating problems they advertise solutions for.

Oof. I’m getting a little dizzy. Stop the world, I’m gonna throw up!

Anyway. I’m not about to move out to the wilderness. Too many mosquitoes. Simple is good. Mosquitoes, not so good. And don’t get me started on the black flies. I lived in Baxter State Park in Maine and worked on the Appalachian Trail for ten weeks one summer in my early twenties, and the mosquitoes and those demonic black flies made a meal of me every day and night—I probably lost two quarts of blood daily up there. Never again.