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.