Yesterday afternoon, we bicycled to a phone store two miles away, hoping to get Gina a new cell phone. it was a warm, clear day.... Yesterday afternoon, we bicycled to a phone store two miles away, hoping to get Gina a new cell phone. it was a warm, clear day, a little before dusk, and the ride was pleasant along the back streets we had chosen.

When we arrived at the mall, well before closing time, the phone store was locked up, though there were customers inside. Rather droopy-looking customers, it is true: a sign on the door explained, in neatly inkjet-prined but misspelled and ungrammatical text, that the store was closing early because the air-conditioning had broken.

Makes you wonder how people did business in the several thousand years of commerce before 1950, doesn't it?

And makes you wonder how profoundly and broadly pervasive energy dependence is. The phone store had no real back door. They couldn't just let the outside air blow through and cool the place. They had a couple of odd boxlike blowers sprouting lengths of flexible ducting that people would take turns standing in front of, but the room had no circulation even with that.

So a modest failure shut down the store. A modest failure, but a complete dependence.

We got back on our bikes, threaded our way through the knots of struggling car traffic--ever so much more dependent on supplied energy than that phone store--and rode home through the twilight breezes...phoneless but free.