Ihardly ever go anywhere. It's one of the chief advantages of being a writer. The commute is short. I wake up. I triangulate coffee, brain and computer. I start working. On days when I'm feeling trés engagé, I might even climb out of my pyjamas.

Recently, however, I have been getting around a bit more than usual. It has to do with 50th-birthday parties. My parents go to funerals. I go to 50th-birthday parties.

I hadn't realized quite how many baby boomers there were until I had to go to every single one of their 50th-birthday parties. No wonder everyone else finds us so tedious. We do go on. The next person who tells me about how good the music was in 1968 gets it right between the eyes. And, although one would have to say that being 50 is better than being in a casket, there are times when I envy my parents. At least when they go out, they don't have to keep saying, "My. I never would have guessed. You certainly don't look dead."

The 50th-birthday parties that have had a direct impact on my life during the past several weeks -- all 323 of them -- have been scattered hither and yon. Some have been outside Toronto, if you can believe it. I am not accustomed to such exotic adventure. The farthest afield I usually go is the recycling box on our back porch. Every so often, I drop another scrapped draft of a novel into its depths. This is called the creative process. Then, following the traditional nervous breakdown, I get back to my desk in the basement, before I get lost.

But I have of late found myself travelling (I use the term loosely) on highways -- usually with a funny card and a gift-wrapped bottle of Metamucil in the back seat. And while no one could be more of a stranger to the collector lanes and exit ramps than I, there are a few observations on the subject of transportation that perhaps I can usefully make.

My opinion on these matters, I hasten to say, is not due to any perception on my part that I am more intelligent, or observant, or progressive, or environmentally sensitive than my fellow citizens. It's just that during the past 10 or 20 years -- or, to put it another way, during the time I have been reworking the opening chapter of my latest novel -- I have spent almost no time on roads and expressways. My perspective, therefore, might have a kind of Rip Van Winkle-like clarity. Possibly, I bring a wide-eyed naiveté to the table. I profess no expertise and certainly I mean no disrespect. But there is one question I would really like to pose to the people who commute to and from cities by car every day and to the governments that think that people commuting to and from cities in cars every day constitutes a transportation policy.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm just wondering. Are you crazy? Are you out of your minds? Do you have the brains you were born with, or do you suffer from some new and exotic disease that has siphoned off your native intelligence and replaced it with something that appears to possess the cognitive capacity of marshmallow? Do you actually think -- apparently not, but let me press on -- do you actually think that sitting here, bumper to bumper, day in, day out, represents very much in the way of human achievement?

Look you. One person per car from here to doomsday. None of them going anywhere fast. And what conclusions can we draw about mankind from this permanently clogged, still life of a highway? How noble in reason? I don't think so. How infinite in faculties? A bit of a stretch. In form and moving how express and admirable? Well, maybe: If we ignore the part about moving.

So here's what I think about the Kyoto accord. Even if we weren't all belching toxins into the air, even if we weren't all piling up a debt of environmental catastrophe that our children and our children's children will have to pay, even if our way of life were not so obviously unsustainable, things have to change. They have to change because we'll all die of boredom if they don't. Believe me, you don't know how unspeakably dull a vista can be until you've crawled across the upper reaches of Toronto on the 401 -- as several million supposedly rational people do every day. Brains cannot remain unaffected by such frequent exposure to such hideous banality. No wonder they kept voting for Mike Harris.

Let's not even take the environment into account. Let's not worry about ecology. Around here, the status quo can't continue for a much more down-to-earth reason. It can't continue because it stopped moving about two years ago. We can load five CDs into the player in our car, and that's no longer enough to get the groceries. We have to repeat the Ring cycleif ever we want to go out to Ikea. Fortunately, we never do. We're 50, after all, and as far as we're concerned, Ikea can come to us.

Talking books are a great help, of course, but it now takes me the better part of The Iliad to drop off the dry cleaning. And so here's what I think of the Kyoto accord. Bring it on. If you don't, I'm going to scream. You can only sing "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall" so many times. I feel that as reasonably advanced primates we have to reconsider the way we move ourselves from A to Z, if only because the other day -- on my way to yet another 50th-birthday party -- it took me two hours to get to B.

Being old is bad enough. Surely we don't have to be stupid, too.