Having Gas

Help me, Spiderfox!

I can’t deal with our continually rising gas prices. I can’t afford driving to work where they pay me not enough to afford to drive to work. It’s killing me. Please help! –C. C., Pleasanton, CA

Dear C. C.,

If it is killing you, I think you need to move to a better place, quickly. I recommend Darfur, or perhaps you’d like to consider Myanmar. Once you’re there or in one of a host of other possible relocation sites I can share with you, you’ll find that the cost of gasoline is not your biggest problem anymore. What a relief from gas.

Just for the record, I believe that current gas prices, while affecting all of us some and some of us more than others, are in fact a more accurate representation of the true cost of gasoline than what we were paying in the past. The system couldn’t go on forever the way it was. We’re talking about a finite resource, and sooner or later things had to change. We Americans certainly weren’t going to make the jump because of our foresight. We required something like $4 per gallon to make us begin to trade in our monster SUVs for SUV hybrids, and we’re still a very long way off from redesigning our lives to greatly reduce the need to drive long distances. But no one’s asking me for help in that category right now, so I’ll just pocket that rant.

Short of helping you move away, which I am happy to do, C. C., I can’t be of much assistance with your problem. You know how hard it is for me to sit one out, but I have to pass on the gas. To distract you from your personal gas problem, I’ll tell you a little story about my friend Animal Avenger.

A.A., who in my opinion selected her professional name carelessly, also unthinkingly or at least unwisely went against my counsel in deciding to take out an ad in the white pages for her services, especially an ad that lists only her initials. Approximately 80 percent of the calls she fields are requests for locations and times for the “next meeting.” I said, A, if you offer help, people or, in your case, animals, are going to come looking for it. You don’t need to advertise. Nevermind that her clients can’t read.

So when somebody called yesterday claiming to be a friend of Bill W., Animal was about to hang up with her usual disclaimer, “You’ve got the wrong number,” when in fact they don’t but that’s another issue. But her superior instincts made her pause long enough to hear the caller add, “Bill Wilson.”

Now, you may not know who Bill Wilson is, but we superheroes do. Bill Wilson is like the Brian Epstein to our Beatles. Without Bill Wilson, many, perhaps most of us wouldn’t exist or, at the very least wouldn’t be in the line of work we’re in. Bill is the kind of guy who makes things happen. He connects people, dots, lines, you name it. He’s a social networking genius.

It turns out that this friend of Bill Wilson, Chuck, was starting a YouTube channel on animals and climate change, and he was looking to do a segment on methane. He wanted Animal to pay a visit to a local cow ranch and in an undercover operation replace the cow’s corn with grass, which the animals can actually digest, thus cutting down on the methane gas. He wanted to film the whole thing, which made me nervous. But Animal was game because she always is if an animal is involved and can be helped.

So she sneaks over to the farm at night with a cartful of sod rolls, and I don’t know any more details than that but suffice it so say that she manages to load up the corn and roll out the sod in the troughs and get away just as a convoy of police cars, lights flashing, begins speeding up the road to the farm, and that’s when Chuck’s crew turns on the camera lights and rushes the farmer’s door to get it all on film. The farmer is heaping mad, and somehow Chuck films him ranting about the high price of corn and how he can’t afford to have people stealing it from him.

And this is where we get back to you, C.C. You see, you and the farmer are focusing on the wrong thing. He’s complaining about the price of corn, but he shouldn’t be feeding corn to his cows, so it’s irrelevant. And you’re complaining about the price of gas, which fittingly enough is connected to the high price of corn, but we all shouldn’t be so reliant on gas anyway. The whole world needs to change. We need to work near where we live so we don’t need to drive so much. Cows need to eat grass, and we need to eat a lot less cow, and if we weren’t so dependent on driving we wouldn’t be growing corn for ethanol and the price of corn would be much more reasonable.

So, C.C., the next time you want to complain, think about the root cause of your complaint, and complain about that instead. And if you need help, contact me, and maybe I’ll say yes.

That’s what I said. I’m Spiderfox.

©2008 Spiderfox

Image of gas prices by faithx5, 2008, Creative Commons license. Image of cows by Sunny Ripert, 2005, Creative Commons license.