HIGH GAS PRICES? FEELING MUGGED YET?

A rant, for a change. The price of gasoline went up 50 cents a gallon while I was en route to my caller class last night (a 2-1/2 hour trip). It will doubtless go up some more, since the media had been warning about it for some weeks before that refinery in Seattle caught fire and (curmudgeonly) provided a convenient excuse. Means my caller class now costs over $50 a week (and I’d feel a lot better about that if most of that cost was going to the instructor instead of into my gas tank) and is probably going to cost more. I feel like a mugging victim. Worse still, not only are the muggers going to go unpunished, they’re likely to be rewarded with my tax dollars, just like AIG was rewarded with my tax dollars after they ate 90% of my pension fund.

There are wider-spread economic effects, of course. I was working in southern Oregon four years ago when gasoline prices went over $5 a gallon, and the economy, which was shaky to begin with, just stopped. (Gas prices eventually went down—not as much as they’d gone up, of course—because the suddenly unemployed public wasn’t driving, period.) Will the new high price of gas slow recovery? Hah. I don’t think there will be a “recovery.” (And I will not say “I told you so” when I’m proven right. I won’t. Really, I won’t. No one listens to me anyway.)

So what do (or can) I do? Well, the message in my “Talkin’ Overpriced Coffee and Gasoline Blues” (http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=5385260), to abandon the car at the gas station and go home and take a nap, is tempting. Not practical, of course (but I’ll promote the song as much as I can anyway). Not drive? Well, I won’t drive as much, obviously, because I won’t be able to afford it. I may miss some caller classes (now that they cost $50-60 a pop), and I’ll enlist square dancers I know to attend the classes and let me ride into town with them—and I’ll set up a crew of dancers to practice on close to home. Today’s trip to the Influence Music Hall in Hillsboro may be my last “recreational” trip to the Big City for a while. On the job front, yes, I’ll go wherever I’m called for an interview (if I get called), but the jobs I’m going to be really interested in are the ones that don’t entail a long commute.

But it ain’t just gas (as I remind people regularly). It’s plastic. Everything is made out of plastic or packaged in plastic and all that plastic is made out of oil. So? I will revert to how we used to live in little (pop. 50) Dodson, Oregon, where there was no garbage service, and I will simply avoid buying anything and everything packaged in plastic or made out of plastic. No, my individual actions are not going to change the world, irrespective of what Margaret Mead said, and I’m not going to expect them to. I’m simply upset, and I’m going to do the lifestyle equivalent of putting my money in a credit union because I’m upset with the big banks. I’m upset at the big oil companies, and I will avoid buying their product to the extent I can. It will not change a thing, but I’ll feel better. In the end, all I have control over is me, anyway.

And of course there are opportunities. Every cloud has a silver lining (and silver commands a high price these days). I’ll record the talking blues at “the Influence” tonight, and if the recording comes out decent I’ll send it off to every radio station DJ (&c.) I can. Ditto for “Selling Off My Body Parts,” which I’ll also do tonight. Might as well kick off the Song-a-Month Experiment with something topical. And after that? Who knows? Are we having fun yet? I hope somebody is.

Joe