Drive

A long time ago I used to gas my truck up, roll down the windows, and drive. It was the time I’d do my heavy thinking, work on problems and issues, or just drop out and listen to the universe.

It was also my muse. My mind came alive thinking complicated story lines and complex characters or just a good opening sentence.

It was time I loved, it was time I mourned.

I sold my truck after it cost $55 to fill up. Even though it was something I needed to do, it’s something I still regret. I had that truck for over 13 years, and those years were some of the most important in my life.

The truck only had two bucket seats and now my family had outgrown it. So like a man getting rid of his favorite dog, I interviewed the man who bought it. He lives in College Hill, retired cop, has two sons in the military, and a son that promised to rebuild the engine on the truck. Something I knew needed to be done but I couldn’t justify. He always wanted a truck, and he was excited about it. He even paid the full sale price.

I watched that truck leave and stayed outside until it turned the corner. It reminds me how I watched an old lover that moved away leave me for the last time.

Now, my little car holds my family well.

Driving is now about the destination and not the journey. The chaos of the city around morning rush hour and everyone driving home. Radio screams talk, bad news, or heavy metal.

Tonight, I rolled down the windows, turned off the radio, and drove. Listening to the whisper of bullfrogs and crickets in the early evening air and watching a storm slowly roll in from the west.

And there is a word echoing in the back of my mind . . . Drive.

Angry thoughts from an angry man

I’ve got time to think and that makes me dangerous right now.

The ABC nightly news has a piece called record oil prices and they do it every night. Yesterday oil hit $123.53 a barrel with the national average of a gallon of gas increasing to $3.645.

Now I realize there are some that say, we’ve had cheap oil for a long time deal with it. Okay. What I have a problem with is the oil companies making billions and billions of dollars in a quarter, not a year, a quarter. Shell's first-quarter profit has soared to $9.08 billion and their CEO says it’s ridiculous.

I understand that the US is a wasteful country. People love their trucks, SUVs, and large gas guzzling vehicles. Ethanol was looked at to be the saving grace for fuel, but now it seems that everyone is blaming the food shortage on this. People, think of it like this. Corn used for ethanol is below food grade. It’s used for cattle. Now the farmers usually steep and boil the corn anyway. The ethanol companies are doing this and fermenting it also. It converts some of the starch and turns it into simple sugar converting that into ethanol. Now the process also converts a unit of Carbon Dioxide with every unit of ethanol produced. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas so this process needs to be captured and used in another process (soda pop, oil refraction, etc or scrubbed with algae).

Forgive me I’m going in several directions. Back to where I want to go.

Looking at the other issues: food prices, home foreclosures, unemployment; our basic needs are going through the roof and the middle class is becoming unable to support it. When a society loses its middle class, things get very ugly.

Think Russia before the Marxist revolution, think Germany before Hitler. When an affluent people loose their means, it becomes time for a revolution . . . and our leaders suck.

The Congress, Senate, and our God loving President have the lowest approval ratings in decades. The only thing they seem to be good at is finger pointing and arguing. Even the process of electing a candidate has become ridiculous.

So. Prove you can run a country. Get some ideas and make them work, or it’s the beginning of the end.

When a smug CEO of an oil company sets before congress and says, well we don’t make much money off a gallon of gas, and then changes his tune that we can’t change anything. Do what we do to terrorists. Because right now, the oil men are doing more harm to this country than the terrorists ever did. The next time an oil tycoon shrugs and smiles about the billions made in the LAST THREE MONTHS call in a Marine. On national TV (CSPAN) have the marine raise his gun to the forehead of these self made demigods and ask him once again what can be done to curb the price of gas. If the tycoon smiles and shrugs or even simply says “I don’t know” let the marine do what they do best.

Maybe that will be the start of the revolution. They are never pretty but neither is true change.