An Ethologist's Notebook - Marginalia of a Post-Modern Culture

Reported 1999-01-04 23:15 by JRoyale

That's Black Gold... Texas Tea

Don't you just love $11 a barrel oil, that's right - for 11 smackeroos, the bad old Arabs will beg to sell you 55 gallons of the stuff that moves the world. Kinda funny that we used to call the stuff Black Gold. HAHAHAHAHA, what a turn about from the 1970's when we were kissing their big fat hairy asses while we lined up in seemingly e_n_d_l_e_s_s lines, every other fucking day, just to buy gas.

I remember a story back then about some poor Mexican immigrant family that got blown to Kingdom Come when a spark found the trash barrel filled with the gas sitting in the laundry room. They were hoarding gas. I guess they thought that if price went even higher they could make a killing on the black market. Only the U.S. Border Patrol forgot to tell them that the reason gasoline works is that it is exothermic. So much for that budding capitalist and his brood.

Of course, back then unemployment was sky high while we lived with an inflation rate of 18% and a short term T-Bills 3 points higher than that and we actually cared that Latin Americans were sneaking across the Rio Grande to work our fields and mop our floors. They were stealing our jobs and that made us pissed, even tho' no Real American™ was gonna soil their hands by working the soil and pushing a broom. 'Cides, we didn't have time back then to farm and clean, we each told ourselves, we had to spend all our time sitting in line to buy gas.

Now we got so much time we waste it by hanging out on the Internet and we got so much oil we don't know what to do with it. Hell, as soon as I finish this article, I'm gonna get in my fuel wasting SUV and just drive around until I need to visit a gas station. I might just be to damn lazy to do all that driving and so I might just drive up the gas station and open one of the fuel pumps, or three, and just pour all the gas on the ground. Then I'll call up that King Sheik dude on my cell phone and laugh my ass off at him.

What I should really do is be like the rest of the country and trade in my fuel hogging Ford Explorer for the completely over the top Ford Expedition. A car so big that is actually might be larger then the Caddies of the 1950's, with their people slicing tail fins. I'll get it with a V-8 and bitch at the salesman cause Ford doesn't have a V-10 like the DodgeKrautRamTough™ the newest in German PanzerFamilyWagons.

Maybe that's what I should get -- forget all the Detroit steel and plastic and go for the newest of the New World Order toys -- a Lima, Ohio built Abram M1A2 Main Battle Tank... 69 tons of hardened alloys and equipped with a standard 1500 HP turbine and a 120mm high velocity smooth bore armor piecing cannon that is just what I need to fight rush hour traffic. With a top speed of 72 klicks an hour and a mind boggling 2 gallons to the mile, it is the perfect accessory for the late 1990's. And wouldn't it be a nice thing to have if the Arabs ever get uppity again.