We're Due Relief

My brother-in-law just bought a bigger spa than their current one, and I was enlisted to wire it up. Apparently, electrical engineers are also electricians. Nevermind the fact I told them electricity rates will see double digit increases in the next few years, but in came the new, larger spa. Energy is, still, dirt cheap.

But as he was driving me to the big-box home center to buy wire, I looked over to see a jacked-up F350 extended-cab truck next to us in the turn lane, with obvious outside tread wear on his front, BF Goodrich Mud Terrain 285-75's. Driving it? A lone alpha male.

Out here in the South Sacramento hinterlands, mudders are apparently needed to negotiate the ratty, hole-strewn collector roads the county obviously neglects in favor of the more favorable Land Park and East Sacramento roads. But this guy's tires were clearly suffering from uneven wear; his back tires were even, suggesting he either doesn't know or doesn't care to rotate them, or that he was completely unaware when he bought them that they'd only last 9-11,000 miles in paved suburbia.

I couldn't see anything obvious in the back of his truck, but likely the only thing he ever carried in the back of it was a 40 lb. bag of dog food. I see this a thousand times a day on the 41st street, highway 99 overpass; a thousand trucks with nothing being hauled in them. They are just commuter rigs.

So I'm supposed to believe that people like this jerkoff are due 'relief' from high gasoline prices? That somehow 'speculators' or 'left-wingers' are perpetrating this whole high gas thing? Or that his wife, whose head barely clears the steering wheel on her Explorer, also deserves relief?

She bought that new Explorer back in '04 because it makes her feel safe, and so that her kids are safe. This is the 'ol bullshit safety mantra. It's bullshit, because she bought it not because it makes her feel safe, but because it makes her feel powerful. How many of these small women have you seen two and a half feet from your rear bumper on I-5?