Sus Domesticus

When my nephew was visiting last week he left evidence of a midnight snack run in the bathroom -- the wrapper to a chocolate All American Creme Pie.

I've eaten hundreds of these over my lifetime, although these days I really don't do that any more...but I did as a kid. The difference between 1979 and 2010, however, is that these pies today are cheap -- dirt cheap -- can be found in every gas station and corner store from Seattle to Miami, and aren't made with sugar and butter but with HFCS and soybean oils.

Growing up we had only Hostess Fruit Pies. Remember those? They were awesome! -- but I seem to remember they weren't nearly as accessible as pies are today. I ate my share, I'll tell you that right now...but I don't remember either me or too many other people around me looking like this, though:

Is this the new normal here in our greatest nation on earth? Men who look like they've swallowed a beach ball?

And compare this belly to the belly on the 9-year old girl on the homepage of Cutiepie.com, makers of said pies. She's thin as a rail. Think she could or would eat those two pies she's holding up? If she did, she'd get nine hundred forty calories, well over her entire daily allotment of saturated fat and enough corn syrup to stun a cape buffalo. She'll be diabetic by age thirty if she keeps this up -- yet according to the manufacturer they're only made with real fruit and only the freshest ingredients!

Tell me. How fresh do you think the sodium stearoyl lactylate is in these pies. And tell me. What the fuck is stearoyl lactylate, huh? Is it something you have in your cupboard? Damn -- even the blogger spell check gets all buggered up with stearoyl and lactylate. They aren't foods. They hardly qualify as words. Yet we're slamming them down and ending up with bellies like the photo above.

We are becoming nothing more than a new breed of habitual upright bipedal Sus Domesticus. And this is why I'm supposed to subscribe to a single payer health care system?

The One That's Never Consumed

Yesterday I had two separate discussions about residential solar PV retrofits -- one in my front yard with a neighbor and the other at a neighbor's party. Seemingly, more people are becoming interested in PV, considering how it took almost two and a half years to get two people to talk to me about my PV system and now twice in one day.

I will say it again: it is far more cost effective to reduce your consumption first before engaging in PV. Always. Weatherproof your doors. Seal any electrical outlets along outside walls. Consider new windows. Or a new HVAC system. Crush out all those phantom loads like phone chargers and stereo subwoofers. Not only will you live more comfortably, you will most certainly find it to be a better value; the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one that is never consumed.

A retrofit PV system will never offer any comfort, unless you consider the ridiculous notion of "goin' green" comfortable. It won't provide shade and it will never keep you warmer in winter. PV might make you feel good, though, by you knowing how you are "saving the world" while everyone else around you is actively destroying it...it makes you feel important.

Yep. Clearly, only I am willing to save the world, ride a bike, use a cloth grocery bag, and get power from the sun, while all of you pollute the earth with your meat eating, your SUV driving, your Drill Baby Drill mantra, and your plastic water bottles.

Go ahead, Insania, keep on thinking that.

Deskfast

My particular role in electrical engineering at SMUD doesn't involve a whole lot of field work. I'm at a desk the majority of the time. My exercise comes from commuting to work, not from work.

I spend the better part of most mornings trying to goad my co-workers to go out to lunch. It can be a challenge, particularly as apparently there is no one else on this third rock who is willing to eat anything as I do. One doesn't like onions, the other doesn't care for Mexican, the third won't eat pork, and the fourth claims that Vietnamese food crawls and one should never eat anything that's still moving...that sorta thing. I eat anything. Anything.

It's a bitch, really, to get more than just one person to go out to eat, but even with just one it is always a much better day for me as I relish conversation, food (whatever it is), and the time away. I don't like to eat there in my cube, I don't like deskfast...but quite often I do end up eating alone at my desk, and I've noticed quite a few people do this, too.

This is an interesting social phenomenon for sure, and I'm wondering if this culture contributes to American obesity. I wonder about my own weight -- why am I so much larger than every South Korean? Every German? When I visited these countries they seemingly ate as much as I did, and I most certainly ate the same things they did. What is it about U.S. food and/or food culture that leads to such an epidemic of obesity?

Is it deskfast?

Consumptive Units

You, remember, are nothing but a consumptive unit. A consumptive unit conditioned to consume consumables. You've been conditioned to consume in myriad ways, with retailers always trying new ways to keep you consuming more.

And as it comes to food, you are very keen these days, due to our mild economic slowdown, to keep an eye on what you eat. I find this interesting.

I wrote, now nearly two years ago here on my Monologues, that as people spend less on food due to our economy the fatter they will get, and the reason I suggested this is because you can buy more calories from processed foods than from fresh foods. I suspected that people will load up on cheap shit rather than good food and keep paying their iPhone bill in lieu of eating better, and they have.

And, as the linked article suggests, "consumers are using store circulars to find sales, are stocking up on foods that are on sale, are surfing the web for manufacture discounts, and are clipping coupons at prodigious rates."

The dumber you are as a dumb fucking consumer the better the bottom line for food processors, the better Wall St. does, all the while in a recession the lunacy of coupon clipping (that is, saving a few dimes on already overpriced processed food) should be obvious. Keep on thinking you are saving saving! money when buying those Gogurt yogurt tubes with a coupon. Please, keep on doing it; our economy depends on you.

I have never once been offered a coupon in a store for a head of green cabbage. Why is that? And why doesn't Grimway Farms offer coupons in the Sacramento Bee for their carrots? I could probably find a coupon for a box of Zatarin's Beans and Rice, but never a coupon for beans or rice.

Carry on my fellow consumptive units, carry on!

Ordinary People

So how many of you, while discussing world cup with others, joked about how North Korea probably practices with grenades instead of soccer balls? How if the goalie gives up a soft goal he'll find himself on the business end of a SKS firing squad?

I've been rooting for North Korea. I like the fact that this closed nation whose players have never even seen a cell phone can compete in a sport consumed by multi-million dollar contracts, endorsements, training facilities, performance drugs and the efforts to mask them, and the like. They really didn't stand much a chance to beat Brazil but they did score a goal against them...and a convincing goal at that.

Imagine what it must be like to be a North Korean soccer player scoring a goal in a world cup match -- most certainly the highlight of any athlete's life but perhaps even more from someone who's not connected to the lucrative world of professional soccer. Just a regular guy. Of course, I'm not so sure this was the case but then I'm just imagining it here on my monologues.

I like the idea of these national competitions because for a brief time the world most certainly feels less isolated, closer together. We stop to watch a North Korean forward bawl his eyes out during the opening of his first ever match and we realize again that they are ordinary people:

I don't think for a second that wars would ever break out among any of the competing countries during the course of this competition. It would be perhaps even better if Afghanistan and Iraq could have fielded teams capable of competing. Imagine if the U.S. played Iran in a quarter final...imagine.

Once we see others as humans, as people, and less as pajama-clad Mujahideen, ragheads, gooks or wetbacks, hey, maybe we gain.

Hang Ups

"Is it realistic to think that, at a time when the residents of Beijing are hanging up their bicycles for cars by the thousands every day, that our residents are going to hang up their cars for bicycles en masse?" -- Lon Anderson, managing director of AAA Mid Atlantic, complaining about what he calls "the war on motorists" as the District of Columbia expands its network of bike lanes.

It's not realistic at all. At all.

An observation: among my 6 co-workers, two of us are white guys, the other four are from Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, and India respectively. The only two people who ride bicycles are Kevin and I, the two white guys. We are, without a doubt, the fattest of the six. My Vietnamese coworker drives a Sequoia every day from Elk Grove, the first Indian a Camry every day from Fairfield, the Bangladeshi an Accord from Natomas, and the last Indian an Accord from halfway to Marysville. The four immigrants have never, never even once, ridden a bicycle while here in the U.S. Kevin and I, the native Americans, commute by bicycle somewhat regularly to work.

I do not have to visit Beijing to know what is going on there -- I see my own small work group as a microcosm of the rest of the world -- the rest of the world is rapidly adopting the perpetual motoring mantra of the U.S. and the moment the bicycle is hung from the rafters it's never to come back down. Educated U.S. immigrants provide a glimpse into where the rest of the world is heading -- down the road.

Oil spills or not, dead pelicans or not, $2.80 or $8.20 gasoline, we cannot and will not change our perpetual motoring culture in my opinion. We will sacrifice all to sustain this unsustainable practice, to our detriment methinks. The rest of the world will follow us down that road; or perhaps, it will be us following the rest of the world down that road. The lure of the private motor vehicle is too strong, and we've vested all in our suburban housal unit living arrangements. We cannot envision a different world and thus we don't. If gasoline rises to $8.20, fuck the pelicans -- our need to perpetually motor trumps all.

Just Too Dangerous

I will be trying my first triathlon here in less than 5 weeks, the old Eppie's great race, and I'm hardly prepared. I can barely run, I can hardly paddle, but I can ride a bike, so 33% will have to do, and it will have to be enough to get me to the finish line.

I can bike because I do it all the time to and from work along Franklin Blvd, my blog's namesake. I started doing it to keep the diabetes in check, but discovered how I could also replace the use of a car with the bike. That is, I don't just drive the car with the bike in the back 60 miles up to Volcano and do a recreational ride on the hillside. I bike on the flat earth of Franklin.

Biking along Franklin Blvd. would be considered "just too dangerous" for the vast majority of our motoring-only citizens. Hell, walking along Franklin Blvd. would also be considered "just too dangerous" for the vast majority of our motoring-only citizens. I should say that I've never once, in thirteen years, never once have I ever seen a neighbor of mine embark on a utilitarian trip on/in something other than a motorized vehicle.

Never once have I seen someone where I live walk home from the store with a carton of eggs or cigarettes. Never once have I ever seen anyone bike home from the store with a carton of orange juice or a carton of buttermilk. Admittedly, biking to the store is something even I rarely do, because of the hassles of stores that don't have bike racks, of stores that have them but are well off the storefront, and the concern of having my panniers stolen. We aren't geared up for storing in anything other than a fucking car, so stores don't provide any real security. In another world I envision rentable bike lockers that cost nothing to use (bring your own lock) that are subsidized by the store (take just eight parking spaces and create enough bike lockers for 25 bikes) so you can go in and get your stuff and have no real concerns about theft.

But!

That's in another world, nowhere near the world I live in here in Elk Grove. That couldn't happen even with $12 gasoline in Elk Grove because the store is required by code to carry a prescribed set of on-site parking stalls determined by its square footage, and to remove just eight of them to create bike lockers would upset that requirement and the county or the city or the grassroots Concerned Citizens For Ample Parking would sue because there aren't enough or some shit like that. Or, because there's bicycle parking in too close proximity to vehicular parking, lane striping, concrete anti-ram pillars, handicap accessible ramps/lanes and additional mercury vapor lighting requirements would make the whole affair just too expensive.

Not to mention, Franklin would still be "just too dangerous." T-ball moms would never allow themselves to ride their bike to the store let alone their kids. Elk Grovian men would never want to be seen riding in anything other than their Yukons with $6,200 rims 'cause even they don't feel safe in anything else. You'd think that they could just circumvent Franklin all together and just take alternate routes down some shady tree lined residential streets, but there's no way to do that with our suburban collector road layout. One way or another, to get to the nearest store requires some traveling on Franklin. Like it or not.

And along with my neighbors, our whole Elk Grovian population has no concept, none at all, of traveling in anything other than a private automobile. They have no idea that it can even be done. "It's too far." "It's windy outside." "I can't drink my latte while riding." So, we don't. And even as we migrate to electrics or to hydrogen or wind powered rigs or to whatever, no matter how expensive, no matter how environmentally damaging...it's still always going to be a car.

To Infinity And Beyond

Well, PG and E couldn't buy their own proposition.

Still, having spent $45,000,000 to lose proposition 16, this money will have to come from somewhere, and with a guaranteed rate of return for their investors, this will ultimately come from their own ratepayers, methinks. I'm a PG&E gas ratepayer, and most certainly to some degree I'll be paying marginally more, I'm sure.

Know what forty five million might have bought? -- two new breaker and a half substations with lifespans well in excess of forty five years. But instead, it bought pretty glossy fliers that have all been tossed into the trash. It bought radio and TV airtime that's now radiated fifty times the distance beyond Pluto, on its way to the Oort cloud. All this has radiated beyond our furthest satellite, Voyager II, and that's all that's left of this $45,000,000. To infinity and beyond.

Finally! We can return to all those boner pill advertisements on TV and radio, now that Meg Whitman won't be flooding the state with her messages. That's an interesting combination of advertising, don't you think? On one hand, Meg Whitman, and in on the other, boner pills. The two don't really go hand in hand...

46 Grams

Even though I make this bold claim of vegetarianism, I still fell far short of being an actual vegetarian.

I kept track of every morsel that entered my gullet last month. I ate, on average, 2,396 calories per day, 46 grams of fiber per day, with 32% of my total calories coming from fat. Now, to get anywhere near 46 grams of fiber you have to be eating a lot of plants, and by consuming 2,400 calories a day, that doesn't leave a whole lot left for milk, cheese, and meat. Nonetheless, I still ate 2.5# of meat for the month.

These were the ribs at the party, the tri-tip on the boat, the chicken in the salad ('cause damn near every salad at every restaurant contains meat), etc. I avoid meat, but damn, it's everywhere and I've a meat tooth.

At that rate I'm swallowing 30# of meat per year, which is 1/7th of what the average American consumes. My goal for 2010 is to eat less than the world average meat production, which is 90#.

The goal is multi-fold: to reduce water usage, to reduce fossil fuel usage, to [supposedly] reduce heart disease risks, to reduce my chances of ever getting arthritis, etc. It makes sense for me to do so if I espouse a closer-to-sustainable lifestyle. Although, I use far more than my worldly allotment of natural resources simply by being an Elk Grovian, what with all our compulsory motoring we do.

In the end, I can only try...

Double Vision

On the bicycle ride into work this morning, I witnessed two traffic accidents. On one ride!

Well, I only really saw the first one; it was behind me. A truck slammed on its brakes and plowed into a car stopped at the red light at 14th Avenue. Another chap oblivious to his whereabouts, plowing into traffic stopped ahead of him; another $4,000+ lost to insurance adjusters and body shop mechanics and the rest of our industries devoted to such things. By the way, this instantly created thousands more in national Gross Domestic Product.

The second wreck, well, this was the one I knew would happen someday -- very nearly a jaws-of-life wreck at the curb cut to the Department of Motor Vehicles on Broadway. I can't help think of the irony of such a thing...if irony is the correct term. That a woman would just complete and pass her traffic test, receive her license, and immediately cause an injurious wreck is just the sort of thing I expected to see, based on the insanity of how people drive around Stockton and Broadway. Daily I jocky with assholes at that intersection as they have to deal not only with a two to one lane neckdown but also with a curb cut into the county med clinic and DMV and a pesky, bothersome, slow-poke bicyclist just trying to go straight.

This lady: she did not look good, having just been t-boned, with firemen attending to her from outside her vehicle. Just another case of firemen doing everything but fighting fires, something they rarely do these days, what with all the traffic accidents they have to attend to.

Just another set of wrecks. The glass and steel have since been swept away, the skid marks are already fading away in the summer heat. Thousands more cars have already passed by without any knowledge of what occured to a few unfortunate souls this morning; the wrecks having already been lost to time and space.

$13,000,000,000,000

Man, it's a good thing the national debt doesn't mean a damn thing. It's a good thing that deficits don't matter.

Otherwise, thirteen trillion dollars of debt might be some cause for concern, now that it reached some 88% of our annual GDP. But we've got nothing to worry about, slick. The national debt is as meaningless and as useless as the oil spill volume numbers coming from BP. It means nothing, and I say let it climb to fourteen trillion. Four hundred trillion; it doesn't matter.

Remember: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is generating a substantial slice of our national GDP. Think -- Ann Thompson along with a dozen cameramen and staffers of NBC renting Louisiana hotel rooms to report from the site, along with their appetites; big pharma selling all those recreational prescription drugs marketed directly to NBC evening news consumers; all those lawyers who will generate GDP over the next seventeen years by filing lawsuit after lawsuit on behalf of lost shrimp producers (lawyers who will earn many times more than shrimpers would ever earn actually working); oil boom manufacturing; oily bird cleaning; Bobby Jindal's air time getting a national platform for his run in 2016. Talk about productivity! Sheesh!

Compared to all the unemployed , man, oil spills are very good for the GDP.

Here's another. If I go out and spend $1.19 to buy 80 yards of dental floss I contribute less than $0.37 per month to GDP, whereas if I don't take preventative measures I'd contribute thousands via root canals, dentist co-pays, insurance billing department staffers, temporary crowns, amalgam fillings, wear and tear on my vehicle to shuttle me to my multiple appointments...and they'll still floss my teeth at the end of the cleaning.

If I keep my diabetes in check I will only contribute a hundred thousand over my lifetime to national GDP, whereas if I let it bolt to seed I'd contribute eight times that through bi-weekly dialysis, amputation surgery and long term care facilities.

I really have to wonder how much of our $14 trillion dollar economy is comprised of shit like this...

Barely A Blip In GDP

I am not a huge fan of technology. I fought for years before getting a home computer; I resisted blogging for years. Once these sorts of things came into my possession, well, then yes, I succumbed.

I fought the cell phone, the HDTV, the computer, the pager, the DVD, the perpetual Internet connection, the laptop, the GPS, the DVR, the in-car Nav, and the blackberry. In every case, I'm among the last to enter and today I still don't have 2/3ds of these devices. I do not have to be among the first to get the latest device, and in that respect I've saved a ton of money, effort, and anguish over the years compared to many of my contemporaries.

I am of the opinion that technology does not equal energy, and I am also of the opinion that technology does not equate to a better standard of living. Truthfully -- can you tell me that having a cell phone is better than not having one?

Remember that old line from 1997 -- "We need a cell phone for emergencies?" What a crock of shit that was! How many married men fell for that line from their wives? This was the classic case of moulding a technology around a fake need and then because everyone else had one it became a "necessity" to live in our society.

I ask again -- is having a cell phone better than not having one? On the surface you most certainly would answer yes, but after you consider the increasing social retardation caused by texting and other fake forms of non-human communication like twitter, et al., the apparent increase in vehicular accidents caused by their use, their $80+ per month in user fees and other charges...is it really better? I could, and might, argue that it isn't.

But no one listens to me, and thank god for that! Today I have a cell phone, along with a DVR, a high speed internet connection, etc. On one hand I bitch about what these things take away but on the other hand I embrace them for what they provide. How do I learn to live with all this? How does anyone else?

I had an opportunity two weeks ago to float around the isles of our Elk Grovian consumer-electronic warehousal unit -- Best Buy -- as I was looking for a speaker for my truck. I commented to my wife how utterly behind the times I am. I spent several minutes staring at a display of accessories for the iPad -- the dock, a wireless keyboard, skins, USB power adapter, etc. It was all lost on me. Let alone the cost of the iPad itself and the fuckering away of countless hours of downloading apps and getting the thing to work the way you want, you are enticed to blow $39 on a personalized wrapper around the thing, along with myriad other $49 and $29 accessories.

And people do, and thank god for that. If you had to count on people like me to keep the economy running you might as just give up now.

I strongly believe that technology doesn't equate to a better standard of living...but what it does do is increase that hallowed metric of that standard -- the GDP. Every time any of us drives to Best Buy and Buys one of their Best items our GDP increases -- from the purchase of gasoline for the car and the wear on the tires and the payments made on time for the HDTV to the burning of bunker fuel in container ships to deliver your product from Southeast Asia.

But I get on my bicycle, bought and paid for now some eleven years ago, get some exercise while eliminating a car trip and bicycle to work and this barely registers any GDP.

As you buy these iPad accessories, your tax dollars promote government spending which raises GDP, along with the monies funneled into Best Buy headquarters' employees' bank accounts in Richfield, Minnesota. The bankers develop GDP for providing access to other people's capital, while the Best Buy employee will go out and buy a shrimp dinner at her favorite restaurant and raise GDP (along with raising her credit card bill).

But I turn on my stove and cook up a yellow split pea soup that lasts for days, using vegetables I purchased from the local CSA that I picked up on my bicycle ride home and again this barely registers any GDP.

As you turn on the AC to cool down your new 3,550 sq ft garage majal, the electricity production definitely increases GDP, as does the diesel burnt to deliver the coal from the mine to the power plant.

But I made a one time purchase of solar panels and a one time purchase of a share in a local solar farm and the ongoing receipt of this solar derived "input" doesn't develop any GDP. As my electricity bill declines I am happier, as I paid for my solar panels not through deficit financing but through reduced consumption and savings I most certainly feel wealthier (I now own these panels), but every year going forward my contribution towards GDP declines.

Yet -- I got exercise. I ate well. I had as much access to electricity as the next American.

From my own gauge of happiness, success, satiety, and concern for the environment, I'd say I did just fine, but from the perspective of our governmental accountants and actuaries I must live like a schlub. I must be poorer.

And so it is with consumer electronics. The fewer I own, the less time I spend getting the fucking things to work and the happier I am (a wholly personal perspective). This obviously doesn't apply to most other Americans, but then, I have never identifed with the larger group at any point in my life. And thank God for that!

Blinkers

When was the last time you, my fellow Elk Grovian, vacationed in Pensacola? When was the last time you ate gulf shrimp?

Probably never.

Your shrimp is mostly factory farmed in Vietnam these days. Virtually none of our Elk Grovian shrimp comes from the Gulf of Mexico. And Pensacola? Way too far for us to visit on any sustained basis. The beaches of Mexico or Southern California are much more accessible.

That said, it makes little sense for any of us to concern ourselves with this small 1,000 barrel per day leak in the GoM. So far it only represents a few hours' worth of total U.S. oil consumption, and in the end only represents less than one one hundredth of one percent loss. That's a fair loss rate, yes? I mean, when your housal unit was built the developer easily sustained a 4-5% loss on materials (lumber cut-offs, unusable plywood scraps, dried out sheet rock mud, etc.) so this oil leak is wholly within normal limits.

That is, you can go on consuming gasoline to drive everywhere for everything and you should have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about the economic loss sustained by others due to this leak. You don't rely on them and they don't rely on you.

Fuck 'em.

This should be the mantra of our little city. It's what we say every day, either through our actions or inaction, to all other regions and communities from which we extract either human or natural capital. This city is wholly, wholly, dependent on external sources of energy, external sources of labor, external sources of capital; we depend on them while the same time we care not a whit about what goes on there.

We live in gated communities, we're unable to walk anywhere for anything (except to walk the dog), we don't have any jobs here worth a damn, we don't grow our own food here, we don't have a viable local business environment. And we depend mostly on external sources of energy. I dare say we are going to find out how badly we developed our living arrangement here as cheap energy becomes depleted, as energy becomes more expensive, as we wonder why we've allowed ourselves to build a city so dependent.

Elk Grove will not be able to survive a higher cost energy future in my opinion. I only wonder if I'm wrong about energy being more expensive in the future, which I very well might be, but I'm not holding my breath. Nuclear was supposed to be too cheap to meter. Batterized cars are supposed to wean us off imported oil. We are supposed to create 9,345,000 new "green" jobs building a new energy efficient future while supposing we will still be able to accessorize our ever-larger housal units with ever-larger consumption devices like digital camera chargers, a computer in each room, an always on router, etc. Wind energy is supposed to allow us to continue to drive 90 miles in each direction daily across the Altamont Pass to our Bay Area jobs.

And deepwater drilling was supposed to help stem the falling tide of domestic energy production...but now that future has been called into question. Tell me. What would the standard Elk Grovian vote for? If the choice is to live with oil shortages or risk a disaster along the coasts of the gulf states or Southern California, which do you think she will vote for, huh?

My guess is that if/when energy goes up she'll just say fuck it, and put her blinkers on.

Eating Less Energy

Of late I've turned vegetarian. Well, not a real vegetarian, but mostly. I've been following the simple mantra postulated by M. Pollan -- Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Today with my cabbage salad I polished off the last remaining spring onion from my CSA box from the Fully Belly Farm, which I get once every other week. This is local, organic, in season, and 100% derived from plants, but importantly, it's food. I highlight the word food because we've migrated away from actually eating what had been considered food and more towards stuff like portable yogurt tubes, cup o' noodles, and Uncle Ben's non-stick rice.

There are so many benefits to this approach that it seems ludicrous that I allowed myself thirty odd years of anguish by eating non-foods:

• Far fewer fossil fuels are needed to just raise plants, rather than to raise plants to feed to animals to feed to us
• No plastic tubes need to be manufactured to contain my yogurt
• Far less water is needed to grow almonds and rice than to feed a pig
• Far less likelihood of heart disease, diverticulitis, and colon cancer
• Far smaller spare tire around my waist

I am a sucker for non-foods, however. I've been eating them my entire life, from quarter pounders as a kid to chicken nuggets as an adult, from Pepsi as a kid to diet A&W as an adult, from Cheeto's as a kid to Pringle's as an adult. To spend time to build a cabbage salad seems so arcane these days, what with microwave pizzas and TV dinners.

Why should I prepare my own food? Don't we live in a service economy? Shouldn't it be done for me instead of by me? I mean, I shouldn't ever have to mow my own lawn anymore, that chore has long ago been outsourced, so why shouldn't my food be the same?

The idea of eating less energy dovetails perfectly with my other personal goals of energy sustainability, sustainable transportation and just plain treading lightly. It just makes sense to me, and truthfully, I feel a whole lot better when I just eat food. I feel a whole lot better when I eat food grown locally, without pesticides, with less reliance on our massive subsidized trucking industry, with less reliance on petrochemical fertilizers, with less processing that strips all the nutrients out while spraying chemical substitutes back on them.

This just makes sense to me.

Count To Fifty

Drive yourself down your local freeway, which, if you're an average Elk Grovian you do so 2.3 times daily, and if you're lucky enough to be driving sans traffic, count to fifty.

The distance you drove is the depth of that busted wellhead on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, that doesn't seem so deep, does it? No. You comfortably drive 5,000' in under a minute using 1/22nd of a gallon of gasoline that costs you about 14 cents. You cruise to your destination, be it for work, to go home, or for play while the leak continues and you could give a rat's ass about the leak, some 2,300 miles distant. It might as well be Nigeria, you tell yourself, and continue comfortably to your destination.

So long as gasoline is only 14 cents per mile, well, why ought you concern yourself? There's no oil production anywhere near here, nothing to pollute by its extraction (only it's burning), and the GoM is so unimportant to the Elk Grovian economy that it means absolutely nothing. Nothing.

I say we ought to just accept said accidents as the cost of keeping our costs under 14 cents each mile.