The following was submitted in May to the L.A. Times as an op/ed piece. It was never published.
I just got back from walking to the local Starbuck's, and I'm not happy about it at all.
The store is only five or six blocks northwest of my home in central Riverside, but those blocks descend on a deceptively gentle slope, so the walk back is an uphill bitch. Worse, I suffer from a scoliosis-induced uneven gait, meaning that by the time I walk through my front door with grande drip in hand I have second-degree burns on the fleshy part of my hand between thumb and index finger. It's hard to settle in and enjoy a cup of coffee with your hand blistering, your tee-shirt drenched in sweat and your pants stained with the same acidic substance the Aztecs used as a fabric dye.
That I would walk those five or six blocks instead of drive them has less to do with health consciousness than the high cost of gasoline. I drive a 16-year-old Honda, one of those supposedly fuel-efficient models with a tank the size of a sewing thimble. I used to laugh at the people I saw cruising around in their gas-guzzling SUVs. Let the other poor saps take out a second mortgage just to drive around the block, I'd say. My car could make it to L.A. and back with the needle on "E."
Then the price of 89 octane hit $4 a gallon, and the only thing I laugh at now is the bitter irony of it all.
Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline inflates the cost and size of everything. Had I decided to drive instead of hoof it, the grande drip now sitting on my desk would have set me back the price of a venti. Had I chosen to drive to the Starbucks a mile away -- as I sometimes would because the closer Starbucks tends to run out of my favorite scones -- my grande would have cost the equivalent of a caramel macchiato. I don't normally drink ventis or macchiatos -- I prefer my nervous system to hum rather than buzz -- but if I'm going to pay for extravagance, I expect to get something for the expense. So these days I walk for my caffeine fix, muttering to myself that I'm committed to tightening up those flabby ass cheeks when, really, I'm just a tight-ass committed to saving a buck.
The cost of a cup of coffee is, of course, the least of my worries when it comes to gas inflation. My wife drives an average of 480 miles a week to and from her job, and, while I work from home as a freelance journalist, I've yet to find a source willing to pay for my mileage. Between the two of us, my wife and I easily drive about 2,400 miles a month. That's about $400 a month in $4-a-gallon gas fill-ups, assuming our cars are in tip-top shape, which they aren't, and that we both stay within posted speed limits, which we don't. And that's just for the driving we can't avoid.
To try to ease the pain at the pump, I've been cutting down a lot on the driving I can avoid, like visiting relatives on their deathbeds and maintaining friendships outside a 10-block radius. This has proven fairly easier to do. Get-well cards go a long way toward meeting family obligations, and are cost-effective even with the follow-up letters of condolence.
I also no longer feel the need to rush to my mentally ill sister's side when she calls me in a panic over those dead people trying to get into her head. "Call me when they've broken through the foyer," I'll say, and go back to bed.
Most of my friends live in L.A. I'd always liked my friends, but at 140 miles roundtrip for visits, I had to ask myself: Really, how much did I like them? Enough to spend $40 a pop just to see their friendly faces? No. If they were really my friends, they'd be less concerned about our weekend get-togethers than my ability to put food on the table. So screw them. These days, I'm cozying up with the drug dealers next door and the guy across the street who sits on his porch all day staring at his Harley.
My newly abbreviated circle of associates should also help the bottom line at Christmastime.
In other words, living in a $4-a-gallon world doesn't have to be a colossal inconvenience. You just have to make a few simple adjustments. Just this afternoon, after drinking my grande coffee, I made the adjustment of walking out to the driveway and pumping five bullets into my Honda's engine block.
See how easy that was?
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