Pull My Finger. Or Just Give Me a Push

I’ve got gas. And thank goodness.

Sometimes it’s inconvenient and mildly embarrassing, but I’ve never been more happy to be full of gas. Well, for my car to be full of gas, I mean.

Just like the rest of the country, Louisville saw record highs in its gas prices this past week, when gas topped out at roughly $12.95 a gallon. With the nearest station holding out for a couple of hours before implementing the increase, cars were recently backed up into the highway waiting to fill up. Thankfully I had just filled up two days earlier. Not that it really matters.

If I have three quarters of a tank on the day of an expected price increase, I always think to myself, “Cool, I should be able to ride this out until it goes down again.” But of course that’s never happened because for at least the past two years, the price of gas has jumped 90 cents every week. So I guess my euphoria over having plenty of gas will soon (pardon the pun) pass.

Despite the fact that the price of everything (minus homes, of course) is on the rise, and always has been, it’s the price of gas that seems to make everyone nostalgic. Just think, 17 year olds everywhere are saying things like, “I can remember when gas never got above $3.15 a gallon.” Yeah, those were the good ol’ days.

But there are ways to deal with the rapid increase. Just the other day I was watching a CNN correspondent go over ways that we can improve our gas mileage to ease our “pain at the pump.” For instance, keeping your tires at their correct air pressure will help increase your mileage by five percent. That’s important because it means instead of having to fill up on a Thursday morning, you won’t have to fill up until Thursday afternoon. Possibly even late afternoon.

It’s painful to think about, but I guess things could get worse. People say all the time that even now we shouldn’t complain because Europeans regularly pay $4 - $5 a gallon for gas. The only problem with that argument is that Europeans are affected very little by the price of gas because they hardly drive. And who can blame them. With the steering wheel located on the right side of their cars, they constantly have to find a friend to ride in the passenger seat so they’ll have someone to work the pedals. Either that or occasionally they’ll use a stick to poke at the pedals from the other side, but that has to be near impossible if they’re driving a manual transmission.

Anyway, the future doesn’t look much brighter. Pretty soon we’ll all be filling up our giant empty tubs of Sam’s Club mayonnaise with gasoline just so we’ll have reserves before the next big hike. We could always walk more or ride bikes or buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, but I’m trying to think in a practical manner.