When Perception Transforms Reality: GAS

Poor Misguided Fool - Starsailor (mp3)
Gas Panic (live) - Oasis (mp3)

Damnedest thing I've seen in a long time.

Gas stations so full of cars, so packed tight, that cars have stopped in the middle of the street waiting to pull in, and another car has rammed right into the backside of it. On the way from my mother's house in East Brainerd to my house in downtown Chattanooga, I witnessed this scene three separate times in the span of 25 minutes.

Three accidents at three gas stations, all within 15 miles of one another.

(I would have taken pictures of those, but I was on my scooter, and the one shot I tried was so blurry all you see is the blue lights of cop cars and the white lights of the gas station streaking all over the place. Above was the best I could do.)

Cars were packed four deep or more to a pump at every gas station I passed that hadn't already run out of gas.
An earlier version of this article in Chattanooga's online newsrag, the Chattanoogan, combined with the idiots on local talk radio, spurred our citizens into believing that, as of Friday morning, gas prices would skyrocket to $5 from their current $3.65 range.

I called some friends in other places tonight. Nothing like this is happening in Raleigh, or Atlanta, or Montgomery, or Nashville. It's happening in a few places in Florida, in Houston (where Ike is soon to rampage), and in Chatta-fucking-nooga. Either Chattanooga is waaaay ahead of its fellow cities, or we're the most gulliable lemmings this side of early 20th Century Germans.

As of 10 p.m. Thursday night, Google had "gas lines" articles from BlueRidgeNews.com, Chattanooga's rags, and Gatorsports.com. That was it, other than some stories about some crisis in Bolivia.


You'll have to pay me a shitload of cash to get me to believe it's pure coincidence that this happened on September 11.

If only we would just drill for oil in Alaska and off the Gulf Coast, this wouldn't happen. In 2042. Maybe.

"Poor Misguided Fool" is from Starsailor's first album, Love is Here. "Gas Panic" is from the Oasis concert CD, Familiar to Millions. The first is available on iTunes. The latter isn't available in download form anywhere I looked. Both bands are full of Brits who don't have to put up with our idiotic American gas fetish.