Watching the Fuel Gauge

As I was driving Candy to work this evening, she was dancing in the seat beside me to the beat of a rap song. I usually can tune out the rap and hip-hop; I cannot not notice the body movements of Candy’s dancing. This evening, however, I was distracted. I hardly looked at Candy, even when we stopped at traffic signals. My distraction was my fuel gauge. I kept looking at it and hoping it wouldn’t drop any lower.

The whole business of quickly increasing and decreasing gasoline prices is getting to me. I have been following the American Automobile Club’s advice and not filling my gas tank to full. I suppose that is based on the possibility that gasoline will be cheaper tomorrow. But Tuesday I purchased gasoline for (rounded off) $2.63 a gallon; on Wednesday the same station was selling the same gas for $2.87 a gallon. A twenty-four cent jump in price in twenty-four hours just doesn’t make sense to me.

And the whole unstable gas market is really driving me insane. It must be, if I am drawn more to gazing at a gas gauge than Candy. These days, going in search of gasoline is much like playing the state lottery—or, “numbers racket,” as it was called before it became income for our states. One never knows what the price will be or if one should have filled the tank yesterday or waited for tomorrow.

Well, I still have half a tank of gasoline as of tonight. And the cost is still what it was on Wednesday. Maybe tomorrow the cost will be reasonable. It isn’t something I bet it.