Gas prices fuel the recession

Just when you thought it was safe to get out of the recession – ta-da! Here comes another mighty blow to our recovery thanks to soaring prices at the gas pump. The price per gallon has vaulted past the $3 mark and is quickly advancing to $4. It’s predicted to peak at $5 this summer. So goes gas, so goes our economy. We Americans apparently suffer from a nasty case of short-term memory loss. Remember back in 2008 when gas went to $4 a gallon? What happened then? That’s when the recession hit – hard and fast. So-called experts tried to blame the downturn in the economy on the housing market, auto sales and job losses. I think you can look at those as symptoms of the high cost of fuel. The more you spend to keep your car running, the less you have to spend on anything else, including new cars. When people quit buying things, jobs go away. When jobs go away, homes are lost to foreclosure. When foreclosures go up, housing prices come down. When all of these things happen, Wall Street gets jitters and the DOW drops. The whole vicious cycle is tied to those dead dinosaurs we convert to gasoline and other fuels and lubricants. It’s time we made fossil fuel as extinct from our lives as the great beasts that provided it. Most of my life I have heard rumors of the big oil companies and car companies buying up patents to alternative fuels and super fuel-efficient cars to keep them off the market. If there is even a single iota of truth to that, now is the time for those things to surface. I don’t believe the stories, but who knows for sure. What I do know is that the cost of gas in 2008 hurt me bad. It hurt a lot of people much worse than me. That’s why I’m scared to death of what will happen this year if we get anywhere near $5 at the pump. For a couple years now I have been planning to take my family to a family reunion in California this summer. After 12 years of marriage, my wife and sons have never met my father’s side of the family. I fear gas prices and other financial concerns will force us to have to wait another two years for the next reunion. To look at it another way, there are hundreds of gallons of gas I am not going to buy. There are several motels and campgrounds I will not be staying at. There are snacks and soft drinks we will not be consuming. Somewhere out there are numerous businesses that will not benefit from me and my family. The tourist traps in my path will not be sprung. I don’t think we’re anywhere near being alone in that regard. I don’t think you’ll be hearing very much about staycations this year. They’ll just be “stays.” If someone were to ask me where I’m going on vacation this year, I’d have to say to a movie or two. If conditions permit, we might even get a day trip to Galveston. Once there, however, we’ll have to find a way to fund the trip back home. On the plus side, I no longer have to commute to the office. I can literally roll out of bed and start writing at my computer. That will save me a fortune in dino-goo at the pump, but it is really isolating at the same time. When you work in a creative field like this, it helps to have others to share and bounce ideas off of. Imagine what it would have been like for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to take down the president if they each worked online from home. No collaboration, just a text or an e-mail. Trust me; they wouldn’t have gotten very far – at least without WikiLeaks. Anyway, getting back on topic, I would sure like to hear from readers about how the soaring gas prices are affecting you. Please take a moment to either comment online or email me at jsouthern@hcnonline.com. I think our stories will paint a very real picture that the experts and politicians don’t want to see.

Living on love is worth every dime

Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone and once again I find myself surrounded by my wife and children and memories of my money. They’re good memories. It was money well spent. Who knows, if I hadn’t spent it on Valentine’s Day I just might be surrounded by my money with memories of my wife and children. Seriously though, I doubt my wife would leave me if I got stingy on Feb. 14. She might make Feb. 15 incredibly unbearable, but she’d still be mine. That is, I think she would, right Sweetheart? Sweetheart? Uh, let me get back to you on that. I was listening to KSBJ radio earlier this week, and they were playing a version of the old Newlywed Game where they pit newlyweds against “oldieweds.” That got me thinking about how well married couples know (or don’t know) each other. That was compounded when I took Sandy to see “The Vow” at the movie theater. It’s the story about a young husband who has to win back the love of his wife after a car crash erases all her memory of him and their life together. Her life was so different before they met that it was almost as if she had led a double life. A lot of things have been going through my mind as I’ve listened to the questions and watched the movie. How would I have answered some of those questions on the radio? How would Sandy have answered the ones about me? I like to think that I know my wife as well as she knows herself. I also like to think that I’m a multi-millionaire with a big, fancy home, nice cars and servants, but that’s beside the point. I learned a few years ago when I first joined Facebook that I apparently didn’t know my wife as well as I thought. There was a game where you asked your friends to answer questions about yourself to see how well they know you. It turns out that I knew my ex-wife much better than my wife. Now my ex-wife is my ex-friend on Facebook. We’re still friends in real life, but my focus has shifted to knowing and understanding my wife better. I’ve learned, for example, that women are moving targets. Once you think you’ve got them figured out, they change everything. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and the expectation of the man to know when it changes and what it has changed to. For example, if her favorite ice cream is Death By Chocolate, the man must automatically know the next time they’re at the ice cream parlor that he should order her the Mocha Mint because that has always been her favorite. There are some questions women ask that have very obvious answers. “Does this (insert name of garment here) make my butt look big?” The answer is always “no.” The same answer applies when she asks you if another woman in the room looks pretty. Most of us guys, however, often have the mouth in motion before the brain can intercede because the brain is too busy noticing how much prettier the other girl would be if her butt wasn’t so big. Interestingly enough, I used to have this dream long ago where I would wake up in the hospital and not recognize my wife and sons and thinking I was still married to my daughter’s mother. How would my wife and boys take it? How would I handle it? I never did find out and in all honesty, I don’t want to know. I love my wife and children dearly, and don’t think they could ever escape my memory because they are so thoroughly engrained in it. Life without them would scarcely be worth living. If there is anything I’ve learned in all my years it’s that there is nothing more important in this world than love. When Jesus was asked what the most important part of the law was, he summed up the Commandments into two parts: love God and love your neighbor. The common thread is love. I’ve also learned that love is not an emotion or feeling but a choice and a commitment. Love doesn’t quit. People quit, but real love does not. Love is what carries us through the highs and lows of life. As the late columnist John Coit once wrote, “Life is short and it hurts. Love is the only drug that works.” It is because of love and commitment that the saying is true: Real fathers have pictures of their family where their money used to be. In all honesty, I’d rather have the love and a lifetime of memories of my wife and children than my last dime. In the end when all is said and done, I can only take one of those things with me when I pass away. I think that’s what Jesus meant when he instructed us to store up treasure in Heaven.

I'm glad I wasn't my parent

If I had been my parent when I was a kid, I would have had a very miserable childhood. Whenever I stop to think of the things I did when I was at the age my children are now, I realize what a sheltered and adventureless life they live. Actually, we do have a lot of adventure in our lives, but it pales compared to my childhood. The things my parents let me do (and the things I got away with) would make me a nervous wreck if my kids did them today. How my parents survived my childhood without having a heart attack or killing me, I’ll never know. Today I get after my boys for shooting their Nerf guns in the house for fear they’ll break something or shoot an eye out. We didn’t have Nerf guns back in the Disco Era. I did have a BB gun, and I used to go outside and shoot nearly everything that didn’t move – and a few that did. The same went for my experience in my teens as a hunter with my single-shot shotgun. The safest place for game birds was within my sights. My children have never been hunting and have only a mild interest in fishing. My hunting career lasted only three years or so and ended when the ringing in my ears began (and to this day has not stopped). I used to be an avid fisherman as a boy. I’d often walk or ride my bike over to the Frog Pond, which has a small creek running by it. I caught a lot of suckers, but not much else. Occasionally my exploits with a fishing pole would net me a small trout, carp or some sunfish. Come to think of it, not much has changed in that regard in the last 30-some years. (Sigh) One adventure we do share is a love of camping. Even that has changed. As a Boy Scout, we cooked our food over a fire and slept in pup tents that you could barely sit up in. My boys cook over propane stoves, sleep in tents the size of condos and have all kinds of electronic gadgets for entertainment. Growing up in the booming metropolis of Niwot, Colo., located just northeast of the People’s Republic of Boulder, my brothers, buddies and I had free rein to go just about anywhere we pleased. We rode our bikes all over town, over jumps, off road or anywhere else we could. Outdoor games like hide-and-go-seek could be confined to a yard or the entire neighborhood. We always knew when it was about time to go home when the lady next door would do her nightly summon of her son. His name is Mike, but we called him Mister because his initials were M.R. Each evening his mom would sing out “Miiiichaaaael … Miiiiiisteeer! Time to come home!” If we didn’t respond right away, it meant we were in someone’s house, down at the Frog Pond or over at the Fina (a little country store and gas station) and couldn’t hear. While my friends and I were everywhere, I get uneasy having my boys play with the neighbor across the street. Our house is on a busy corner in Rosenberg and I don’t feel it’s safe for my kids to ride their bikes in the area. In addition to a lot of traffic, we share a corner with a restaurant, bar, gas station and a Laundromat. Some of the characters we see on a regular basis make you wonder if there was a big sale at the thrift store and if all the dentists had been run out of town. There must also be a lot of deaf people in our community because of all the cars that go by with the music up so loud you would swear we were having an earthquake. I got my driver’s permit the day I turned 15½ and my license on my 16th birthday. My oldest two have no interest in driving. I had summer jobs away from home and went to college on the other side of the state. Not so with my youngsters. Living on a hobby farm in a rural community and being hyper-active in Boy Scouts gave me experiences that my children may never have. I used chainsaws, wood splitters, pocket knives, electric saws, sanders and drills; butchered rabbits and chickens; went rock climbing, canoeing, climbed mountains, drove cross-country, jumped from 30-foot cliffs into the water, jumped on our trampoline (without those safety nets), slept in igloos, and played a lot of sports. I plea the Fifth on such things as drinking, chewing tobacco, sneaking into concerts, playing with illegal fireworks, watching movies with ratings above my age, and reading certain types of magazines for men (and I use the word “reading” very loosely here). I never did smoke or try any drugs. After all, a fellow had to draw the line somewhere. I lived a very busy, active and adventurous life. My boys can build with Legos and play video games. They are active in Scouts, but even then it’s not like they’re out in the woods thinning out beetle-kill stands of pine or climbing Longs Peak on a hot, summer day. Maybe it’s time to change all of that and get my kids (and myself) outdoors more often and engaged in fun and challenging activities. That way they can experience more of life and I can learn more about the hell and countless hours in prayer that I put my parents through.