How’s that inflation treating yourself? Well, that’s not so good.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness as the old saying goes. Fuel & fuel. Gasoline & food. Those are the heavy stones during this storm of consumer price increases. If you have done some lucky things in your life ahead of this once-every-40-year occurrence, you have been bearing the brunt of it a little better than others.
Intermittent fasting. We made this decision a long, long time ago, going on nearly 10 years now. It might be helpful in terms of regulating hormonal responses to hunger and so forth; however, the more practical and obvious aspect is basically you’re skipping a meal, at least, and more likely a meal-and-a-half to two meals a day. It’s rough at first, and you will have social and long-held habitual forces to overcome. However, you get used to it, and you begin to understand that that whole three-square-meals-a-day message is just clever marketing that’s been forced upon you since you were weaned off mother’s milk. As with many things on TV and on various other commercial media, you are being asked to buy things, especially food, that probably you really do not need.
We’re going at least 16 hrs. between last nighttime food-consumption to next day’s first intake. More often it’s 18 to 20 hrs. And then when we eat, in the mid-to-late-afternoon, it’s going to be something hearty and soupy, like split pea and ham or gumbo; or else a fine cheese-and-onion omelet with a good helping of nuts and bread on the side. Fruit in the evening, a couple of hours afterwards, and lots of plain-old fizzy water at all times. No need to enrich the cheap-food dealers or fancy-food snob outlets. It’s good to cook for yourself mostly.
As for the other fuel, the dinosaur-fossil refined petrol, we really lucked out there. Last year, in a bit of extravagant grief spending after our mother died from complications of COVID-19, we went out and leased a hybrid vehicle after going around 20 yrs. with an old manual-transmission six-cylinder beater. The beater was a fun car to drive, especially punching up the gearstick to downshift from fifth gear to third while scaling the steep rise up Laurel Canyon Blvd. heading south from the Valley toward Hollywood. Good times. Power on demand.
This hybrid is fun to drive in a different way, in that motoring has become like playing a video game. You have the instant fuel-efficiency feedback, and if you keep the thing in Eco Mode and pulse-and-glide toward a majority of EV (battery-only) propulsion, the MPG can go off the charts in a good way. Even daily scaling the Valley floor to the top of Mulholland at Nichols Canyon, the hybrid is reliable for 35-40 miles-per-gallon. On the odd freeway trips to the Westside or Malibu, 50 mpg is easily within reach.
Compare this with the running-rich 16 MPG average with the other car in the household, or the old beater’s 20 MPG. So that has helped with the inflationary pressures.
In short, actual consumption is almost always more than most people need to get by. People burn too much fuel — whether gasoline or foodstuffs — and social and commercial pressures are frequently to blame. Slow down, eat less, look for efficiency, and you’ll already do better than the average citizen. True, the go-go-go hustle-culture mopes out there will say the only thing that matters is being giant-sized and buying and using as much material stuff as you can, and that’s up to them, but probably that’s a little too much self-centeredness to lead a quality life. When you make yourself giant-sized at the expense of everybody else and then by wearing down the resources around yourself, the future cannot help but be bleak. Whereas the faithful used to draw the Sign of the Cross over an abundant landscape, the über-consumer self-believers are gonna end up tracing the Sign of the Almighty Dollar over a gray and dead wasteland.
Cheerfully, stay tuned for a half-hearted bit of commercialism from this corner soon enough.
