Gasoline

TC Boyle fesses up about his addiction to oil.

I plead guilty to the above, as much a schizophrenic about the rift between environmental consciousness and the need, right and consuming passion for the automobile as any of my fellow Californians. My commute to the University of Southern California is an unholy 200 miles round-trip, and it consumes time -- four and a half hours -- and fuel. I drive a powerful sports car because of the burning need to subdue and outrace all those other commuters, and though I make that trip only 39 days a year, still, I make it alone and I make it as expeditiously as I can, with little thought for what it is costing, on every level. (And yes, I've found myself buying gas half a tank at a time, fondly hoping that when I pull up to the next pump, prices will have plummeted to where they should be, or where we want them to be.) Gasoline prices in Santa Barbara have always been among the highest in the nation (and this has nothing to do, we are assured by the oil companies, with the protests over the 1969 oil spill from the rigs in the channel), but lately they seem punitive.