As I was leaving The Joint Chiropractic in Farmington a couple months ago, I noticed a young, blonde haired gal pushing her car out of the main driveway of the parking lot toward a space. She had apparently run out of gas. It reminded me of a time when running out of gas was just part of my day to day experience. It was easy to forget to fill up my tank when I was a 20 something, big boobed, hot blonde. Someone would always bail me out. It’s not that I was out of money or resources. I just forgot to notice how much gas was in the car when I drove it.
There was one time, I wasn’t bailed out. I was with my dear friend, Ricki. We ran out of gas on a freeway offramp, just a 5 minute walk from the nearest gas station. We didn’t have a gas can or the money for a gas can at the moment. We just had the money on us for the gas to get home. So I used my feminine wiles to get an old paint can from an older gentleman working at a paint store next door to the gas station. I bought the gas with what cash we had on us and filled up the paint can with gas. Ricki had a plastic hair extension bag in the car. It was a cellophane bag like a ziplock but long and tubular, without the zip on the end. We shoved an open end of that into the flap on the gas tank. We opened the other end of the bag and poured the gas from the paint can into it. We held the gas flap open with… wait for it… wait for it… an eyeliner pencil. As we were filling up the tank, some very chivalrous man drove by us and yelled at us out his Chevy pick-up truck window “that’ll never work!” But, he was wrong.
It’s been 15-20 years since I ran out of gas the last time. It was surprising when I was driving home two nights ago from a yule party to discover I had NO gas in my Nissan. It hadn’t occurred to me that my husband would ever let our car’s gas tanks get to E. I have rarely been behind the wheel over the last 9 years, so it’s primarily been my husband tending to the fueling of the cars. Nevertheless, I was having a fun drive down memory lane, praying my car would coast into the gas station driveway. Just like the old days…
Thankfully, it did.
When I got out of the car at the pump, the traditional Covid vaccine ads were playing over the loud speaker which I tend to tune out. But the next ad caught my attention as it was saying how soy allegedly prevented cancer and should replace almond milk as the less carcinogenic alternative. Now, I know everything they say about Covid is all wrong, but I really wasn’t prepared for tumor growth enhancing soy being touted as some kind of cancer prevention food-which it absolutely is not. I was thinking how the soy industry must have cherry picked some tobacco science to come up with a report that made it legally acceptable to make such absolutely preposterous claims. But, I was so flabbergasted, I just stood there, blinking and looking at cars parked around me. I threw my hands in the air and yelled, “DON’T BELIEVE THAT! IT’S ALL LIES!” As a girl came out of the mini mart walking toward the car on the other side of mine, looking at me scared and perplexed, I realized how crazy I must have looked in that moment.
I often wonder how much bullshit is still coming. When suddenly any old housewife can sell any shitty, cloth mask on Amazon and legally say it “prevents Covid,” without a single challenge from regulators, but medical doctors and researchers can’t prescribe their own patients certain off label drugs as a mere treatment for symptoms of Covid, one must recognize there’s an agenda at stake here. This agenda promotes control of the masses. It promotes only things which will shuttle customers toward a single product. And regardless of track record, of back ground, of experience, those who have 100% success and rave reviews from their recovered patients are demonized when they should be interviewed, researched, studied, listened to and praised.
Why would it surprise me what nonsense the soy industry would be using in marketing? It would be no less crazy as hearing the cigarette industry say that switching to cigarettes would prevent cancer that someone might get from eating, I don’t know, vegetables? The thing is, if I worked for the soy industry, I could easily explain how much of a natural disaster the almond growers are for the environment, taking up so much water to grow almonds as opposed to soy. Since Silk, the famous soy milk brand also sells almond milk and has a commercial interest in the almond industry, it makes sense they would pick a red herring to upsell their primary product over their secondary without destroying the reputation of almond milk entirely with something defaming and worse, true. If they get too real, they lose face and money.
Similarly I often think if I were the Democrats, I’d go after the Republicans for pay to play shenanigans, for helping the Saudis starve children in Yemen. If they wanted to convert Republicans, why not tell them something that Republicans might care about Instead, they just say “Trump’s a racist” which is more of an opinion not held at all by Republicans than an incontrovertible fact. I think it’s about the same thing. If Democrats bring up pay to play schemes and shitty foreign policy and the corruption of the military industrial complex, then they equally have to account for their own favorite politician’s war crimes and pay to play schemes. They won’t get real because reality brings people together and moreover, turns the segregated against the segregators. The truth rarely picks sides. And people who want to play sides or play sides against each other rarely take an interest in the truth.
I guess I’m a little melancholy about the direction the world seems to be going. No one wants to talk about what’s real anymore. They’d rather draw lines of division about somewhat false premises that either don’t matter or cause people like myself who know the truth to start looking like nut cases, yelling at the wind at gas stations at 9 o’clock at night. That might be the point. If you gas light people enough, those that are true will look crazy and scary. Those that are wrong will appear relatable, favorable and easy.
There’s a problem with this course. You can’t associate with peddlers of lies without becoming a liar, and if you don’t keep up with the lies to cover the lies, they catch up with you. While it seems popular and easy, it can’t be comfortable to have to perpetuate lie after lie to uphold the illusion of competence. That shelf life can’t be sustainable. BUT, how many aspects of life can get tainted by these far fetched falsehoods before people care more about their own reputations than the reputations of some greedy industry or political faction?
I don’t know, but until then, I’ll try to contain myself at late night gas stops as I keep a better eye on my fuel gauge. What else is a gal to do?