What will the kids do?

Gas prices suck. We all know this. It goes with out saying that $3.08 a gallon is just ridiculous.

But what I am really worried about is the kids, not the city kids, they got the trains and the busses, and not the suburban kids, because they can get to the trains and busses too. I am worried about all those kids that are stuck in the middle of nowhere, or as we called it when I lived in the middle of nowhere, BFE.

BFE, in my old neck of the woods stood for Butt Fuck Egypt. Charming, insightful and it rolls right of the tongue. It is also kind of ironic that BFE for me is not too far from Cairo, which, by the way is not pronounced like the one in Egypt, but rather like the syrup, Kayro (kay-row).

When you are that far out, miles away from any city or even a half-assed suburban mall you are stuck. There is nothing to do, and nowhere to go. If you are lucky you can scrape together money to drive somewhere to see a movie, go to a show, go to a club, or at a minimum go to the mall and wander around. If you don’t have enough money for the entertainment part you are left with one option…to stay “in town”.

If you stay “in town” and you aren’t interested in sitting in your car (or truck) off some dark country with the radio on and risk a few under age drinks (cheap beer, rum and Coke, or Purple Passion) then you have only one other option.

Cruise.

You would put your money together with a couple friends and long as you had about $5 you could cruise for quite sometime. You might drive 40 miles that night, but it would be the same 5 miles over and over. Hopefully you had enough money to still get a Happy Meal or at least a couple large fries and a pop.

You would pass your friends all night long and wave, honk or yell, and you would pass the car wash and wonder who's with who and you would loop around the DQ because it was the end of the line on that end of town. Maybe you would find a party to go to but more often then not you would just listen to music and talk to your friends until curfew. It was good times, but I have to say I’m not sure how we did it for hours and hours on end, then again, our parents were at home and not in the car so I guess that was at least half of the attraction.

Occasionally we would stop at IGA and pick up a can of frosting (chocolate) get a couple Pepsi’s and hit the road. I don’t think we ever finished an entire can of frosting in one night but we ate a lot of it. We were civilized enough to use spoons, but I don’t know how civilized we could really have been considering it was a can of frosting we were eating. Only the metabolism of the 16 year old could have kept me that skinny and still able to do stuff like that.

There was almost an incident when I aimed spoonful of frosting at a stop sign and I wasn’t wise enough to look behind us before doing so. As I hung out of the car window to get a better shot we slowed to a stop, I flung my spoonful of frosting hoping to make it stick (it didn’t). Then we started up again and turned, the problem was the police car behind us, but, as all good small town cops do, they just kept going past us, despite the fact that my friend nearly drove us off the road laughing at me while I hung out the window. If that didn’t look like drunk driving I don’t know what would, but we didn’t get stopped, which of course made us laugh harder.

If the kids can’t get out and about they aren’t going to be left with many options and the options they are left with all spell trouble, drunk trouble, drunk driving trouble, stupid stunts trouble and knocked-up trouble.

Moral of the story, lower gas prices so that you don’t end up with a lot of drunk and pregnant hicks. Give’m a chance, they might just make something of them selves. Cruising on $5 now wont keep them out of trouble for more than an hour. I urge the American Government to consider this now, before it is too late.