Gas Prices, Cigars, & Rosie O’Donnell – Be Afraid
As you drive down any highway or pass your local filling station in town, you’ll notice that the price of gasoline is changing more rapidly than Joan Rivers face. Now while both situations are a ghastly thought, at least the facially carved up comedian doesn’t put a hurt on your disposable income.
The term “disposable income” means different things for everyone – money for Chinese food on Friday nights, golf on Saturdays, going to the movies, money for poker night, or enrollment into Clark Griswold’s jelly of the month club. But for me, it means cigars. Premium cigars. Premium, handrolled cigars made by a couple of Latin American fellows named Manuel Labor and Manuel Dexterity. My disposable income (if there really is such a thing anymore) is happily spent on brown, leafy cylinders with names like JR Ultimate, Siglo, and Arturo Fuente. Okay, there’s an occasional beer or twelve, scotch whisky aged in sherry casks, and phone bets to an undisclosed Florida dog track, yada, yada, yada, but for the most part, I spend every last leftover cent I have on cigars. (I was going to say I spend it on the “love of my life” but I didn’t want you to think that I blow all my remaining dough on my wife or something like that, fer crissakes. Sheesh.)
Like many of you, cigars are a vital part of my weekly regimen. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about my Dominican, Nicaraguan, and Honduran buddies, wrapped all snuggly and warm in their fermented and aged brown blankets. Yes, I think about them constantly while planning my days around their beloved company. And purchasing them is a rush that every waking, breathing person should live to experience – plucking their oily carcasses from their cedar-lined dwellings, then bringing them home to meet the rest of your tobacco laden family members. (Excuse me for a moment while I collect myself. This gets emotional for me.)
But now we have a real problem and there seems to be no end in sight. The price of gasoline is drifting higher than the front row at a Grateful Dead gig, and that means what tiny bit of extra dinero we had to purchase our smokes is going up in a proverbial puff.
We’re all used to seeing the price on the gas station signs change by a couple cents every week, but now you wake up to a fifteen cent jump and that means there’s a couple less Hoyos that daddy’s coming home with. You truly wonder when it’s going to end and then you hear some hack, no-name economist on CNN say that he predicts that we’ll see a painful six dollars a gallon by June. This is sheer madness and good god, that government of ours needs to step in and do something before they actually do shut down for good.
What truly pisses me off – or shall I say what really roasts my robusto (hey, that’s catchy, I’ve gotta use that somewhere) is when the oil companies announce that their quarterly profits are up by hundreds of millions of dollars – and it’s obviously all from fleecing customers who have no choice but to bend over and stick a nozzle in their tanks. You’d really think that big American oil would get together by giving the average Joe a break until somebody takes out that crazy-ass dictator, but noooooooooo, that would make just too much sense. Greed is a goddamned ugly thing people, I don’t give a Shinola what Gordon Gecko has to say.
So, what the hell are we gonna do, guys? Do we horde our stash and ride out the storm? Do we show up at several unnamed refineries with whiffle bats wrapped in duct tape and start swinging for the fences? (Wow, I haven’t broken out the whifle bats in a while.) The truth is, none of us know how this is going to all play out, and it’s getting scarier than Rosie O’Donnell at an all you can shove down your pie-hole burrito buffet. You know what? I don’t even know how to end this friggin blog, I mean, what the hell, you worthless, Washington FAT-ASS bureaucrats… DO SOMETHING ALREADY! DO SOMETHING!!!
May your Whiffle swing mighty tall and mean,
Tommy Z . JR Cigars Blog With the Zman
