Free Republic

No wait, not 6. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light, sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cabdrivers (at least initially), metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone...

1,100 days of brutal violence and death, grinding you down to a numb little nub. Thanks, Dubya! You've endured three more birthdays. There have been three Academy Awards ceremonies, three new Super Bowl champions, three full winters and three summers, three complete cycles of jean styles and hemlines and pleat cuts in the fashion world and there has been the rise and very quick fall of roughly 146 horrible TV shows you never even saw. Your skin has changed. Your teeth have worn down. Your bones have shifted in their sockets. Your fingernails grew another 4 inches and you consumed...

Sometimes there is just no way to know. Sometimes you are just handed a slab of raw perspective, a shocking dose of irony, and you have to do with it what you can. Some readers wrote me e-mails when I was out scorching my nether parts in the remote Nevada desert at Burning Man 2005, half naked and beglittered and intensely hung over and posting daily blog entries that read more like postcards from my moaning id than rational semicoherent slivers of BM reality.

In which Mark Morford survives his high school reunion, still unmarried and childless. It's like that feeling you get when you smack your head into a brick wall and your skull reverberates and your vision momentarily blurs and you have a painful but somehow still nicely appealing flash of insight into Something Very Important, something you think you should know, something that can only be illuminated via cocktails and bloody prime rib and conversing with old flames. This is the high school reunion. It is the most curious thing. You attend one and you are calmly slammed up against the...

Oh my yes, there is indeed one force that is eating away the American soul like a cancer. Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place? Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very one. Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of consumerism gone wild. This is America....