Last Friday I was pulling a Kramer. Remember when that dude was driving around in a new car he was test driving and trying to run the last drip of gas out of it? At the end of the show they came to the car lot and kept driving?

I was doing that Friday, matter fact, I was going to fill up Wednesday night but decided against. I wanted to see if the gas prices were gonna keep droppin. They seem to do that everyday now. So I didn't wanna fill up and then wake up the next morning, drive by a gas station and see the price dropped 5 cents. Plus, I wanted to see if I could fill up my tank for less than $40.

This was very important to me. I purposely didn't do the math in my head -- 17 gallon tank, multiply that by 2.xx/gall = ?...actually, I'm a writer and a black man, maybe I couldn't do the math -- I wanted to be surprised though.

So Friday, Jada (my whip) was doing that herk-jerk thing shje does when she's runnin out of gas. Coincidentally and fortunately, it was right near a Race Trac, the cheapest gas spot in my area. So,I pulled into a station with $2.37 gas and filled up.

It came to like $38.36 or somethin.

Yo, know lie...I hit em with a Tiger Woods fist-pump and then did a couple steps from the Cha-Cha-slide. I was feeling both triumphant and hopeful.

Just a couple weeks ago, I was droppin close to $55 on a fill-up. On the real, I started thinking about world-peace and no more starvation for some reason. If gas was really back below $2.50, i thought, then we were on the verge of worldwide diplomacy.

It was lunacy, for real. I had gone mad.

And what's really gnawing at me now is that I've recognized that I've been had. One of my co-workers told me so.

Me and couple my fellow scribes took a lil 20 minute trip to San Antonio, Fla. It's this small lil cartoon town not to far from where I rep. They have a downtown. It's one street that spans about two blocks. It features a police station, City Hall which is housed in a one-story building, a house turned into a dentist office, a house turned into an accountants office and a house turned into a doctors office...and Pancho Villa's, a Mexican restuarant.

We pulled up to the spot and some white dudes with cowboy hats were drinkin Negro Modelo outside. One smiled and his teeth looked like peanut-brittle. We got inside and I noticed they didn't even have the decency to boat in some square-head Mexican to cook a flauta or somethin.

With all that needlessly said, we sit down and start yappin and I tell everyone about my triumphant $38 fill-up. I'm goin on and on about how great that is and how things are looking up for our wallets and then one of was like,

"Vince, what are you talkin about? $%&* that! Gas was below $2 just about two months ago!"

And I sat and thought to myself, "These oil tycoons straight ran game on Da Dude."

Can anyone even remember when gas was below $2? Most of the people at my table couldnt. I know I, for one, thought those days were like at least a year ago.

These oil niggas know that.

And its like most things in life, sooner or later you get used to absolutely insane things. No matter how inappropriate, unwarranted, evil, illegal...our brains and the way we process certain things just become desenitized. How long does it take? A month? Two months? One viewing?

In my religion, we're always told to watch our entertainment, ya know. You watch a couple Rambo movies or a couple Tarrantino flicks and the next thing you know, you see someone beatin a man senseless with a bat on your next door neighbors porch and about all you can muster is a "Hey man, beat the back of his head in, not his face in."

Listen to enough hiphop and the slightest annoyance from a woman and you're calling her a bitch under your breath. Either that or imagining some dehumanizing sexual position you could demean her in.

Speakin of hiphop, the caliber music I listen to now is woeful. Back in the day, when dope album after dope album used to drop every Tuesday, I would've never sat through a whole Nelly song or called Lil Wayne wanna the illest emcees out. But the hop has been so trash lately, that the SoSo Def posse-cut gets the volume turned up in my car now.

Me and my Vino just kicked it about jazz the other week and I said how this year has all of sudden turned into an OK year since the new re-recording of Trane at the Half Note dropped and the new Wallace Roney and Sean Jones dropped. But that's three albums. Up until last year that'd have been disgraceful. In 2003 I kopped a new album every month. And lets not even get on the 60s and 70s.

I left Buffalo and now all of sudden, I don't mind eating Dominoes or Papa Johns. NO ONE in Buff would be caught dead eating that trash pizza. Pizza lovers in Buff have the luxury of livin in a city with a large Italian population, so we get authentic pizza. But after six years, I almost forgot what it tastes like. So now, cooked dough, spaghetti sauce and mozzerrella is good. So many spots use fake cheese, that if I go somewhere and taste some real mozzerella, I'm jumpn for joy, even though the dough tastes like toasted Wonder Bread and its the consistency of a wool sweater. Think about how pizzerias mustve thought about pizza hut when it first opened. it was probably sacreligious, but a nigga like me will kop because there's no alternative and it just turns into status-quo.

The things we deal with on an international scene is typical of this thinking too. That's why that situation is France is so powerful. It's some people that said screw the status quo and theyre not just going to meekly accomodate what the powers that be sets as the agenda.

So when I fill-up tomorrow, sure it'll be exciting to see if I can do so for below $35, but I'm scowling while I pump, just out of pricipal. The wool is no longer over my bug-eyes. Until this gas drops back to the $.86/gall it used to be at the Delta Sonic during my junior year, I'm not havin it.