I acknowledge that climate change is real, I weigh too much, my health is important and I want to dress great when I go out. Hey, the packaging needs to be as good looking as the contents. As soon as my wife stops laughing, I’ll continue.
Everyday I have been told that we need to do more, to reduce carbon emissions, eat healthier foods, lose weight and be pressured into looking better. While that sounds great, do you know how much that will cost us? I will go broke long before I can ever save the planet. This same kind of outside pressure led me to start smoking when I was in high school. With the cost of nicotine patches and gum, therapy and starting new bad habits to help replace smoking got very expensive. My first effort at trying to be good cost me a lot of money. You know how much I spent on chewing gum while trying to quit, then the dental work that followed. That really took a bite out of my budget. Yes, a continuation of last week’s punning, but it costs too much to stop…too much hilarity.
Let’s start with the environment. Every day I’m bombarded with earth shaking news about how fast our planet is spinning into oblivion. If we don’t do our part, earth will turn into a spent piece of coal spinning through space. As a citizen of the planet, I feel I have to do my part. I went out looking for a car that would help reduce my carbon footprint. I first shopped for an electric car. I find it exciting that our technology has advanced so much that I now can own a fully electric car that can take me to the mall four blocks away, where I can plug it in to charge, then have enough juice to make it home with shopping bags in hand. I then plug it back in at my house. This can be prohibitive but boy, would I look environmentally friendly and like I hang out with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, a fighter for the environment. Leo, give me a jingle.
A fully electric car costs quite a bit more than your everyday, gas driven,Toyota Corolla. If you go with the full package of solar panels to collect the energy of the sun and Tesla batteries to store it, you will drain your bank account faster than a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado drains its gas tank. I don’t think I could qualify for the loan to add tens of thousands dollars to Elon Musk’s astronomical net worth so he can send some more of his rich friends into space. If he is the savior of the planet, why not make his electric cars affordable for the unwashed masses. Maybe that’s why he wants to colonize Mars with just rich people and none of us plebeians (Trying to expand your vocabulary. Look it up.) that he seems to despise.
Another way of helping the environment is to keep your car running at its highest efficiency. Unfortunately, they are basically driving computers, and when I open the hood of my hybrid, there was a very large sticker that said “HIGH VOLTAGE.” The same warning you might see on, let’s say, the electric chair at your local prison. That scared me away from a life of crime and doing any work on my hybrid. Now I have to go to a dealership to keep my car up and running and it is very expensive. I would ask Elon Musk for a loan but he’s too busy trying to take over social media, and letting me know how much smarter he is than I am.
Another aspect of my life where I am trying to do the right thing is by losing weight and eating healthier. I was just starting my second Big Mac while I was thinking about it. If I want low calorie, gluten free, sugar free, fat free dining, I have to pay a premium. It barely costs me anything to clog my arteries. I dare you to compare prices at the supermarket. If it has a panel on the packaging that says “(fill in the blank) free,” you’ll be paying more. It doesn’t make sense. Logic states that the less you put into food, the less it should cost, right? I am pretty sure I saw a bottle of water with a gluten free label on it and the price was quite a bit more than that water from a spring somewhere in the mountains. When did water start having gluten in it? I wonder if the forest animals are secretly adding gluten to our water supply in an effort to rid this world of humans. First Elon Musk and now Bambi are trying to do away with us.
Medication is another frustrating obstacle for people trying to stay healthy and alive…in this country at least. If I rewrite this article for Canada, I will drop this section completely. Why do life saving drugs cost so much? Maybe it’s to support all the advertising the pharmaceutical companies place on our televisions. An example is insulin. Literally a life saving drug, can cost into the hundreds of dollars for Americans while in Canada it’s $35 dollars. Why? According to our politicians who refuse to address this issue, it is because they don’t want us to become socialist. Canada is full of socialist and hockey players. These experts connect socialism to communism and we don’t want any communism in this country. Hockey players we’ll take, even from Russia, but no socialized medicine. Considering how beat up hockey players get, you have to have socialized medicine. These politicians also will accept very large contributions from big pharma to help prevent communism from ravaging our country. If people have to die, so be it…as long as it’s not any Canadian or Russian hockey players. We’re trying to save them from socialism and communism. Now that I have cleared that up, let’s move on.
Finally, the cost of looking good has skyrocketed. If I want to look dressed to the nines when I take my lovely wife out to dinner, I should be wearing a pair of my Dockers Khakis, a stylish Tommy Bahama shirt and a pair of Italian loafers. To dress this way would cost me more than dinner, and we would be sitting at the local Mac Donald’s starting our second Big Mac…again.
I am forced to do much of my clothes shopping at Walmart so I can afford to eat. They do offer some clothes that look like the brand name ones as long as you don’t mind the buttons being a little off on your shirt, your Khakis having one leg shorter than the other and your shoes made out of recycled water bottles. At least with the latter I am helping the environment by recycling plastic and the label that was on the sole of my new shoes, left over from the water bottle, said it was gluten free. Maybe that’s why they cost 25¢ more.
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