I Don't Feel Bad About the Small Size of My Kidney at All

Looking at my blog posts over the past couple of days I see that I have been very pedantic, even for me. I think it must have been caused by the shock of having the existence of a Hummer bigger than mine rubbed in my face. And that's a very hard thing to have rubbed in your face indeed. But I think I'm over it now. I mean, just because someone has a Hummer bigger than mine that has absolutely no bearing on how I feel about myself or my level of self respect. I am quite over my childish sense of competition based on size. I'm making a fresh start on this issue starting now. I shall eat my breakfast and begin a new day without any size related anxiety.

It shall be a huge breakfast of brogdingnagian proportions.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

This cannot be! I just saw a stretch Hummer that is even bigger than mine! It was hot pink and about 80 feet long and racked up enough violations of traffic law and god's law to have the driver's license revoked just by turning a corner.

How dare they have one bigger than mine!

If I can no longer compete on size, then I'll have to compete with style. Time to go for a drive in my hot pink Edsel with a purple metallic stripe and a rotting leg on the front.

I Feel... ANGRY!

A most unusual event occurred today. I believe that I actually experienced an emotion. This rarely happens and I am very excited about it. Ha! Excited! That's another emotion! And Ha! also! Well, Ha! isn't exactly an emotion... I guess I could call it delight, but that seems a tad strong. I think I'll just call Ha! the thrill of realisation. It's like I'm a veritable living cornucopia of emotional experience today. And they said I was dead inside. (They being my parents, my sister, the Catholic Church, my psychiatrist, two Papal Bulls, and the guy who wanted to remove my necrotic lymph node.)

So what initiated this outpouring of emotion? Well, somebody tried to kill me. And not in the usual, quite understandable way. When I say tried to kill me, I think that unusually for me they actually might have tried to kill me by accident. (Does paranoia count as an emotion?)

Anyway, I was driving along, heading around a curve, when the person in the car next to me decided that they would rather be where I was and almost drove into my side. Now if I was in the Hummer this wouldn't have been a problem. In fact I probably wouldn't have noticed them. Even after they had collided with me I probably wouldn't have noticed them. Of course, if I was in the Hummer there wouldn't have been a problem as I would have taken up both my lane and theirs and I would have been impossible not to notice. Even blind people can notice my Hummer. (The blind can sense evil.) But I wasn't in my Hummer, I was on a tiny motorised skateboard called a Hyundai Getz that only has enough power to do everything you could possibly want to legally do.

When I saw them attempting to turn into me, (an understandable desire, but foolish, as I don't think anyone else has got what it takes to be me), I swerved out of the way and honked the horn. And here's the interesting part. I honked the horn a second time even though it served no practical purpose as the goal of giving a warning would have been fully achieved by the first honkeration. I believe that I honked the horn a second time because I was feeling angry.

I'm very excited about this. I've never felt angry before. The best I've been able to manage is irritated or annoyed. But angry is something new. Sure I've pretended to be angry before, but I've never actually felt it. I've pretended to be angry when facing angry people, mainly to stop myself from laughing out loud because angry people look so hilarious. They go bright red, or at least the pale ones do, and they make the oddest expressions. But if instead of getting angry they go into a killing rage, then they go slack faced and ashen. It's actually quite surprising the number of people who go into a killing rage when I'm around. It's almost as if people don't like having the beliefs they've based their lives upon mocked as I try to help them by pedantically pointing out incongruities in said beliefs. Odd that.

Anyway, I'm hoping that feeling anger will help me understand other people and their bizarre, non-nonsensical, stupid, irrational, and frequently mindless behaviour better. You see, I'm trying to develop empathy. And I'm getting quite good at it too. I'm able to recognise four different facial expressions now. Admittedly I'm having trouble recognising these expressions in humans rather than muppets, but I think I've got the basics pretty much down pat.

Another Setback!

I have just had a very frustrating phone conversation with the the Manly Man Hummer Association. I called them to get the green light on some modifications I am performing on my Hummer, as checking with them is one of the conditions of my receiving a stipend for driving a Hummer while being such a manly man. Things started off on a bad note, literally, with there being strange noises on the line. You would think that in this day and age I would be able to pick up a telephone and call Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and get a clear connection, wouldn't you? And then they told me they don't approve of the modifications I am performing on the Hummer.

I just don't understand it. They approved my other modifications, the harpoon gun, the chain and ship anchor for emergency braking, the air compressor, the extractors, the afterburners, the lead weights for increased traction... But it seems that as soon as I try to make a change to improve its fuel efficiency, suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, I'm not allowed to do that. I threatened to go over their heads and call their parent organisation, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, but the representative I was talking to just laughed to my ear. (If I'd been in the same room with him I'm sure he would have laughed to my face.) Well, I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of their position and the conversation went down hill from there.

I think the situation was made worse by my poor estimation of his English language abilities. I had assumed that his English wasn't good enough for him to understand what I meant when I called him a pustulent carbuncle fixated on procuring fetid dingo kidneys for diseased malefactors, but apparently he did. It seems that his years at Oxford were not wasted. As this point he started to refer to me as dude, as if I was some sort of Californian surfer or Ninja turtle. Anyway, to sever a long story short, I will no longer receive a stipend for driving a Hummer while being such a manly man.

Drowning Fewer Thai People Through Changing Car Rego

I heard it again last night. The deep, throbbing growling growing closer until it was right beneath me. The metal on metal scrape of the garage door closing, followed by the unpleasant mechanical stench of unburnt hydrocarbons seeping between the floorboards. Then the deep rumbling I could feel through the frame of the bed cut off and was replaced by the intermittent tink-tink of cooling steel.

I made my way downstairs, passed my tank collection, and approached the Hummer. It was wet. Water dripped from the chassis and pooled beneath it. A sprig of green plant life was caught below the left headlight. It was long, soft strands of bright but rich green – a colour seen rarely in Australia. I plucked a small crustacean from the radiator grill and bit its head off. A fresh water species. There was debris along the bottom of the windshield and I picked out pieces of plastic and metal. The pieces had once been a hard drive and I knew which country it had been made in. I no longer had any doubt. Once again my Hummer had gone out in the night to drown Thai people.

I blame myself.

No, wait! No I don't! I blame the car! I didn't drown those Thai people! The car did it! I wasn't even there! Sure, I know the more one drives a Hummer or any other fossil fueled vehicle, the higher the chance it will slip out at night and go on a Thai drowning rampage, but how was I to know that the last trip I took would be the one to set it off? When I drove 200m down the road to buy an exercise magazine, it wasn't my intent to kill anyone. It was just bad luck that I happened to set it off. It is possible that my actions may have led to one or more people being downed, but only in the stochastic sense.

And how do we even know that my Hummer drowned anyone? It's impossible to say. It's a well known fact that Hummers and other vehicles only magically transport themselves to Thailand and drown people when no one is looking, so it's not as if there are any witnesses who could say my Hummer did down someone. Sure, I did find some matted human hair in one of the wheel wells, but that doesn't mean anything. My Hummer may have simply drowned a Thai wig.

And really, when you get down to it, it's the responsibility of the Thai people themselves to deal with the propensity that oil powered vehicles have to drown them. They need to adapt. When a three tonne truck suddenly magically appears behind them and attempts to hold them under water until they drown, they should simply jump out of the way. If they just take the simple precaution of avoiding all bodies of water they should be fine. While I understand that this may be difficult to do in Thailand, we manage it quite well in central Australia.

So I feel no guilt at all about driving a Hummer. Well, maybe just a tiny, weeny, itty, bitty, bit of guilt the size of a pimple on a bacteria's bottom. Sure, I could drive a car that is much less likely to drown Thai people, but I can't stop driving a Hummer! You see, I have a very small... kidney, and my driving a Hummer makes me feel better about the comparatively small size of my organ. My kidney organ that is, because that's the part which is small. And what about the stipend I get from the Manly Man Hummer Association in return for driving a Hummer while being such a manly man? If I stopped driving a vehicle that at random times drowned Thai people it would hurt me financially. This is something Thai people should keep in mind as they are being drowned. And yes, I know it's hard to think rationally with an oxygen starved brain while thrashing around underwater, but I don't think it's too much to ask them to consider the big picture.

So I don't feel guilty at all.

Except that I do, just a little bit.

So, how can I purge this small particle of guilt? I know! I'll encourage other people to change their ways to improve the situation while doing nothing myself! That always works! Now, let's see, what can I suggest? I know! Car rego!

In Australia, car registration is quite pricey and is mostly insurance. Apparently compensation and stitching people together after cars smack into each other isn't cheap. It's a charge that's the same for each vehicle type, no matter how many kilometres the vehicle is driven. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because one would think that the chance of smacking into something would be more or less proportional to the number of kilometres driven, rather than a fixed chance per time period whether one kilometre is driven or a million.

So I suggest that we change car registration so we pay by the kilometre rather than by time. This will have the advantage of turning car registration into a running cost rather than a fixed cost, which will slightly reduce the number of kilometres that people drive as the cost of each kilometre driven will be higher than before, even though the average cost of driving will be about the same. Fewer kilometres driven means less congestion, less pollution and lower CO2 emissions.

Paying per kilometre driven will also encourage the uptake of electric and fuel efficient vehicles. If people know they can keep their old petrol slurper and only pay registration for when they actually use it, they will be more likely to purchase an electric or other small, fuel efficient vehicle for around town use.

Changing over would be a hassle. Many cars would need to have their odometers checked because of the temptation to over report the number of kilometres it displays at the start of the new system. But after that it shouldn't be too difficult. People could just self report the number of kilometres they have driven each year, or part year. Sure, people might lie about how many kilometres they have driven to try to save money, but if the vehicle is sold or wrecked then the odometer would be checked and it would catch up with them then. “But,” you say, “What if I drove many kilometres and then set the car on fire, destroying all evidence of how far I drove?” Then I would say, “Congratulations, you have gotten away with committing a crime, something that has long been an important part of our culture here in Australia. I hope you feel proud of yourself.”

I realise that paying vehicle registration by the kilometre may go into the too hard basket. For one thing, depending on how it's done, it could have a big effect on the trucking industry. And I also realise that some people might prefer to put off any change until they can install GPS monitors in all vehicles and use a congestion based pricing system. But, and this is the important point, I have put the suggestion out there and my guilt is now assuaged.

Time to take the Hummer for a spin!