A Witch's Teat

It's a truism that people who don't have anything to talk about talk about the weather, so I'm hesitant to do it two weeks in a row. Plus I don't like to do direct sequels week to week as a) that would require me to remember what I did the previous week, and if anything is self-evident about this blog project, it should be that it is labor-averse, and b) making that kind of thematic or idea-building effort would just give the audience the impression that they should expect something coherent in this space when, above all, I prize the freedom I've afforded myself by never even accidentally suggesting that I have some kind of plan for all this. That has its downsides of course as every week I start thinking about this at exactly the same time, the-minute-I-open-this-ancient-laptop-screen-o'clock, meaning every session begins with my brain vacating every thought I might have had about any event or idea of the previous seven days, so it's all frantic google searches ostensibly for news, but almost always ending on Instagram clips of bloopers from the U.S. version of The Office, which is weird as it's a show I rarely watched and never really enjoyed. But sometimes the attention span needs what the attention span needs. And apparently sometimes mine needs to hear Pam Beesly do swears.

But this is not going to be about the weather! At least not directly! It's about how the fact that having a rare winter where we got more than five days (not cumulatively, I mean total) where the temperature was in the 50s has--probably totally accidentally!--coincided with this month's unprecedented 300%+ rise in home natural gas prices. And it's not just me who thinks it's excessive. When I went to enter my payment to Southern California Gas for my January bill, the robot who lives inside my online banking website pulled me aside to say "whoa, hey, this seems a little excessive, pal. Natural resources are a sucker's bet" and then spent forty minutes showing me graphs about bitcoin. I'm paraphrasing some of that, but the root of it is a certain percentage of true.

It's unseemly to talk about money in the U.S. for some reason, mostly I think because if we did we'd all realize how much we're getting absolutely fucked, in 100% of cases by private businesses who thrive on opacity, obfuscation and intimidation. It's been fascinating to see a right-leaning social media haven that works like a real-time oral history of white people panicking about the abominations of integration and diversity in suburbs officially called "Nextdoor." The participants have taken a break from reporting about mysterious helicopter flyovers or all the times they saw a brown person in their neighborhood around or after sunset and have started shouting out their home gas bills during this spike. I will tell you mine was fairly modest in total size, but still pretty astounding as a percentage. My December bill of about $40 jumped up to about $150 for January. Impressive, but at least I got to learn that gas is charged on something called a "price per therm," which has gone from ~$1 to over $3. I'm sure the last thing utility companies want is their captive customer base really starting to pay attention to the shit written on their bills, but here we are. Nothing makes an activist in the United States faster than a market price correction.

There are, of course, Very Important Explainer Articles out there now, the spin of which seems to be 1) it's been cold all over and 2) something something infrastructure. Now, if it were that we were having an exceptionally bitter winter and what was happening was my increased bill was subsidizing the availability and affordability of natural gas in places less developed, less well-off, more frequently closer to freezing than here? I'd legitimately be fine with that. I'm a GenX Democrat, we live for that kind of performative, shallow, tragically ultimately meaningless quasi-socialist gesture. It's what we have in place of principles.

But I'm also old enough and I've lived through enough resource "crises" (almost always in the form of gasoline) to understand that we live in a system designed to frustrate the impulse or even the action to help. Every gofundme effort to pay for someone's drastic medical expenses starts off as a feel good let's-all-pitch-in, help-thy-neighbor story before we're all bummed out realizing it's just the latest tragedy until the next one, or worse, indicative of the thousand other ones happening silently at the same time. The money raised is a relief to the family, but only feeds a ravenous system the pile of lucre it needs to justify and sustain itself, at our literal expense. It's tough to do anyone a public solid when the line between a utilitarian gesture of good and getting actively price gouged doesn't actually exist.

See, I told you I didn't want to talk about the weather! We know by now that the topics on the table here anymore are weather, the crushing heel of late-stage capitalism or TV/movies based on popular genre IP. But I wasn't ready to talk about the James Gunn DC Studios stuff, so you human get lives destroyed by a cold snap instead. Superman can wait. But he can make fire with his eyes, so he can afford to.