For those of you who don't already know, I live in a confusing and often frightening place called the United States of America. Specifically, I am located in the illustrious state of Tennessee about 40 miles northwest of Nashville. I live in the fourth or fifth largest city in the state of Tennessee. If you've ever been here then you already know that that's not really saying much.

Oh, and before you even think it, don't blame me for country music. It wasn't my idea. I don't even believe in it.

Either way, I woke up at 5:00 a.m. this morning after going to sleep only two hours earlier. I had to do this because my girlfriend's brother has been trying to find work in the town where I live and his only option right now is day labor. This means I get up every morning and run him to a tiny little building where he sits and drinks coffee and watches the news with about 30 other people from around the city. Sometimes a few of them are called to go out to various construction sites within the city and make about $6.00/hour breaking their backs in the sun. But keep in mind, that's only if you're lucky. If you're unlucky then you spend about three hours sitting around wishing you had a real job.

So I woke up again at about 8:30 a.m. to a call from my girlfriend's little brother. No luck on the job. I hopped in the car and drove a few minutes down the road to pick him up. Once I got there he told me that he needed to run to a jewelry store in the mall to make a payment on a ring his girlfriend got him as a present last year. As much as I hate the mall, I was pretty awake at that point and decided to go ahead and make a trip of it.

The only mall in our town is about a 20 minute drive from my house, and this...

...is what we followed practically the whole way there. In case you're wondering why this is such a big deal, I'll quote a Wiki article that I read once I got home.

"Although General Motors does not provide official H2 fuel economy ratings on the gasoline engine it comes with, most reviews have observed high single to low double-digit mileage.

Forbes notes "H2 gets a paltry 13 mpg (miles per gallon of gasoline) on the highway and 10 mpg in the city" Motortrend observed 12 mpg. Car and Driver observed 10 mpg. A reviewer at about.com got 8.6 mpg. Edmunds got 9.2 mpg. Four Wheeler magazine observed 10.8 mpg in their final long term report of an H2 SUT. Their worst tank was 7.2 mpg and best tank was 15.3 mpg, pretty high for an enormous SUV. Consumer Guide observed 10.7 mpg, even with mostly highway driving. Automobile Magazine averaged less than 10 mpg."

I'm not sure about other parts of the country or elsewhere in the world, but gas prices here have skyrocketed within the last three months. In my region we're paying an average of $3.69 per gallon, when only last summer we thought that $2.50 per gallon was bad! I've also heard that some parts of the United States are now paying over $4.00 per gallon.

As far as I know, the people who drive these ridiculous luxury machines never take their tires off of the road. I've never seen one cruising around town with mud splattered up to the roof. I've never seen one tearing through a field or throwing up sludge on a twisted back road somewhere. I see them at stoplights and in the parking lots of clubs and in my lane of traffic. I see them perpetually locked onto the pavement serving no purpose whatsoever but to shoot up the national average of gas prices, their drivers pretentiously chattering into cell phones or paying more attention to the television on their visor than, you know, the road.

I followed the first H2 all the way to the mall. I saw the second one as I was just about to pull into my driveway a couple of hours later. Apparently they're friggin' everywhere.

To top it all off, at the mall my girlfriend's brother and I were hanging out front before the place opened and simply watching the hapless pedestrians walk by. We saw lots of fat people in tight pants, lots of skinny people walking around with cigarettes and energy drinks, and one perfectly healthy-looking woman who insisted upon pressing the handicap button to make the door open automatically when she walked in. To top it all off, we stopped one guy to ask him the time. Noticing the golden watch on his wrist, we watched in stupefaction as he dug into his pocket to look at his cell phone.

Somehow I am gripped by this insistent thought that the vast majority of people who live in this country are perched precariously on the border of total mental disability.

Welcome to America.