Prices for Oil in Poland

Czesc dudes and dudettes, hello! This is the future calling!
They say that futures's here, only unevenly distributed - and they usually mean Japan. For once, I'm happy to announce, the sometimes backwaterish country of Poland has been your future, until just very recently, my friends! Gas prices oscillating around $4.5 a gallon for years. Years! So you might want to "repeat after me".

But today I'm here to talk about the past.

That was a night I took a strange pill, or maybe just a half of it. Four years ago, on a warm autumn evening, in a village deep in the Polish mountains. There was a church lit up like a ballistic rocket ready for a launch. And stories of world war two guerrillas surfacing out of the past, in the pilly haze. And then we were all guerrillas, dressed up in old communist army uniforms of our host's father, sneaking through the hills, between the trees, to disable that rocket!

That's when the vision hit me, of a world without oil. The pill builds a strange reality where all the elements lock in around a central premise: electricity will soon be gone. What do we do? How do we cope? I was walking then with two friends through a forest late at night, and plans had to be made fast. And plans needed to be based on an understanding: of what happens when electricity goes out. The friends were clearly missing the point, missing the utter terror of what happens when electricity goes out. I guess it was the other halves of their pills that made them so foolish and uncaring. The issue, in their minds, got reduced to a simple darkened lightbulb, and people reading newspapers by the candlelight.

No newspapers! No hospitals! No trucks to deliver groceries to supermarkets! No clothes and shoes from China! No Maroccan strawberries in the winter! No more trips to the seaside! Remember that crazy story about the Soviet town dependent on fuel shipments by sea, stranded in the middle of heavy northern winter without working heating, with people covering radiators that pumped cold from frozen pipes rather than heat into rooms already on the verge of freezing - it's coming! No more TV! No more internet! Cory Doctorow will really stand in the middle of SF with BoingBoing written on scraps of paper, like in that freaky SF story! Leaking chemicals! Exploding nuclear powerplants! Transportation ground to a halt! Riots! Violence! And no more homogenized, pasteurized milk too, most probably! And no more disney as well, unless we remix it into popular, folk theater plays shown in the countryside by wandering troupes!

Imagine the terror! Half of a pilly pill would surely help, but I'm sure your imagination has been fueled enough recently to attempt this cold turkey.

So there's no electricity. And two thirds of your population, like in my case, are oblivious to the drama, dreaming bucolic dreams of neo-luddite simplicity. Which is like, EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Wrong. So what do you do?

I remember what I did, and the thought still sends shivers down my spine...

But I need to go now, they're starting to ration gas, my mom says the last time it happened was during martial law, and that if we survived that we can surely survive this as well. Anyways, they have some gas for sale starting tommorow at a station nearby, and the line up is starting already, so I better run and grab my spot.

talk to you later...