In a compelling video blog posted on YouTube, rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs laments the fact that oil prices are so high he can’t even fly in his private jet to pursue his acting career.
You should actually probably watch the video before you read on. It is so ridiculous and hilarious that I encourage you to take a pause from reading and watch Diddy’s journey through…gasp!...a public airport.
From what I gather from the video, Diddy insists he is facing the same problems the rest of us are with high gas prices. According to the video, he’s even decided to stop spending $250,000 a month to use his private jet to fly from New York to Los Angeles while he pursues his acting career, and is now flying coach on American Airlines (though the seat he had looked suspiciously like first class).
As I heard Diddy’s testimony, one thought and one thought only came to mind: “I feel your pain Diddy. I feel your pain.”
“I feel your pain Diddy. I feel your pain.”I want to take this opportunity to piggyback off Diddy’s heartbreaking story to tell you about my own experience with high gas prices. Recently when planning my travel to Florida for TheSequitur.com’s annual conference, I was faced with plane ticket prices in the hundreds. Greyhound was about the same. I can’t afford those prices – I have a wedding to save up for! The search for transportation continued. Finally, I found a guy named "Old Whiskey Tim" who runs moonshine from El Paso to Orlando by stage coach. He said he’d pick me up in San Antonio for $50 and a “Men’s Health” magazine. I agreed to the price, and never asked what the magazine was for. It was better that way.
Old Tim picked me up in late April, and we began the perilous journey to the state Homer Simpson once described as “America’s wang.” We didn’t have much to keep us entertained: no magazines (except the issue of “Men’s Health," which I had no interest in), no games, no women. All we had to keep us going were Tim’s stories about running his stage coach. Toward late May, we began the long trip through the swamps of Louisiana, and I already regarded Tim with the respect a father figure deserved. This was a strong, proud man. This was a man who was willing to drink the kind of moonshine known to make your liver and pancreas explode simultaneously. This was a man who looked Death straight in the eye, spat on the ground, and said, “Go screw yourself.”
Diddy’s harrowing chronicle of traveling with the general public should be a wake-up call to us all.We arrived in Florida on the last day of July, just in time for the conference. We weren’t the men we were when we set out on our journey. Our beards were caked with dust and dirt, our clothes were worn and tattered, but through thick and thin, old Tim and I had avoided the price of oil altogether. We had made a trip independent of Diddy’s “brothers and sisters” in the Middle East. We had given the finger to the oil companies that can’t give people like Diddy fuel cheap enough for his private jet. We had emerged from our journey as men who understood that the price of oil is affecting each and every one of us.
Diddy’s harrowing chronicle of traveling with the general public should be a wake-up call to us all. If the oil crunch is hurting our most wealthy celebrities – what does that mean for us regular folk? I think the relation of my journey to Florida this summer answers that question: it means that a lot of us are going to start hitching rides with moonshiners who for some reason still travel by stage coach.
And, in case it wasn’t obvious, the story of my summer travel is exaggerated. We actually did have a couple of magazines in the stage coach. [YouTube]
Branden Hart, a TheSequitur.com assistant managing editor, works as an editor in San Antonio.
Morning Coffee is a collection of top-fold news, oddities, observations and wisecracks, peppered with financial advice, movie reviews and more gathered by TheSequitur.com contributors and editors.
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