I just got my first car in four years. My sisters, both of whom have worse grades and are younger than me, have had cars continually since they turned 17. Mine was sold when I moved out here, a subtle comment on how happy my parents were with my decision to leave their coast.

I should not complain because I actually didn’t pay for this car; it’s an old family car and it needed a home anyway and I just happened to be the lucky recipient. So I shouldn’t look a gift horse in its gas guzzling mouth.

It’s an SUV. If I had the money, I’d buy a hybrid. Something small and efficient and I’d paint it black and have a clever bumper sticker relating to Bush’s shortcomings.

The only way I can justify driving an SUV is to use it to run over oil executives (whose medical bills I’m probably funding). Oil companies have record profits and my car will take a $100 to fill up? I wonder if my car will run on rage. Or, alternatively, because a lot of the cost of gas comes from federal taxes, I can try running down government officials. I’ll have difficulty telling the two groups apart.

I have seen this type of car before. Or rather, I’ve seen the type of person who would drive this car before. He has his windows down and his system up and throws his hands to the music before he swerves to avoid my bike. And it’s even cooler how his buddy leans out the window and barks at me. It doesn’t matter what it is, for it reinforces two things: 1) he is a badass 2) his friend is a lesser badass who cannot afford a sweet ass ride like his, but at least knows a good crew to join up with. I always enjoy his commentary, his backwards cap, his upturned collar and the little gems of philosophy I hear from him.

Guy in passenger seat: “I GOTTA GET HIGH! WHOOO!”

Me: “You are using the future tense when you clearly intended the past.”

I’m an English major. My rebuttals take time. Unfortunately, the driver of the car had kicked his sweet-ass-ride into high gear. He did not hear my correction of grammar.

These are the kind of people I see driving this car.

Now admittedly, the SUV will come in handy for going up to Tahoe in the winter time for my ridiculously WASPy hobby of downhill skiing. But the guilt is going to get to me. This isn’t the guilt I feel for kicking wiener dogs or telling people that I heard Radiohead was breaking up. This is a lingering feeling, something like: “I know I am partially and directly contributing to fucking up this planet.”

I feel like polar bears are going to meet me in a parking lot one night and just beat the living hell out of me. These won’t be guys in polar bear suits, but actual bears with brass knuckles for some reason. In the corner, Al Gore plays the violin. They are pissed that I am destroying the ice caps. They also want my lunch money. I have strange dreams.

I wouldn’t blame the polar bears at this point. I have it coming to me. I mean we all have it coming to us to a certain degree. There are plenty of SUVs on this campus, plenty of people who don’t recycle. There are smaller sins too. Like at dinner, when you don’t finish your pot brownies. God cries. When we waste valuable digital trees by continually emailing about dorm meetings — I die a little inside. Especially if they’re from my former dorms WHO WON’T TAKE ME OFF THEIR GOD DAMN LISTS.

The Enron execs just got their asses handed to them, which is great because their asses will have lots of handling where they are going. Why the hell can’t we do the same to Shell or Exxon? Not guilty of price gouging? How is it that the government is monitoring my downloading of music but can’t monitor the meetings where a bunch of white balding oil executives are smoking cigars and sitting on chairs made of poor people? Maybe noise doesn’t travel very well in the west wing because while the government might be deaf, even I can hear the party in Cheney’s office. Maybe they are having difficulty differentiating the good guys from this week’s scapegoats.

I think to a certain degree a lot of society is having that problem. Our government is a circus, not the cool French-Canadian kind where they juggle dolphins while smoking cigarettes underwater but the over-the-top American kind where we can’t tell the ringleaders from the clowns. We’ve all got our hands in their mess too because of our reliance on oil. Americans need to do a lot to make amends to the world for our sins against the environment. Personally, I’m going to undergo some self flagellation to clear my conscience. I’ll watch Al Gore’s new flick. I’ll hug a tree. I’ll only kick vegan puppies.

I’m going to do my part to align myself on the side of good, so when the polar bears come, they’ll just eat the roommate.

Chris hopes his roommate treated you citizens right in his absence. Send complaints to cholt@stanford.edu.