I paid my patriotic penance last week, and I'm feeling like a weight has lifted off my shoulders. Except that what I paid is most likely going to the things I don't agree with: the war, the debt payments for the war or bailing out bad traders on Wall Street. So if we're guaranteeing bad debts by our own government and huge companies that didn't see the badness coming in the last year, can you give me back the few thousand I lost? Give me a little tax holiday or something?

I mean, I didn't buy a house in the boom because the prices seemed unrealistically high (and paying extra money because I couldn't afford the down payment didn't seem to make sense--if I don't have enough money to buy the house, I have to pay insurance to the mortgage company to guarantee what I couldn't do in the first place?). I don't invest in banks or mortgage companies. But if I totally screwed up and lost all my money on my house or bad stock investments, would I get anything from the government?

Nope. And I'd still have to pay those taxes from last year.

So my $600 check will go to my landlord, and I'll just have to hope this bailout money will float all boats. And maybe it will for a while. Maybe it's the tonic we've all been looking for.

I have the occasional tonic myself. I'm self sufficient that way. It doesn't really help my financial situation (especially if I get the "good" tonics), but it makes me feel better about getting screwed by the government. Know what? I have to pay extra taxes to the government for the good stuff.

Gas went up last week, now hovering around the $3.50 mark here in Albuquerque. Right after McCain proposed having a summer holiday from federal gas taxes (about eighteen cents a gallon, I think), gas went up twenty cents. Does that mean we already had a gas tax holiday, and we didn't even know it?

Most of the people I went out with in the last few weeks commented about how everything costs more. Toilet paper has doubled in cost in the last year. And we all need toilet paper. Anyone out there thinking about giving up toilet paper?

Eggs are more than double (which reminds me, I need to eat those expensive eggs I bought when I moved into this new place), but milk seems to be about the same price (between two-fifty and three bucks a gallon...hey, it's less expensive than gas! Where's my new hybrid car that runs on milk?). Corn is going through the roof because farmers get huge subsidies to grow corn--for gas. Don't they know hemp is better for this sort of thing? And shouldn't gas get cheaper if they're making all this new-fangled corn gas?

And yet, even as we all bitch and moan, we pay for it. Because there's nothing you can do. There aren't lobbyists for regular people, because regular people have no power (or, y'know, money to pay the lobbyists). There isn't anyone looking out for us. I don't care what those people interviewing for the Prez job say, it ain't about us. It's about them, and probably some of their close friends.

If the polls say things they agree with, they love polls. But if the polls don't, then the polls are wrong. Guess what the polls seem to be wrong about? Well, the war for starters. Because we aren't doing anything except staying the course, and the polls say two-thirds of Americans want us out.

Apparently us regular people don't know what we're talking about.

At the same time, there will be no revolution. Not televised, not on the radio or the Internet. There won't be a best selling revolutionary book, because no one reads anymore. They finished that Harry Potter series, y'know. Everyone can die happy without having to crack another book.

If there's one thing inflation seems to do to most of us Americans, it's try to figure out a way to pay for everything we buy all the time.

Life might be a little more interesting if we had "gas riots" here. Y'know, kinda like the food riots happening in places halfway around the world. Because food is too expensive for those regular people to buy.

Matt Worley isn't always mistaken for a regular person, but he is for the most part.