[caption id="attachment_1123" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Wow"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20110429_5.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1123" title="20110429_5" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20110429_5-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

When I first moved to California in 1990, I spent the spring, summer and fall putting miles on my car. I was covering professional and college sports, often two events a day, and I'm pretty sure I was putting gas in my car two or three times a week.

I honestly don't remember what we paid for gas then. I know when I got my license in the spring of 1967, regular was about 35 cents a gallon, and the price shocks of '73 and '74 bumped it up, first to 55-60 cents and then to about a dollar. Ever since then, gas goes up a lot, down a little, up a lot, down a little and the oil companies get rich.

The first cars I ever owned were a Ford Pinto and a Chevy Camaro. I loved the Camaro. It was a '73, one of the last of the real "muscle" models, with a V-8 engine and a 350 under the hood. It got 10 miles to the gallon, 12-13 in highway driving. Filling the tank usually cost me $10-12.

By 1990 in California, I was driving a Pontiac Fiero. It was the first new car I ever bought myself, an '87 that I got at Weld County Motors in Greeley, Colorado, and I drove it all over Colorado, all over Nevada when I lived in Reno and by the time I got to Los Angeles, it already had about 80,000 miles on it.

I owned numerous cars during the 20-plus years I lived in California, and one thing I became accustomed to was paying more for gas than people almost anywhere else in the country. When I moved to Georgia last November, one of the first things I noticed was that gas was 30-30 cents a gallon cheaper here than it had been out there.

Of course lately, everybody is paying a lot for gas. Some folks argue that if you factor inflation into it, we're really only paying a little more than we did 30 or 40 years ago, but that's sort of fatuous. Yes, inflation has made everything more expensive, but the biggest thing that has caused all that inflation is the increase in gas prices.

[caption id="attachment_1129" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Prices are climbing"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20110429_4.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1129" title="20110429_4" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20110429_4-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

And what is really ridiculous about it all is that while cars have certainly become more fuel efficient since I started driving 44 years ago this month, we should have moved on to an entirely different kind of technology by now. When you look at amazing advances made in so many other areas, the fact that we're still dependent on the internal combustion engine is totally silly.

Of course you know why this is true.

There's still plenty of money to be made using up the rest of the oil, so we probably won't move on to the new technology till the oil is just about gone.

The only good news for me, at least, is that being retired, I don't drive as much. Yeah, I paid $54 for a fill-up a couple of weeks ago, but I'm really only buying gas a couple of times a month.

Fact is, if we didn't go to Atlanta every other week or so, I would hardly be driving at all.

And wouldn't that be wonderful.