In Honolulu, Los Angeles and most U.S cities, the price of gas is now over $4.00 a gallon. To make sure we do not panic, experts are busy assuring us that it will surely get to $5.00 a gallon by summer.

Anticipating a higher demand for $5.00 bills, the Federal Reserve just released a new redesigned $5 dollar bill with a picture of a barrel of oil replacing President Lincoln’s. To foreclose protests, the apex bank wants to make sure we know what a barrel is and why we should dole out so much for a gallon of gas. Everyone seems to be getting ready. But are you?

While Democrats are promising to grab smiling oil company executives by their balls and squeeze them until they return some of the breath-taking profits they are making, the Republicans are promising to make the oil market obey the supply and demand fundamentals. Meanwhile, considering the cost of gas that you may need to drive up to an Old Country Buffet near you, you may have to walk to the Subway to buy your two feet-long Philly steak and cheese sandwich.

In the good old days of Bill Clinton, a 25 cent increase in pump price would make him release oil from the strategic reserve, else Whitehouse interns may not be able to buy gas to come to work. But you can’t catch George W. Bush doing something that silly. He would rather humor OPEC to increase production or he would invade another of OPEC’s countries. But being that OPEC knows that Bush has no military reserve left, they just laughed at him.

Some evangelists must have prayed because George W. Bush is finally doing something about the soaring price of gas. He is sending Dick Cheney to haunt for oil in the Middle East. Cheney is going with a special Bazooka that can fire from ten cylinders all at once at 23 miles per bullet.

As it is often the case, good things do come from bad situations. While some Americans have parked their cars, opting instead to share the dirty train platforms and bus chairs with winos and creepy flashers, others who are more creative are bringing out their horses from the barn. In some cases, retired donkeys are being redeployed to the street.

From all indications, American car makers will roll out their final models of those gas- guzzling SUVs in 2009. By the summer of 2012, when wheelchair bound John McCain will be preparing for his second term in office, the price of oil will be so insane that anyone who walks into a dealership and buys an SUV will immediately be taken to a doctor’s office next door for a lobotomy.

I have been thinking, instead of designing cars that drink light sweet crude, why don’t our car makers downgrade and make cars that drink the cheap and more abundant heavy sour crude that runs in sewage pipes across America?

Already some smart people who do not own the Prius have began to experiment. Some cars on the road now run on vegetable grease. Some run on French fry fryer’s grease from Burger King. I understand that one innovative man is working on converting car engines to run on urine. He is proposing his urine-gas stations adjacent to Starbucks and Dunkin Donut stores. When you run out of gas, you simply pull down your pants and … off you go. In this 21st century, price gouging is proving itself to be the mother of all inventions.

Some really clever guys are now working on a mind-boggling project of harvesting the energy of the hurricane. According to some estimates, the energy in one category five Hurricane, the type that ethnic-cleansed New Orleans, is enough to power the state of California with all its hitch-hiking illegal immigrants for a year. The proof that this may actually work comes from the fierceness of its denunciation by speculators at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Turning corn into ethanol won the heart of Iowa for Obama. Harvesting wind from Mexico as it crossed the Texas border won the heart of Texas for Clinton. Cleaning the colon of the old and reliable coal deposits gave West Virginia to McCain. It won’t be long before the Alaska oil rush begins. Men and women will pick up shovels, diggers and power drills and head to Alaska on solar blades.

But truly, if not for this nuclear non-proliferation treaty that has tied our hands from producing anything nuclear, the ultimate solution would have been the zero emission nuclear alternatives. Once you buy a car and a cake of uranium imported from Niger, you go home, enrich it with peanut butter and jelly, crack it inside your fuel tank and let the radioactive chain reaction run ad infinitum.

The only downside is that you may never be able to shut off your car. But who cares? We already spend half of our lifetime in our cars.