I did one of those on-line carbon-footprint analysis questionnaires, and it told me that my lifestyle was almost green enough to qualify me for beatification except for the fact that I commute seventy-five kilometers to work. This is a no-no as far as is concerned by the great sky hippies who sit in unseen judgement of us all. Apparently, the kosher thing to do is to work for an organic vegetable-whispering bisexual cathouse within walking distance of your house and not, somehow, to explode congealed dinosaur arse within the bowels of my stylish and utterly masculine butter-yellow sub-compact.

Who knew?

So I says to my mate, I says, "You wanna carpool sometimes so what we can save the world?" and he was all like, "Yeah, because gas is expensive," and I was like, "To-may-to, to-mah-to." And so it was decided. So now three or four days a week my colleague and I ride together, drinking coffee and listening to the radio and accusing other drivers on the road of being mentally handicapped.

We watch the traffic animals. We are cruise-control ethologists. We develop theories about turbulence-inducing loci along the trail, and try to pre-emptively navigate in order to minimize their affects on whatever organism we're riding within. Whoever's not driving has the luxury of watching the tails thrash in the rearview.

My colleague says, "I've been driving this highway for fifteen years and there's stuff I never noticed before until riding as a passenger."

"Like the noble savage, riding as a passenger sensitizes us to the glories of the world. That's the real reason natives blockade the highways -- it's a gift to the white man, reminding us to slow down and smell the KFC."

"I am kind of hungry, you know."

"Sorry. I was going too fast to turn off."

"I don't want KFC. I wish there was road-side Indian food."

"You mean like fried bread and moonshine?"

"No, like India-Indian."

"Oh."

Riding together like this provides us excuses to get out of stuff. People may ask one of us or the other whether we can stay late, and we get to beg off on the grounds that the other has some vague obligation that won't allow it. "Yeah, I'd love to, mkay, but $NOT-ME has an appointment and I'm his ride, so..."

"You guys carpool?"

"Oh yeah, yeah. Earth first, of course. We thought we should do something in line with the company's new green measures, you know, to reflect the spirit of that initiative on a personal level."

"That must save you a lot on gas."

"Well, that's neither here nor there, really. It's the planet I'm thinking of. We all have to do our part, right? What have you done to save the world today?"

"I put my aluminium foil from lunch in the blue box."

"Bless you, child. Come -- let us sing Kumbaya together."

The question I'm asked most at work by people who don't know me very well is "Are you joking?" which is fair, because I am. I didn't start it, though. When I was new another guy in my department decided I should run some sort of gauntlet of corporate virginity by weathering the consequences of a series of random lies he told people about me. For example, he told the cougars in the Air Department that I am a devout Muslim with two wives (one hot (very), one not (hairy)), and he told the girls in the Schwag Department that I'm homeschooling my children in order to better indoctrinate them with my Fundementalist Christian worldview (a young Earth intelligently designed by a supreme entity that hates liberals).

All those people are fired now, but the jokes live on. It amuses me to be imaginative rather than candid when making small-talk.

Ditz from Sales, squinting and cocking her head: "Rilly?"

Me, poker-faced: "No."

"So you're joking?"

"A little bit."

"A little bit?"

"Okay, a lottle bit."

"What's a lottle?"

"It's like a little, but bigger."

One of the founders of the company is a big joker. Everything he says is a joke. He comes into the Art Department and asks who he can buy drinks for, and my carpooling compatriot and I often volunteer. We meet him in the parking lot of a nearby off-airport sleazy dive where bosses take their secretaries ostensibly to discuss this docket or that one but in fact in order to throw back a few drinks and chat about personal things as a vector for flirtation. The joking founder is not bringing my colleague and I there for a comparable reason, which we know because he goes to great lengths to emphasize his heterosexuality. He talks about it all the time.

He also talks about fat girls all the time. He is obsessed with rejecting them. He looks around the bar to spot girls he thinks are too fat, and then tells my colleague and I all about how they don't turn him on at all while he spins hypothetical scenarios about having sex with them. He thinks fat girls should wear burqas. He's offended when he can tell a girl is fat beneath her clothes. He steals glance after glance at them until he feels he's discerned their true physical calibre, and then extravagantly dissociates himself from any attraction.

"Imagine going down on that one -- you'd fucking get lost. You'd need those beacons they use to wave down jets to find your way out again. And her fat-ass belly'd be sitting on your head, like a fucking hat. Jesus -- who the fuck would want that -- a fat-hat?"

He pauses philosophically, and sips his drink.

"Black guys. I guess, right? Black guys are all into that, cushion-pushin' or whatever they say. That's not racist. That's just what they're into for whatever set of reasons, I don't really know what they are. They just dig the fat-ass ladies. Not me, though. Man."

His wife is not fat. She doesn't ever have sex with him. He travels a lot. He makes inappropriate suggestions to the waitress when he hands her his shiny golden credit card. He likes to insinuate that the waitress spends every off-duty hour performing sex acts. They smile tolerantly or, if they want big tips, egg him on.

"Shit," he might go on to say, checking the time on his Blackberry. "I gotta take my kid to hockey. So only one more drink. Another double. You guys?"

"No, we have to bail. I'm his ride and he's got to be somewhere."

"Do people think you're homos because you carpool together?"

"If so, they don't tend to mention it."

"He doesn't ever pretend the gear-shift is your cock?"

"Well, no. It's an automatic transmission."

"Wrong stick, buddy! Ha, ha, ha. That never happens, eh?"

"Not really. Um, thanks for the drinks."

"From now on I'm going to call you two the Enviro-Twinks!"

"See you tomorrow."

Autumn's here. The leaves are going russet. It rains more often, and when it does everybody in the highway goes really, really slow just in case the rain makes their cars explode, and they hit the brakes erratically for safety's sake. About a third of them fail to activate any external lights, which I suppose is their way of being playful -- of providing a friendly challenge to the rest of us so we don't get bored sloshing back and forth between thirty kilometers per hour and none at all.

(It's a foggy time of year, too. Most of the people with fog-lights (Phares anti-broullards) on their car do not turn them on when it's foggy outside. I get all tantric and shit, trying to meditate on the reasoning behind it.)

My colleague presses an invisible mime brake in the passenger footwell. This motion is captured in my peripheral vision, thereby actuating the visible, non-mime brake in the driver footwell. A second later I catch on and squint at the grey blur ahead to see what's set off the process. Ah yes, the looming shadow of an unilluminated vehicle swelling geometrically head.

"I'm on it."

"I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize. I respect the mime brake."

"I don't mean to backseat-drive."

"Your anxiety is my precognition. Keep it up."

Radio One mumbles. There's an election campaign on. Our choices for the new provincial executive are a giant douche or a turd sandwich, inspiring in us a sad kind of retro-nostalgia for the coming federal race which promises a similar contest of lukewarm and limp villany mumbling buzzwords to win our hearts and minds, or at least our Nielsen points.

I'm going to vote for whomever seems the most ineffectual and grossly dishonest, based on the theory that my prior strategy of taking the opposite tact hasn't succeeded in the least. I'm tired of being a minority. I want to be on the winning team. I want to vote the same way as everyone else, so we don't have to disagree when we chat. It's so awkward. No more! This time, I'm voting retarded.

There is a billboard-sized sign on my grass. It advertises a potential provincial politician, representing a party which may be just retarded enough to fit the bill. My father-in-law installed the sign. To his credit, after he'd done it he asked if I'd mind. He phrased the question as if it were hypothetical, even though he'd just banged five foot wooden stakes into the ground.

"No," is what I said.

I wouldn't want to risk offending him. Voting retarded is one of his chief skills. If I'm to cast a retarded vote, I should definitely be looking to him for guidance.

"You ver doing the carpooling today, ja?"

"Yes. I'm single-handedly saving the world."

"Ha, ha. You know all evidence says the coldest vinters in history have all occurred within the last four, maybe five, decades. It's a fact, ja. Indisputable, but never the less ignored by so-called intellectuals."

"That's a crying shame."

"I know, yet no vone does anything, no. No vone is protesting the government that supports bogus science and funds these so-called studies. No vone is there to even saying anything, because today's young liberal people are all sheep who do and think vhatever they're told by the media."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"On the BBC, ja. And another thing, no -- today's generation has no capacity, absolutely zero, to understand vhy Iran does what it does and who's to blame for it."

"I've often said that."

"It's the same thing as pornography, ja. It is proven scientifically that looking at pornography leads directly to rape, but the young liberal people won't allow the government to control it. That's a case vhere they ignore their religion of science, like so many other cases."

"These are troubling times."

"Soon, the vorld vinancial system vill collapse and then there vill be a separation between those who think correctly and sheep: a separation made by surwiwal, no. Plain and simple, ja."

"That'll learn 'em."

"You'd think so, but in my opinion people are too stupid to learn much of anything."

Carrots came out of our garden, and my wife made carrot cake. She gave the green parts to the rabbit who hops around our ankles in the livingroom, like a lost extra from Teletubbies. There are green peas, too. Soon we'll pick and shuck the corn (both of them), and we've already eaten our way through a bumper harvest of apples. If we had to live off what we grow we'd be screwed, because it's not even Thanksgiving and the cupboard's already bare. Note for next year: plant more plants.

My DVD player broke, confirming my hypothesis that the more you pay for one the narrower the range of discs it will accept and the shorter the unit's lifespan. I don't know why this is, but I'll meditate on it.

Om.