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Cars and computers make you stupid.

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As many of my readers know, life as a homeowner is to be constantly besieged by wildlife. Chipmunks, squirrels, opossums, neighbourhood children, and now woodpeckers menace your family stead. Our ancestors would go out and take a drunken pop at them with whatever weapon fell to hand. For those of us with ethics about the sanctity of life – inculcated by environmentalist cartoons, no doubt – it can seem impossible to effectively manage all these disparate threats to your home.

When I called the woodpecker guy about all those woodpeckers trying to peck the side of my house (which is not mostly made out of wood) I got a rude surprise. Dude just laughed at me. Nobody can make woodpeckers go away, he gasped out between giggles. All we do is sell you some crazy shit to annoy them into destroying your neighbour's house instead. I hung up immediately, and resolved to solve my problem myself. It would turn out later that his uncharacteristic honesty was due to a gas leak in the neighbourhood, but that's a story for another time (RIP Woodpecker Woody.)

Rather than fight them directly, I decided the best plan was to do as the woodpecker guy wanted. Like Steven Seagal in his acclaimed action thriller Above Lethality Under Siege, I would simply redirect their attack somewhere else. What makes a bunch of agitated birds with super-long tongues wrapped around their brains chill the fuck out for five minutes? Becoming homeowners, that's what.

Now, I've been accused of many things over the years, often credibly. One of the things that any attorney will tell you never to do in court is defend yourself. Even so, if it came down to it, I would tell that stuck-up judge and that jury full of douchebags that I was capable of building a Goddamn birdhouse. No woodworker, to be sure – there's no ornate finials or even dovetails, as I wasn't sure if woodpeckers had like a "race thing" going on with the doves – but I dutifully followed the woodpecker birdhouse plan I had downloaded from alt.woodworking.birds.birds.birds on the library computers. And it looked pretty good as I nailed it to what remained of my fence.

Here's what I hadn't thought about, though. Induced demand. As soon as I put up some affordable housing for these picidaes, all of a sudden their entire social calendar wanted to move into the same neighbourhood. Parents, cousins, grand-cousins, supernephews, you name it. Each and every one of them knew the way to get a brand-new deluxe luxury condo was to start pecking on my house when I was trying to sleep. One morning I woke up and a pair of sapsuckers were flying around my bedroom, with a hole in the wall big enough to stick a pair of Weber carbs. I was spending every waking hour constructing low-density housing for the woodpeckers, and my neighbours were beginning to wonder if I was the one luring them to destroy their homes.

I wish I could tell you I had a good solution, that I managed to convince them to wreck the police station down the street, or progressively carry off a bunch of coyote pups until their den was empty, training them from birth to become warriors in my righteous battle against avian invasion. None of that happened. I simply decided to let them have the house, and started living in my car instead. Way better sleep, although the parking patrol keeps coming by and doing a "welfare check" in the middle of the night. I'm pretty sure those fucking birds are calling the cops on me.

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Recently, my city has been complaining about their bus lanes not being respected by members of the public. Normally, this would be a job for the police, but they've all been on paid vacation the last couple of years. The big brains on City Council proposed some kind of fancy-ass foreign-made surveillance camera on the front of the buses, to read the plates of the fiends who would block a bus, but I have another proposal. Some might call it less of a proposal and more of a beautiful dream.

On the idyllic afternoon where my policies are put into action, I switch my right turn signal on a little bit too early, and in return a woman named Neci who has never seen the outside of a Soviet work prison for more than 30 minutes takes my wing mirror off with a subsonic 50-calibre warning shot from a mile away. Her dream when released is to one day visit Subway.

Up the block, a pair of teenaged child soldiers made mostly of knives who were hardwired from birth by various French ex-governmental assassination rings have disabled a Cayenne by putting $6500 of tank killer rounds through the engine block, and pull out the driver to receive her ticket.

Behind me, I hear the distinct sounds of an Uber Eats driver doing a hit and run on a parallel-parked M35A2. In response, he receives 30,000 rounds per minute of Phalanx caseless hot loads from the nearby traffic calming emplacement.

A little girl rides her single-speed Huffy up the bike lane and meekly rings her bell at a Ford Escape blocking the crosswalk. It barely has a chance to get back into gear, before an extended-magazine Uzi comes out of the Hello Kitty basket on the front.

An absolute bear of a man comes off the sidewalk and pulls in the shattered husks of each car, leaving whatever he can easily slop out of the driver's seat in the middle of the road for the crows. The child soldiers take pot shots at him from their sidearms the whole time, and cackle about composting. It is their private joke.

A bus tootles happily through this warzone, delivering people to their destination only about fifteen minutes late.

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Too many people have shed blood and died in the Console Wars. Good folks, kids who had a real future. I myself fought in the Console Wars, desperately fielding a rear-guard battle on behalf of Sega against the cruel forces of the Super Nintendo. If things had turned out differently, who knows where I'd be today?

Once the end to hostilities was declared, sometime around the Dreamcast, that was it. No reparations. No payment for our brave message-board posting. Not even any new games. Nobody asked us if we wanted to stop. We were told to just keep going, and not mention the war ever again. That's hard to do when you're hanging out in the veteran's affairs building with a bunch of your fellow soldiers, critically wounded by seeing Sonic the Hedgehog hug Mario.

Couple folks went on to become mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, fighting as irregulars in some distant hellhole like the Xbox. I knew one guy who, well, he got really into the Tapwave Zodiac, before all that shit went down. He closed his browser that day, and never reopened it. He's living as a deep-sea fisherman in Cape Cod, now. Bet the nightmares of GameFAQs never stopped. They don't know you gave up. They don't care.

So we sat there, waiting for a revival. Once in awhile someone would come in and try to get us really excited at a picture of Alex Kidd. Think some of them must have been feds, trying to catch some of the old soldiers out who still had hate in their heart for the plumbers. Me, I started dating someone with a Nintendo 64. You know, that Super Mario isn't so bad when he's driving a go-kart instead of trying to destroy everything I held dear on that fateful playground.

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When I was working in a real job, one of my coworkers quit. That's not unusual: I've had lots of coworkers bail out of a gig, and not always because of something I did. We're a communal species, us humans, and whenever someone exits the tribe, it leaves a weird void behind. Then a whole lot of other coworkers quit, and the company president set himself on fire in the parking lot of the stock exchange. I stuck it out until the bitter end to steal some office supplies, of course, but we'll get to that in a bit.

See, my coworker didn't just leave to get another shitty job. He started a map store. Like many of us, he had a deep-rooted special interest that could not be easily dislodged. In his case, it manifested as a love for all things cartography, and getting rid of the shitty employment around his neck opened him up to live his dream. You wouldn't think a map store would be successful, but it was, which certainly makes me question not having acted on my worst impulses as a means of revenue generation.

As soon as I heard, I went in there. On my lunch break, of course, to give moral support to a former member of my tribe. Place was bustling, full of happy people who loved a good compass rose. It had formed a community, even, and rigorous debates about topographic standards. My former coworker was there, pleasant and relaxed, in a way I had never seen him before. Slowly, I began to feel envious, like a twisted and hateful thing, reeling from the light before me.

I never went back, although I did think about buying my favourite nephew a globe for a Christmas present. Then again, maybe they don't believe in that kind of thing over there. Not map-like enough. Doesn't belong in our tribe.

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Have you wondered about the stock market? Lately, a lot of people have been getting really rich off some total bullshit. That's not fair to me, who expresses bullshit every day, sometimes for hours at a time, and has received little or no financial success from doing so.

Back in the 70s, a hard-working flim-flam man could walk into banks and get a bunch of high-interest loans for whatever crappy business he could imagine. Calculators that work in space! Personal hygiene robots! Tang! Of course, those loans would often never be repaid, but an application of more smooth-talking bullshit could often convince the bank's loan manager to at least walk away from a bad deal. It was a golden age for the common liar.

Nowadays, lies are only effective if you are already rich and powerful. Sure, you can do your own small-batch lying, but eventually the consequences will catch up with you. That little bank your grandpa stole a quarter-million dollars from in the 70s? Now it's part of a huge empire of evil venture capitalists, and you're literally too small for them to even bother to listen to. It can be impossible for the Main Street scammer to compete with today's supercharged Wall Street scammers.

That's why we're starting a new megascam. We call it the Liar's Fund. Here's how it works. First, we collect every bar fraud, rip-off artist, grifter, and cheat that we can find in the tri-state area. Then, we securitize their scams. That's right. We bundle all of these scammers together, until they become big enough that the venture capitalists can't resist it. Five minutes later, they've spent six hundred million dollars on a loose coalition of unemployed confidence-folks. Big party, yachts, lots of backslapping. Then we split the dough, and all go our own ways. Sure, the venture capital guys get ripped off, but they won't miss that money. It was all bullshit anyway.

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One of the great problems of our age is that being in your home is pretty awesome. You can do all your shopping, order food, talk to all your friends, and cultivate ultra-niche tastes in previously unthinkable pornography with several thousand other people also interested in it. You don't have to go outside for anything anymore. Unfortunately, this means that someone very important in your life is being neglected. I speak, of course, of your car.

In our parents' age of car-dependent urban planning, you had to drive a whole bunch to see your friends. Then drive to a movie. Then drive to get burritos. Drive, drive, drive. That meant you got to spend a lot of valuable time with your car, and really know all of its quirks and knocks. Most people spent more time in their car than at home, a true golden age for our civilization.

Things have changed, but that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of this state of affairs. Average mileage is pretty low these days, which means there's a lot of room for additional depreciation priced into your car. Why not drive several hundred miles on the highway today just because you want to? See the world! Street race a cop and spend a night in jail! Stop at random diners along the way, and watch the wait staff try to deal with their first in-person customer in years. You can always bring your phone, and do all that fun internet stuff when you get there.

And let's not forget the greatest advantage of having a car. If you get mad at someone on the internet, you can figure out where they live, and show up on their doorstep. You'll instantly win that argument, I'm telling you right now. That's the kind of thing that you can't do from your phone, at least not until Uber gets really desperate for Q4 revenue and adds "knee-breaking thugs" to their repertoire.

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People ask me every day. Why did you start a company where the only employees are dogs? Once, I had a really good answer to this question. Now, I'm not so sure. Why did I do it? Perhaps the reason why changes from day to day. Let me go back to the start, and maybe we can figure it out together.

Have you worked in an office that allows dogs before? It's a glorious worker's utopia, except for all the other parts of working in an office. Even the dumbest Golden Retriever can improve a shitty meeting just by sitting in the corner and looking stupid, and you can blow off a lot of steam by spending a mere few seconds with a Schnauzer.

Inevitably, though, the dog has some problem – pooping in the legal room, eating a dead raccoon, rolling around in the important files of the auditor – and HR bans dogs in the office. Nothing is the same after that. Some folks would blame the canines, but I blame the folks. If it wasn't for people filing complaints, HR wouldn't have to step in. If it wasn't for humans, we wouldn't need human resources at all, would we? Hiring a staff of dogs seemed like the inevitable next step.

Sure, there's probably lots of reasons why you wouldn't want to do that. Our first couple of months in business were very rough, and provided us with most of those reasons. For instance, a dachshund is a shitty welder. Not because of their physical attributes, no, but because the breed's temperament. Hold on, I just got something from Canine Resources. Discrimination? What are you talking about? I just said some stuff about wiener dogs that we're all thinking. Hate speech??

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Do you remember the phone book? Every summer, I had a job to deliver the phone book. It was a great way to make money, as long as you didn't think too hard about how much you were working for that teensy amount of money. I'd walk up to your property, throw a thick-ass chunk of paper onto your porch, and then move on to victimize your neighbour.

Life has changed, and there is now no longer such a job for kids. Paper routes? Gone too, with the death of newspapers. Even if the phone books were still being made, they would get distributed instead by ex-war robots or pseudo-enslaved precariously-employed foreign labour. Without that first, crappy job on the ladder, kids are unprepared for every other crappy job they will have during their lifetimes. We need to bring back the pointless summer job.

Now, there are still some summer jobs for kids, but they turn out to be incredibly important ones like "lifeguard" or "child soldier." What we're looking for is more of a fun, frivolous thing. Something where kids can blow it off and head to the 7-11, without anyone drowning or being bombed to death by flying war robots they never even see coming. That's why the city has hired my extremely expensive consulting company to provide landscaping jobs.

See, hiring actual employees directly is too costly. Wastes taxpayer money. All that overhead. Looks bad on the ol' budget. Instead, they just pay my company even more cash to hire some teens and tell them to trim city lawns. That way they're supporting a largely unaccountable small business, and not giving money to human beings.

The kids get a small amount of that money, I pocket the rest (important for the liability of having a bunch of kids operating 30,000-rpm whirling blades of death near playgrounds) and I don't get too upset when I catch a few of them doing whip-its behind the Kroger's instead of working. Everyone wins, except the taxpayer, but let's be honest – those phone books weren't really "free," either.

So when you're out there this summer, and you see a pair of teens trying to buff a giant dent out of a landscaping truck, make sure to help them out. They're our future. You were that age once, and you probably drove into a rock while staring at girls too. When those kids get their second job, piloting the drones in the water wars, maybe they'll remember you and decide to miss your house.

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Cars are great, but they're only great for moving very quickly. Throughout most of human history, we've been passing our physical bodies through space at a relatively slow clip. Now, all of a sudden, we've been equipped with 4000lb death missiles that are very eager to immediately shoot to highway speeds and stay there for several hours. You can immediately understand it would be hard for our species to adapt. That's why occasionally a farmers' market or an eye doctor's clinic gets obliterated by a RAV4 whose owner mixed up the pedals.

Worse, cars are really inefficient at those low speeds. While you're crawling around the Walmart parking lot, this thing is chugging gasoline that could otherwise be used in a flat-out competition with your hated/loved rival in a Tokyo highway death race. Things are getting so bad, lots of people are getting out of their cars and walking to the store rather than wait in line for a primo parking spot out front.

Many folks today are rejecting the holy order of the manual transmission simply because most of their trip to work involves being completely stopped. Having to wiggle-jiggle the shifter and wang-jangle the clutch every 0.35 seconds gets old, compared to what you're supposed to be doing with the car, which is going down the back straight at Laguna Seca. Thus: boring-ass automatic transmissions, which make life nearly intolerable, and are still burning all that gas to do nothing. There's battery-stuffed modern solutions that make this less miserable, sure, but physics doesn't lie: it takes a lot of beef to get your huge chunk of steel back up to speed once it's been stopped for any reason.

Recently, I was stopped at a red light, and got to thinking about this, because the cabin of my car was filling up with unburnt gasoline coming out of the hole in the floor and/or exhaust. Everyone else didn't seem to mind, appreciative of the quick break that allowed them to check the status of the sports gambling apps on their phones. It was in this monoxide-choked haze that my mind opened to new ideas, new ways of living.

We could go slow and fast, I thought, as I saw a guy riding a Cannondale in race spandex ride around in circles so he didn't have to put his feet down and fall over. I had re-invented the donut. Ever since then, I get great fuel economy, and I don't mind getting stopped at lights anymore. Sure, it's a little annoying when there's a lot of other cars around, but once you start whipping shitties, they tend to make some room for you. Now if only I could figure out how to make a set of tires last longer than a single commute to work.

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All the cops are worried about "ghost guns." It's all they can talk about whenever an incredibly sloppy journalist is in the room with them. Well, I'm here to tell you this worry is overblown. I've had enough of these cops trying to protect ghosts, spectres, spirits, Caspers, and ghouls. I deserve to defend my family with the kind of firearm that puts them down and keeps them down.

Nowadays, you couldn't make a movie like Ghostbusters, what with its strong anti-authoritarian stance. Those independent-minded, entrepreneurial small businessowners didn't stand for any spiritual bullshit from another plane of existence. No. They got out there, made their own guns, and destroyed those ghosts. Huh. Why would the police want to take that middle part away?

Now, I don't have any particular evidence that City Hall is run entirely by a group of evil apparitions. Conveniently, I'd need to break the law and get in there to get the proof required. Every time I try it "the right way," through the court system, the judges just laugh at me. We'll see who's laughing when a series of unstoppable demons pull their children to hell, the so-called protectors of society unable or unwilling to plug 'em with their "real" guns.

Even if they do force this pro-poltergeist betrayal of justice through, I'm not going to leave us all vulnerable. At the first sign of those phantasms poppin' off, I'll be driving as fast I can to a city that still has a Micro Centre. Why? For some reason, everyone keeps saying a 3D printer is involved, maybe because trying to get one of those damn things working feels like witchcraft. The malevolent spooks probably can't resist the urge to fuck things up, and they'll hop right in there and get trapped.

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Chef Linguini Fellatio had finally gone too far this time. At the county fair nationals, he dared to disrespect my basil pesto to a group of judges. Scandalized, the local newspaper's pasta-sauce editor, upon overhearing the tirade, dropped whole-ass dead. By the laws of kitchen combat, I was duty-bound to avenge him.

Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with Italian cooking, there's a lot of ways to produce a good pasta. Most folks these days head to the sewers, and find an incredibly talented but good-willing rat to help them achieve their dreams. That's a lot of work, especially now that DeVry opened up that rats-only cooking school. Plus, and you didn't hear it from me, the Health Department is getting really mad at finding little rodent footprints all over the sterile counter.

So what's the way that I chose to get good at pasta? Making a whole lot of pasta. And that's just what I did. One of my mentors in culinary school told me that, if you wrap a bunch of spaghettini together in a tight bundle, you can kill a man with it. Rolling it up like that keeps it from flexing. As long as all the noodles stick together, the entire group isn't let down. That's a metaphor for something, maybe.

Perhaps the best thing about beating a man to death with noodles, and then having the assembled culinary community of your city agree to never narc on you about it, is that you can dispose of the evidence very quickly. Just wash it off, and pop it into a pot. Diners will be having it that very night, and they won't ask any questions when they see you carrying a huge bundle down to the sewers. Everyone knows the rats need to get paid.

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When I go to the duck pond, I don't bring my phone, which distracts, polarizes, and evilizes. The majesty of nature drapes over me like a comfy blanket, calming my mind so I can think about the really hard problems in life. Why are we here? What comes next? And who brings a 1995 Mustang GT to the duck pond, does Vanilla Ice need to discreetly buy some drugs and the Internet cafe inside the Borders was closed?

Yes, dear reader, you've probably figured out the "play" I am making here. My local duck pond has, on top of the usual accoutrements for waterfowl, a parking lot. And for whatever reason, there's always something interesting in that lot. Let's take a walk over there now, friends, and car-spot together.

Even if you are of the persuasion that hates automobiles and justly believes they are responsible for the inevitable collapse of everything we have ever known, you can't deny it. That Peugeot 504 wagon is in absolute mint condition. There cannot be more than one of those in this entire country. Why is it here? Nobody knows. It is the magic of the pond. Sure, the rest of it is all nasty modern SUVs, but those gems are what makes it all worthwhile.

In fact, this spot is so mystical that I don't even park my own car in the lot. To shove any one of my clapped-out hoopties into this glorious place might well disrupt the delicate ecological balance that allows it to happen. Plus, the ducks wouldn't like it if I leaked oil into their living room. I've already thrown enough phones in there after winning internet arguments about Mustangs.

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On the first Tuesday of every month, I have a very important meeting. Like Abe Lincoln said, democracy is all about the people, and if we don't work together as a community, the fascists will take over. Local organization is all that separates us from that horrible oblivion, and although I have lots of better things to be doing, I still need to stand up and do my part with what little time I can contribute.

Being a part of this committee is one of the greatest honours of my life. I know that it's no longer "cool" in today's society to care too much about things, but watching out for my fellow citizen gives me an immense feeling of pride. With such small actions, we can work together and make things better for everyone, entering into a glorious new age.

Enough bragging. As you can tell, it is indeed the first Tuesday of this month, and therefore it is time to visit The Committee. Perhaps you can come with me, to document my selfless sacrifice to improve the lot of all humanity. Get in the car, we're going to stop at Wendy's on the way. If you're worried about it biasing your reporting, then you can buy me a Frosty.

Ah, yes. The Committee. You sit right here, and keep the cameras rolling. We've got some Robert's Rules of Order stuff tonight, you know, the good stuff. Some big votes. Proposals. It's my turn to be chairperson, because of my years of service.

Fellow citizens, I call to order this meeting of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

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For centuries, the British have been making brilliant fibreglass roadsters, extremely temperamental boxlike trucks, and a variety of commuter vehicles that are best remembered as warnings. What they've never done is create anything as majestic as the Ford F-150.

Yes, I know and agree that the Triumph Spitfire is way better than the F-150. Otherwise, I couldn't get up in the morning. I'd much rather drive one of those to the grocery store. That said, have you looked at the parking lot of your local grocery store? That's a lot of F-150s. Nobody can deny it now: the market has spoken.

Once, a long time ago, the British came up with another great idea. It was called the "locost," which is probably short for "low cost." By stripping a bunch of busted-ass old British cars, likely placed upside down in your local ditch, you could build your own kick-ass roadster for not very much money. Unfortunately, these busted-ass old British cars are no longer clogging the highways, byways, and cautionary tales of the year of our lord 2026, so a new alternative has to be developed.

Friends, I think we can bring back vintage British motoring. We just need to find a vehicle that has massive popularity, frequently gets crashed, and sometimes develops intractable electrical problems that make their owners freak out and junk them. I am speaking, of course, of the F-150. With a tactical application of a sawzall, I think we can turn an extended-cab pickup into a very ugly and somewhat large V8 roadster. Then we just need to add little Union Jack stickers to the fenders, and loosen about half of the grounds. I'll be seeing you at the tweed-blazer car meet.

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"Sir, do you realize you're still using a car, like some kind of caveman?"

My ears perked up. The highway patrol constable was speaking an entirely different series of words than he usually does. My attorney strongly recommends that I not tell you the normal sequence of words, being as they are likely "building evidence of an anti-social pattern of behaviour," but he's not here. You know what? You seem cool, I'll tell you the new words that this mountie told me.

"Hot air balloons are the new thing, man. If you don't get rid of your car and switch to this, you'll be left behind forever."

Not wanting to argue with the mounted policeman too much, I still gently push back. Hot air balloons aren't for me, man. I like to do my own driving. Go where I want.

"Listen, pal. If it doesn't go where you want the first time, you can just take off again and see if it works then. It's so much less work than driving. I barely have a job, now, with all the hot air balloonists overhead." He points to a series of dirigible-adjacent aircraft, repeatedly bumping into each other. At least half of them are the ugliest fucking thing I'd ever seen. None of them seemed to be going anywhere, honestly.

"And the emissions? We can only get more helium from the moon. We shouldn't be just burning it in order to maybe travel to the Kay Bee Toys."

That did it. I had stated enough words of a certain pattern to be billed as an adversary in this officer's mind. An intricate crystalline structure of indisputable scofflaw behaviour had been constructed in the very air between us. I was now an "IA hater" – one who opposes the inevitable dominance of inflatable aircraft. There was nothing to do but to engage in a high speed chase about it.

As I wound the engine to 5K and popped the clutch, I could just barely hear the redshirt squeak: "they're getting better every day, dude! Pretty soon you'll be able to steer!"

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"Hey bro," says my buddy Wylescroft, "the news says aliens are real."

Sure, okay. Makes mathematical sense. "Are they buying our used cars?" I ask.

"No. They're doing some weird stuff to our brains. I don't get the news anymore now that it costs money. Ted in 4-A told me all about it when I was down doing laundry. You know the dryer is broken again?"

Fucking dryer. Of course it's busted, it's always busted. "Less competition for me, at least."

I return to endlessly searching the local classifieds for low-to-high-mileage 1970s economy cars. Or at least I try to, because I keep getting distracted by sirens as everyone outside is freaking the fuck out about something. Down the street, the police station is on fire, but that could be for any number of reasons. I close the blinds so the roaring flames stop flickering on my phone screen.

There's a good deal on a '75 Scamp. I pick up the phone and call directly, because that's the kind of thing that this sort of seller prefers. "Will you take $1000?" I ask as soon as they pick up, without looking at the original asking price.

"Yeah man, yeah. I gotta get out of this city. The Goddamn Martians are coming for our frontal lobes, man. You got cash?"

I realize I have highballed myself. "No," I tell him. "The coin dryer ate all of it. It's broken again, you know." I'll call back later with a fake voice and offer $500.

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Here at the bank, my entire job is to deny loans to people who are coming up with world-saving energy inventions. Folks at parties ask me how this can be an entire job. They want to know why I would block such incredible life-changing technology and instead plunge human society into an inevitable collapse. I tell them to ask my boss.

Everyone out there has a way to justify the bad parts of their job to themselves. For me, I just tell myself that I'm protecting them from the oil and gas industry. Imagine if you invented a magical carburetor that got a million miles per gallon off of just water. BP would have you killed in an instant. Would you rather save the world, or be allowed to continue living? Thanks to my timely denial of your loan, you'll never have to grapple with that dilemma.

Of course, there's no way to prove the oil and gas industry has been making a handsome side hustle out of discrediting and discreetly murdering its opponents. That's why it's a conspiracy theory, and not a conspiracy law. Still, my job is to manage risk, and I take great pride in that. Nobody has ever told me explicitly that it's the bank's risk, but honestly it wouldn't be good for my performance review to give you a quarter million bucks and then have to get it back from your grieving widow a week later. Everybody wins in this scenario.

Now, will I get you a loan for making things worse? Absolutely. Very few assholes who invent smoke tunes for Dodge Rams have ever been killed by Greenpeace types. The risk is super, duper low. And if you do happen to encounter some sort of grievous bodily harm as a result of misadventure, we at least have the Ram to sell at auction. One of my coworkers accidentally approved a loan for biodiesel, and now everyone thinks they can use old french fry oil to drive their trucks around. We took a position in the company that cleans out McDonalds' grease traps, and we're making a killing. The metaphorical kind. I think.