America is a complicated nation.
We have approximately 742 places where a person may purchase gasoline from Native American pumps.
I know this because I made it up while eating cream pie.
But it feels accurate.
Specific numbers create confidence.
If I had said “around several hundred,” people would doubt me immediately.
But “742”?
That sounds researched.
That sounds like a man with a clipboard once drove through Oklahoma during a difficult divorce.
Naturally, this led me to investigate the average savings per gallon.
Experts claim the savings range anywhere from ten cents to over a dollar depending on taxes, location, market conditions, and whether civilization itself is collapsing.
But after extensive independent study involving coffee, pie, and almost no mathematics whatsoever, I arrived at the exact savings figure:
98.4 cents per gallon.
This remarkable discovery immediately caught the attention of my physician, Dr. Mangle.
Dr. Mangle is not only a medical doctor but apparently a fuel economist.
He informed me that 98.4 also reflects normal human body temperature.
This startled both of us because until that moment neither of us realized the human body was secretly calibrated to tribal gasoline discounts.
Dr. Mangle now plots these things.
Apparently there are charts.
He believes there may be a direct connection between fuel savings, body temperature, and cream pie consumption.
The medical community remains divided.
Wall Street, however, has shown growing interest.
The Mangle Thermal Fuel Index
According to Dr. Mangle’s theory, whenever Native American fuel discounts exceed average human body temperature, markets become unstable and pie futures begin to surge.
One cable business network recently featured a man pointing at a graph while saying:
“Historically, when reservation gasoline approaches thermal parity, consumer confidence rises sharply in baked goods.”
This may explain Costco.
Meanwhile, politicians continue ignoring the crisis.
Which is unfortunate because America was clearly not prepared for the intersection of Indigenous fuel economics, dessert-based research, and medically supervised hallucinations.
I would investigate further, but I am currently working diligently on completing 134 novels, each of which contains part of Chapter One.
This is more difficult than it sounds.
Any fool can finish one novel.
It takes a particular kind of artistic courage to begin 134 of them and then stand back, exhausted, like a man who has personally invented literature but misplaced the second chapter.
Some writers suffer from writer’s block.
I suffer from writer’s intersection.
Every idea meets twelve other ideas at high speed, and by noon I have a historical romance, a murder mystery, a children’s book about a moose, and a three-part streaming series about a gas station economist named Dr. Mangle.
Still, I remain optimistic.
This country was built by people willing to cross deserts in wooden wagons without air conditioning.
Surely we can survive a world where a retired writer discovers an entirely new economic system while eating cream pie near a gas pump.
And frankly, if Dr. Mangle is right, the future of the American economy may depend entirely upon pie.
Which would finally explain Congress.
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If you enjoy highly scientific investigations involving fuel, small-town morality, suspicious adults, possible criminal innovation, and a prairie water tower that nearly killed me, you may also enjoy my true-ish story about purple farm gas, RCMP roadblocks, and a man named Jesse James who boxed my ears for climbing municipal infrastructure.
Read: Nothing Happened in Coronation — where almost nothing happened except the parts that did.
