Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

In this wry, compressed jab, Abbey links two fuels of modern American life: caffeine for the body and gasoline for the machine. The joke that coffee “often tast[es] like” gasoline suggests not only bad diner coffee but a broader critique of industrial convenience—mass production, speed, and disposability—seeping into everyday experience until even pleasures become harsh, standardized, and vaguely toxic. Typical of Abbey’s environmental and anti-consumerist sensibility, the line implies a culture addicted to energy inputs and mobility, where the human and mechanical appetites mirror each other and where the costs (aesthetic, bodily, ecological) are easy to ignore while the engines keep running.