ON the very day last week that the price of a barrel of crude oil was higher than it has ever been in the history of crude oil barrels, I was -- choose one:

(a) Bankrolling terrorism.

(b) Exercising my God-given American right to make free choices, even moronic ones.

(c) Raping the planet.

(d) Being a road hog.

(e) All of the above.

The answer is (e). I was driving an H2 -- junior heir of the original war-wagon Humvee. California, naturally, has more Hummers than any other state -- more than 3,000, and that was before Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer's designated driver, ran for governor and even more guys ran out to imitate him.

My rented H2 was a subtle gray, unobtrusive in the way that Orson Welles would be unobtrusive in a charcoal pinstriped suit.

It is one obnoxious hunk of steel, plastic and wishful thinking. It was so big that you could measure it in hands, like a horse. I sat up so high I was eye to eye with the driver of a cement-mixing truck. It was so tall that the antenna twanged like a guitar string against every beam in my underground garage. It had all the nimbleness of the Nimitz. It was so wide that I gave up trying to get a veggie burger at the Burger King drive-through because I concluded "drive-through" would mean "drive through the back wall."

I know a woman whose Hyundai got crumpled like a Kleenex by a dad in a Hummer who didn't hear her horn, see her car or even feel the smash when he backed up without checking the specially installed rear- view cam that was supposed to guarantee things like this wouldn't happen.

So, forced to go solo, I did my field research:

My neighbor Hap: *Nice little compact you got there.*

My neighbor Kim: *That thing makes mine (an SUV) look like a VW, so shut up!*

Restaurant valet (risking his tip): *Here is your carrito (little car).*

Man trying to squeak past in green Volvo: I can't print it but it was the word Dick Cheney hurled at a U.S. senator.

Mostly, the sight of the H2 made male faces go slack-jawed. I felt like Angelyne in a tube top. Two boys in the back seat of a Toyota waved and thumbs-upped frantically. I've got to give it to GM: The H2 is adolescent road candy, a power fantasy brilliantly marketed, a four-wheeled pheromone.