I bought 50 cents worth of gas Tuesday. There, I said it. I just needed to put all the cards on the table and try to move on.

I’m pretty bad about running down the “Miles To Go” in my auto — I was so proud to get the “0” a few weeks ago — but I’ve learned that can be dicey. It is far from an exact number.

So when I was coming back from lunch and I was down to “6,” I knew I had to stop. Keep in mind that shaving and stopping for gas are two of the regular activities I despise, but still recognize their necessity. (You don’t want to see me try to grow any facial hair.)

As bad luck would have it, I was on the wrong side of the street from the gas stations on the busiest street in Bossier City. It was lunchtime, and I didn’t want to make one foray fighting that left turn jungle, much less two.

So I pulled into a semi-sketchy gas station on my side of the road. I am a serial filler-upper — as long as I’m there, I might as well make it count so I have to come back less frequently — but when I began looking for a pump, my gas tank was on the wrong side of all available stations. So I whipped it around, and did such a bad back-up job that literally the hose wouldn’t reach.

It gets better/worse.

After re-positioning, I was already wanting to get out of there, so I punched the debit card numbers, dropped the nozzle into the tank and yanked the handle immediately.

I noticed the flow was maddeningly slow. But sometimes, an air bubble can form if you go too fast, so I paused for a few seconds and restarted.

No change. In fact, it was even slower, to the tune of about a cent every 5 seconds. (Run that scenario in your head real quick.)

Now I’m committed. My debit card is in there, I’ve already established poor driving skills, and I couldn’t trust another pump at this station. So I figured I’d keep going, like the idiot that I am.

Until it simply got to be too much. I made the resolution to stop at 50 cents. It was something like 0.15 gallons. I promise you could have filled up a Suburban faster than it took me to complete the process of buying two quarters worth.

To make matters worse, when I got back in the car, my Miles To Go was still “6.” I couldn’t even buy enough gas to go a mile.

I once wrote a check at the Handee Mart in Ruston for $0.83 when I was in college and vowed to never make a non-cash purchase in which a stand-alone zero is involved on the left side of the decimal. But a man can only take so much.

And yes, I limped into another gar station. One that was less than 6 miles away.