Taxicab Depressions

I mentioned before that I was moving at the end of February; it turned out to be the end of March. My ace real estate agent wife found a nice 3 bed, 2 bath, 1800 sq ft house in a really great neighborhood at an excellent price, that has a 17×15 “utility room” with the water heater and washer/dryer hookups against one wall, and a 17×11 detached wooden shed/mancave, with a shingled roof and a newfangled window unit air conditioner with a remote control. It blows really cold on “Energy Saving” mode. Now we have a bedroom for us, a bedroom for my daughter, and an office for my wife with a door that closes.

Alas, I have been banished to the laundry room and the shack out back, but I’m OK with that. Sharing my office space with the washing machine is a small price for 442 square feet of “my space” to put my tools and crap. The newer 16 SEER AC unit blows really cold in here, closest to the air handler, and the spare fridge with my beer is a short six-foot coast in my wheeled office chair, no need to get up. I need some room; not only do I have a lot of crap of my own, but when my old man died, the bulk of my inheritance was a shitload of tools, things I’ll probably never use… tap and die sets, pulley pullers, angle grinders, cut-off saws, all sorts of crap. But even with all these brutal tools, my Dad was into making dollhouses, with scale, functional wood cabinets and four-inch tall dressers with drawers that opened, so now I also have all sorts of tiny little files and chisels and a 6×6 inch table saw. I have a lot of things I can’t even identify… I’ll pick up some odd-shaped metal object and say out loud, “What the hell is this, and what does it do?”

I have tools to fix tools, and for the first time, I have a place to put them that isn’t a garage stuffed so full a car can’t get in… pretty stoked about that.

The rental we were in had a pool, which is nice on a hot Florida afternoon, but I have learned that a pool is a part-time job all to itself. I’ll miss it, but I’m grateful to have that time back. I am working on a real essay, one I hope to finish in a few days, but again, I can’t promise that. There’s still boxes everywhere, I have to lay some flooring in my daughter’s room, the yard is a disaster, just terribly, terribly disorganized. I can’t locate a box that contains framed photos and a clock radio, we seem to have mysteriously lost our large crockpot, and I’m using things like this for a doorstop.

But I am trying. Stay with me…

[The following is an email I sent to my mailing list a few days ago.]

I quit driving a taxi a year ago last October, two weeks before Halloween. I have been out of the cab for over a year now. I just couldn’t take any more, just at my wits’ end. There’s a lot of shit jobs in this world where you have to deal with assholes and the general public; I am sure that somewhere in this world, there is a desk manager at a Holiday Inn that is dreading going to work tomorrow, or a nightshift cashier at Walmart that can’t take many more mutants at her register at 4:15 in the morning, but the difference is that while their customers may be assholes, they probably won’t assault them or puke on their shoes.

The decision was actually made by my wife… she said to me that she didn’t like the person I had become after five years of this shit. I went to bed hammered many nights, woke up tired and groggy, just angry and irritable all the time, and so exhausted on my days off that doing little repairs and things around the house was hard to accomplish, and never seemed to get done. I didn’t like never seeing my wife and especially my daughter… missing all the special moments like her birthday parties and school events, or even just taking her to the park and watching her on the swings. I’ve missed a lot of her childhood.

I’ve said more than once that the problem for me isn’t the job, it’s the people… if I was driving around cardboard boxes rather than these wasted morons, I would have never started a blog, and my mind probably would have never met your mind. I could work for FedEx until I was eighty years old. But somehow, other taxi drivers don’t seem to have a problem with these people. Some drivers do this for decades and just let it roll off their backs, but I can’t seem to do that, and I have come to understand that I am temperamentally not suited to this work. Since I detest belligerent drunks and have a natural aversion to violence, I’d be even worse as a bouncer. I’m OK with that… it’s just who I am. I’d also make a lousy accountant, I’m not a good enough liar to be a spy or an undercover detective, and since I’m not crazy about heights, I’d be useless as a roofer or high steel worker.

And that’s OK. Know thyself. I’m just not suited to this work. So I quit.

Not to belittle anyone with serious problems, but I am just now breaking through my intense case of PTDS: Post Taxi Disgust Syndrome. I’m sleeping better, though I can’t seem to reorient my internal clock reliably. I still stay up too late, and my brain remains most highly focused between midnite and 4 AM… or what I used to call “bar close”. I still dream about driving a taxi, as weird as that sounds… and I don’t mean dream like I want to go back.

I still have all my regular customers saved in my phone, dozens and dozens of really nice people that I’ll never speak to again, maybe with a few exceptions, like Clayton and Tyler. Beverly is still in my contacts, a lady in her late sixties or early seventies who lives in a luxury downtown condominium that called me once or twice per month for years to take her and her husband to the opera or the theatre or the ballet or a restaurant or some other venue where a gentleman should wear a suit, a lady I charmed the first time I picked her up.

I randomly got her first call to my taxi company, and after they got in my car and I headed out to their destination, I said, “Well, this is a pleasure… it’s nice to see a gentleman taking his daughter out to the theater…” They both laughed heartily, and Beverly tipped me generously, and she called me exclusively for two or three years. One night she called and I was a long way away and couldn’t serve her quickly, but I told her to sit tight, and I sent one of the guys in my company to fetch her immediately and get her where she needed to go. Beverly started tipping me even more after that, because she knew I would always make sure she was taken care of.

And all my NS or “No Service” idiots are in there as well. If you are a jackass or a problem or sketchy or smell bad, I save your number in my phone with a brief description like “NS puker” or “NS dealer” or “Mango Ave hooker”, so I don’t have to deal with you again. One night a few weeks before I quit, my phone rang and the ID on the screen said “NO FUCKING WAY”, all caps. Funny thing is, I don’t even remember who that was… but when I think back over the parade of belligerent idiots and intoxicated human debris that has been in my car, I honestly don’t miss dealing with those people.

So now I’m a house-husband. I’ve mentioned before that my wife is in real estate, and this is another job where I would really suck. I don’t really like talking on the phone, and I hate texting. My wife is on her phone from eight in the morning to nine or ten pm sometimes. She’s extremely good at this real estate business, but she was being held back by the duties of being the sole parent awake and available in the daylight. A successful real estate agent needs to be flexible and be ready to turn on a dime to serve a client, because an $10,000 check might be on the line. Between getting my daughter up and dressed and taking her to school and picking her up and getting her through dinner and bath and bedtime, plus having her on the weekends, she was lucky to accumulate 40 working hours over seven days in a week. She was trying to show homes and meet with clients around the daily schedule of a kindergartner, not really a schedule for success for a real estate agent.

We talked it over, looked at her sales curve, did the math, and decided I was more valuable at home than in the car, taking care of my daughter and keeping up the house so my wife can devote mad hours to her business, with me doing direct mail and internet marketing to keep her busy. And I’m happy to report that she is on an ever-upward trajectory, and I expect good things for us in 2017. I still work for the taxi company, blogging and marketing them for a modest weekly stipend, but between their marketing needs and my wife’s marketing needs, they keep me pretty busy. And when you add school pickup and homework and dinner and laundry and grocery shopping and bathtime and cutting the grass and vacuuming and pool cleaning and going to the Goodyear shop to get my wife a new tire, I seem to be really damned busy these days. And on top of all this, I am moving at the end of February, and I’m not entirely certain where all the money for that is coming from.

I once said in a post a while back that if I could just get out of the car I could write so much more, but now that it’s happened, I find the opposite is true. A lot of my writing happened sitting outside of a bar on a slow Wednesday night without a ride for an hour or two, when I had nothing else to do but pick up my iPad and write about some crazy drunk that was in my car last weekend. I seem to have very few of those nothing-else-to-do hours these days.

I still steal an hour here and there to work on the book, but currently it is 63 files in a folder that range from finished stories to barebones notes about some jackass I threw out of my car. The work continues, when I can. The other night I wrote a little about a drunk guy that I told, “You idiots are the reason I carry spare magazines.”

So the question now is, what do I do next?

I quit. I have no new taxi tales forthcoming, all the rest are going into this book I am struggling to write. I guess I could just close the blog and leave it online until I can’t afford it anymore. But I still want to write more than the taxi book, and a lot of you are here because of my political rants. I’d like to continue offering my viewpoint on politics and current events, but that has a low priority when weighed against things that actually makes me money or contribute to building my wife’s business.

Many of you have donated to me through my donate button, some people more than once, and I am moved every time I get a ten or twenty dollar contribution. And I love those occasions when I look at my email and yell across the house, “Hey, babe… some girl in Nebraska just sent me seventy-five bucks!” But it is very random, not the sort of thing one can make plans on. Things have been tight as we have adjusted to me only making a small recompense from my taxi company. If I could somehow get paid to make posts like The Pig Trap and Black Lies Matter, I’d post more often.

I think I have found a way to do that, if you guys like my writing the way you say you do.

I’ve discovered this site called Patreon. Basically, it is a place for writers, artists, musicians, and video producers to build up a base of patrons to further their work. The artist sets up an account, and he decides how you can patronize him, either by pledging a set amount by the month, or by the piece of work. By the piece seems to be the proper option for me; my schedule is so packed I can’t honestly predict when I can post, and I would feel guilty if someone paid three bucks for a month when I just couldn’t post anything.

Besides, I like being paid on performance, one of the few things I did like about driving a taxi. I might have hated it, but if you asked any of my teammates, they would all tell you I was very good at it. I made pretty good money for five years.

So here’s how it works: if you like my writing and wish to see the work continue, you pledge one or two or three or five dollars for every post I make… the price of a beer, depending on where you drink.

Like I said, I’m really busy and can’t promise a post every week. But if I were able to keep that pace, $1 pledged per post would be four dollars per month. You have the ability to cap your pledge, and if I suddenly start spurting out five essays a week, you can set a cap so you never pay more than four dollars in a month. But trust me, I’m way too busy for that to happen.

It is all very secure, and I don’t have access to your personal info. You can opt to cancel at any time. There is no obligation, no contract, no risk. If I don’t produce an essay, you don’t pay for one. If my work sucks, you quit, just like I did.

And if I decide to put up some trivial post about a music video I like or some random offhand observation, I’ll just post it here rather than on Patreon so you don’t pay for that. I won’t put up bullshit and ask you to pay for it. It took me eighteen months to send out this first email to this mailing list, so my promise to not abuse your Yahoo or Gmail account should tell you that I would never abuse your generosity.

Some artists on Patreon put up most of their posts or videos so that people can’t see unless they are a $10.00 contributor, or meet some other threshold. That’s bullshit, and I don’t want to do that. That’s a paywall, something that pisses me off every time I encounter one. If Taxicab Depressions is to continue, I want the world to see it. And that is the plan; I will still post here, as long as the market will bear it. If people truly like my work and are willing to patronize it, I will continue. If you know my work, you know I won’t be writing for Weekly Standard or Wall Street Journal anytime soon, so you guys will decide the future of this blog.

So, if people decide they want more and will support me this way, here’s what will happen. I’ll write a post, and my patrons will be able to see it 24 or 48 hours in advance on Patreon, and then it will go up on my site. You can view it first at Patreon, or just wait for it to appear here. But patrons should get some sort of spiff, so I’ll do an occasional “patrons only” post, or maybe give you guys excerpts or chapters of the book before it is published… or maybe “deleted scenes” that don’t make the book. I’ll find a way to give you guys something special.

The bottom line is that I will continue to post on this blog when I can, but the frequency of posts will be directly related to how busy I am with other more lucrative projects in my life. If I am busy with my wife’s real estate work, writing a political essay that doesn’t pay can’t be a priority.

On the other hand, if every member of this mailing list pledged just one dollar, that would assure you of at least two posts a month. Two dollars per essay would be a blessing beyond belief. If every member of this list pledged three dollars, that would change all the math in my household.

So it is up to you guys… patronizing my blog not only gets this site maintained with new political essays and thoughts on current events, it also gets my book published quicker, and it might also get my first novel published, an idea I’ve been toying with and jotting down notes on for a few months now, about the Realignment of America… think The Pig Trap, taken to its’ logical conclusion.

But hey, people have their own problems, and I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody patronized me. The economy sucks for most of us, though I am hopeful that Trump can turn that around in a year or two. I’m just a dumbass ex-taxi driver with a bad attitude and a low threshold for bullshit, that only writes these political rants for psychological therapy and the hope that my voice will somehow be heard by someone that can help fix this country. Sometimes I look at the state of America, and I feel like I’m the only passenger on the Titanic that seems to be aware of any problem, like I’m yelling in the ballroom, “Hey! Am I the only one that has noticed that this beautiful parquet dance floor is ankle-deep in seawater?”

But I would like to continue, and I intend to continue, though I can’t shake the thought that a political blog called Taxicab Depressions isn’t the best marketing. As to the frequency of my posts, it’s all up to you guys. My Patreon page is www.patreon.com/TaxiHack.

If you were to share that link with friends and family on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere, I’d be honored.

So buy me a beer… I have good stories to tell…

Nearly a year and a half ago, I started my mailing list with the promise that I wouldn’t flood your in-box, and I kept that promise; I’ve never used it. But my next post is just for the people that follow me and have supported me, coming to your email. So if you haven’t joined my mailing list, sign up at the bottom of any post. For some reason, I can’t seem to get it on my main page, but click any link on the left, scroll down, and get signed up. I promise, I won’t deluge you with mail.

Heartfelt thanks to all the people that follow my rantings faithfully…

[EDIT] Some people have commented that they are getting my RSS feed, or asked me to add them myself. I CAN’T DO THAT. You must sign up yourself at the box that says “Get Free Email Updates” at the end of each post in order to get on the mailing list.

All the news talking heads are speaking about Trump in the past tense, from FOX News to my local news stations, saying things like “Trump only has two weeks to resuscitate his floundering campaign”. I’m no pollster, but something doesn’t feel right. I have noticed the last couple weeks lots of Trump bumperstickers, but very few Hillary stickers. I see more Bernie stickers than Hillary stickers, at least where I live. Driving around my town, I see only Trump signs, and nobody seems to have Hillary signs in their yards around here. I see pickup trucks with Trump messages painted in their rear windows, and I see the Make America Great Again hats and shirts fairly frequently.

This was really brought into focus yesterday when I stopped by Walmart and the guy behind me in line was wearing a MAGA hat, and as I walked out to my car, I saw a cute girl on her late twenties wearing a MAGA tee shirt. As I left the parking lot, I saw Trump stickers on five cars. My next errand was taking my daughter to the library, and I consciously looked for signs and stickers there and back, and counted fourteen for Trump, two for Bernie, and zero for Hillary.

The other thing is Trump’s rallies. Trump rallies look like Metallica concerts, and Hillary can’t seem to fill up a Starbucks. Hillary held a rally at a venue close enough to my town to make the local news which holds 2,000 people, and it wasn’t even half full. Tim Kaine had an event in Miami that drew maybe fifty people. And the people that do show up don’t seem particularly excited. I saw this video of Hillary operatives handing out home-made signs to make the people look like they went to the trouble of making a sign to wave.

I think Trump has got this. I understand this little research project of mine the other day is highly anecdotal and may be specific to my area, but I see little evidence of support for Hillary. The Clinton campaign isn’t acting like they are coasting to victory, indeed, they appear to be scrambling to find another cannon to fire at him, and he seems impervious. I think everyone knows the “groping” complaints are all horseshit… this billionaire has been surrounded by beautiful women for fifty years with nary a complaint, and suddenly 10 women emerge to spout off a month before an election? The woman that said Trump groped her on a plane works for the Clinton Foundation and has pictures online with Hillary’s arm around her, so she doesn’t seem real credible. The latest is a washed up porn actress that launched a commercial website the day before her phony “press conference”, so she seems legit… if Gloria Alred is involved, you know it’s a scam.

Be honest… if you got felt up by someone you knew was a billionaire, you would immediately make two phone calls, first, 911, and second, to a lawyer, and begin the process of collecting a six-figure settlement. I wish Trump would grab me by the nuts… that would sort out a lot of problems in my house…

I’m just astonished that with all the sleaze and corruption swirling around her that Hillary is still a viable candidate. She is literally without shame. All the shady shit being exposed by Wikileaks should be completely disqualifying, and would be, without the mainstream media hiding it from low info voters. This is what concerns me. Podesta’s emails have revealed that most of the mainstream media are little more than stenographers for the Democrat party and Hillary in particular, running stories by them for approval and even striking or modifying direct quotes to suit their candidate.

And as a personal aside, I love that Wikileaks has shown that these leaks were not a Russian hack, Podesta lost his phone in a taxi, like so many dumbasses I have had to deal with. If I found Podesta’s phone in my car, I’d be Fed-Exing that phone to the Ecuadorian Embassy myself. It is alarming that the President has blamed this on Russia though, and inflamed an already terse relationship. That’s how low these people will go.

When the Founders wrote the press (what we today call the mainstream media) into the First Amendment, they assumed that the press would function as a check on government power, not aid and abet their crimes. Today, the check on the government has become the internet and social media. The legacy press has become a bad joke and the American equivalent of Pravda, and as I watch events today unfolding and damaging the mainstream media’s preferred candidate, look for future statists looking for ways to silence opposing views, ie, Hillary’s opposition and vow to overturn Citizens United. Were it not for social media and independent bloggers, you would never hear a peep about Hillary’s despicable behavior and shady dealings. It is truly ironic that countless people entered the field of journalism because of Woodward and Bernstein, and look what they have become.

I believe Hillary’s only path to victory is wide-scale voter fraud, and if you Google that subject, you will see massive investigations ongoing in Illinois, Indiana, and even bright-red Texas… and curiously, several polls have turned Texas from “red” to “leans red” to “toss up”. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has revealed the how and why of voter fraud in America, as well as proof of the Clinton campaign’s role in inciting violence at Trump events. There are millions of dead people eligible to vote on America’s voting rolls, we have voting machines that mysteriously change votes from R to D, we have Democrats bussing people to multiple polling places to vote, and in many cases, anyone with a driver’s license can vote in certain states.

This is what frightens me the most… the corruption in our government is so extensive and metastasized that this is no longer some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory anymore. It HAS happened, and it may well be a factor this cycle. Our former Secretary of State and nominee of the Democrat party used a private email server to conduct her business in order to avoid Congressional oversight. Our President KNEW this, and corresponded with her with his own non-official email address. The IRS and EPA have been weaponized to serve the administration, and the DOJ has been corrupted so deeply that it declines to prosecute the most extensive security lapse in modern times. These are people that just don’t care, and voter fraud is a mild misdemeanor, in their eyes.

Yet numerous polls show Hillary four to twelve points ahead. Well, Hillary has been proven to be a serial liar, the mainstream press silences negative stories and openly lies to us as well, so is it such a stretch to think that polls might be fabricated too? The Podesta emails show them coordinating with the media to oversample Hispanics and Native Americans in Nevada or Arizona. One poll I saw was 61% women versus 39% men, and Hillary wins by nine or eleven points. I think these polls are just another rigged tool in the Democrat toolbox to dispirit Trump voters to make them stay home.

I think Trump’s got this. The Gallup poll for Oct 26th, 1980 was Carter 47, Reagan 39, and Carter got crushed in a 44 state landslide. I don’t think Trump will duplicate that, but think back to those circumstances… the economy in the toilet, sabre rattling from Russia, Iran taking hostages, and inflation soaring. Today, we have an economy in the toilet, sabre rattling from Russia AND China, Iran funding terrorism around the globe and fast-tracked to nuclear weapons, and depressed wages coupled with rising prices. I think the parallels are striking. “Make America Great Again” really isn’t too far away from “Morning In America”, if you think about it.

One other note on polls; campaigns do what is called internal polling, polls only for the candidate and not shared with the public. I came across this story that claims that the Clinton Foundation moved 1.8 billion to a bank in Qatar. I’ve seen a lot of “fake news” sites, and I honestly don’t have time to research this stuff. I’m a simple man that knows nothing of the world of high finance… maybe Tyler Durden at Zerohedge can sort this out. This may be bullshit, and the site is covered with ads and clickbait stories, but the story implies that Hillary’s internal polling shows her losing, and she will leave the country after her loss, taking a swimming pool full of Benjamins with her and live out her days in a palace in Qatar.

Ehh… I could live with that. I’d like to see her prosecuted, but Obama will no doubt hand her and her whole little crime syndicate a blanket pardon. I’d like to see Obama prosecuted, but that would probably be untenable politically. But I pray that books will be written and investigations will be conducted, and history paints this corrupt cabal of grifters and hustlers for the criminals they truly are. America is better than these avaricious frauds, and to quote Obama himself, “that’s just not who we are.”

Go vote. Only a crushing victory will give these criminals the rebuke they have earned.

Don’t get mad, just a quick and easy post of something I saw on night three of the RNC. Before things really got going, the band was playing and people were milling around and dancing in the aisles. The camera cut to the band, and a young man onstage was playing the harmonica, and he was really killin’ it… a very good player. He started singing, and it was sort of a fast-paced rhyme, almost like a country-rap hybrid. As I watched, I distinctly heard him sing the phrase, “a little bit of doobie, ain’t talkin’ ’bout the brothers“, and the camera cut back to middle-aged delegates, dancing awkwardly in the aisles and wearing stupid hats, oblivious to that lyric.

I said to my wife, “Did you see that?” and I rewound the TV, and yep, that’s exactly what he said, and it flew right over the heads of the people on camera (I think). The chorus of the song was “back in my drinkin’ days”, so I Googled up that phrase and discovered Chris Janson. Never heard of him, not a big fan of country, but this young man is fun to listen to. Not complex music by any measure… hell, I could play this, three or four chords, and I know this guy Oscar that I’m confident could send me the tablature or a video of the lead guitar part in 10 minutes or less… but it has a “catchy” and fun quality I like.

And, I can relate… while I’m still in my drinkin’ days, I’m not anything like I was twenty or thirty years ago. Some might say I’m lucky to still be here.

So here’s Chris Janson’s Back In My Drinkin’ Days… a fun listen, and it makes me wonder if he was mildly trolling the RNC, or just playing a danceable tune…

“Thank God I lived to tell about the stupid things that I used to do…”

Here’s another one I like… from these two songs, I get the feeling this guy is a reformed drinker. For some people, that’s just the way it’s gotta be. But again, I can relate. There was this one instance in the parking lot outside of a Cult concert I could write about, and then there was the incident where I was shithammered in a bar near Nassau and I wasn’t sure if I was about to become an American in a foreign jail that I could tell you about, but it’s probably better I don’t…

[EDIT] I listened to several other of Chris Janson’s songs, and then I came upon this… I wish I had the talent to give my wife and daughter a tribute like this…