My Conundrum

Posted: 8th June 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags:

So I was talking to Ken, a long-time reader of Taxicab Depressions the other night, who asked me how the book is coming… and I said that I’m currently working on a piece entitled, “There Are No Hyenas In North America”.

That might strike you as a cryptic title, and you might be asking yourself, “Why would a taxi driver or a taxi passenger in Florida have any reason whatsover to utter those particular seven words?”

Exactly.

I want to post this story here, but I think I need to save it for the book. I have such limited time to write, and it will be hard to make real progress on the book and still post something here.

I will try… I have a vignette of a drunk British guy a week ago that I really liked.

I’m doing my best. I don’t want to lose the audience that I have, but if I am busy at work, that’s less time I have to write. On slow nights when there are few rides and I am not making any money, I get some work on the book done. I’ll try to throw you a bone as often as I can…

Post For Albert: Butthurt Cream On Aisle Nine

Posted: 12th May 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized

So this douchenozzle stumbles upon my blog and posts a comment on The Pig Trap, only to find that the owner of this site has the audacity to moderate the comments posted on it, and then makes a second comment, where he says with great butthurt and much indignation,

Awaiting moderation? That’s pathetic! What are you afraid someone will say?

For some reason, when I read that, I hear the wasted idiots I have to deal with at work, whining that I won’t let them in my car with their red Solo cups of beer or their cheap pizza dripping with orange grease… I shouldn’t have to explain myself. I own this car, and no, you can’t smoke in it, either.

No, Albert, it’s not pathetic. I have a few good reasons for moderating comments, like keeping Louis Vuitton spam and inappropriate posts off my blog. There’s all kinds of crap in the comments of this essay that I don’t agree with, but I still posted them up… “freedom of speech” and all that shit, ya know. Unless they sounded dangerous or started going too far afield, I posted them up. But each and every one of them waited until I had time to read them, and I have been a little busy the last couple of weeks. You will wait, too.

I own this place, dude… just like my car. Ask me about my cake-baking policy.

In his original comment, Albert says,

Great article, and I agree with everything except the 3 names you mentioned. Ted Goldman Cruz-Sachs? Are you serious? What exactly makes you think that he is different from any other corporate-owned politician? Did he convince you with his pointless fake filibuster? There is no hero riding up on a unicorn to save us, and even if there were, his name is not Ted Cruz.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/09/ted-cruz/

And I will approve this moronic comment, as well… even with the weird Ted Cruz bashing. That almost sounds like you get a check for posting this tripe. If you missed the cynicism in my writing, your reading comprehension is severely lacking. There are very few Washingtons in Washington these days, if any at all. These are the people we got, so whining that his wife works for a bank should be a disqualification? As opposed to running a personal email server, one that was extremely vulnerable to hackers, in order to circumvent the Federal documents law and deleting tens of thousands of documents, with a side order of obstruction of justice? This a big part of what The Pig Trap is about.

You “Ready For Hillary”, bro? She didn’t have a “Three AM Phonecall” from Benghazi, she probably had a live video feed, and the emails exchanged that night will never be seen… not for national security reasons, but for the personal security reasons of Hillary Clinton. And yet, she is somehow qualified to run for President. And now we learn that Hillary signed off on giving Vladimir Putin control of a lot of America’s uranium, in exchange for half-million dollar speaking fees for The Clenis?

I am utterly astonished that Hillary Clinton has not held a press conference to say that she has withdrawn her candidacy, and decided to spend more time with her granddaughter… the only marginally respectable out, at this point. I think she should be in an orange jumpsuit by now. And I am even more astonished that anything more than three or four percent of the American electorate finds her to be an acceptable candidate for President.

I wonder if Female Secretary of State Condi Rice could have gotten away with that shit… she’s black, ya know, so… don’t say “secretive” or “corrupt” or “entitled” or “bossy”, or you’re not only a misogynist, but a racist, too.

Ted Cruz, at the very least, talks about the Constitution the way I do. Today, he’s my guy. Until he reverses his position on the 2nd Amendment or some horrific scandal about Ted and underage hookers in the Bahamas surfaces, he’s my guy. Personally, I think the Republicans can skip all the debates and decide the nominee through a vigorous tournament of “rock-paper-scissors”, and dispense with wasting money attacking each other, and instead shine their light on the scandalous behavior of the Clintons and on the utter failures of the Democrat policy for the last decade. Even Jeb would be better than what we have, and what the Democrats are offering.

And, yeah… Ted reading “Green Eggs And Ham” to his little girls during his “pointless fake filibuster” was more principled and meaningful than anything John Boehner or Mitch McConnell have done to date, so, there’s that…

So I wonder, “Who does Albert support?”, and then I read this…

but I see no evidence that they are any different from Rand Paul, who talked a good game for a few years, capitalizing on his father’s hard-earned credibility

Okay, now I get it… that says a lot about you, dude. Ronulans… they can’t be reasoned with. I love this line from Allahpundit

Let’s face it. If he did start talking like this, he wouldn’t lose a single supporter.

I like Marco and like what he has to say, but I disagree with him on immigration. I like Rand, but disagree with him on foreign policy. I love watching Christie talk smack to union goons, but his 2nd Amendment position is a non-starter for me. But so far, I can’t find a single thing Ted Cruz has said that I disagree with, so he’s my guy. He’s more Constitutionally-grounded than anyone I can think of in recent history, more intelligent and cunning than most people believe, and an excellent extemporaneous speaker. He doesn’t need teleprompters, he doesn’t even need notes. Talking about America is easy, when you know it by heart. Personally, I can’t wait for the debates…

Anyway, sorry about your butthurt, Albert, but your comments are approved and posted now.

Crap Taxidermy

Posted: 26th March 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized

It is 5:25 on a Thursday morning, and I should be heading to bed, but I am on beer number four, I think… maybe number five… I lost count… and I am sitting here crying…

Sweet Jesus, whatever you are doing, stop right now, and go look at Crap Taxidermy

I’m not sure which will happen first, but I think I will either wet myself or break a rib laughing in the next three minutes…

Black Lies Matter

Posted: 18th March 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags:

RacePimps

I did not want to give Ferguson and Fat Albert Garner in Staten Island a single molecule of oxygen, but we had some protesters a few weekends ago in my town, obstructing traffic and marching through the streets, chanting “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe” and “Hands up-don’t shoot”, and it really is aggravating. I don’t know who these five or six-dozen people think they are winning over by causing massive traffic backups and disrupting peoples’ dinners at the street cafes and restaurants downtown. I am just infuriated by the lies, and so many people being hurt by them. The bile and hatred on Twitter over this shit is horrendous… I’ve never seen anything like it. Racial relations in this country are in a terrible ebb tide, much degraded from just twenty years ago.

Black Americans, you have got to snap out of this. You have to stop listening to the media and the racial grievance industry. This shit is simply not true. If you believe these memes, there are only two possibilities: you are ignorant of the facts and too lazy or too stupid to go find those facts, or you are a knowing and willing co-conspirator in perpetrating this hoax. You are a chump, or an asshole, and quite possibly both.

Here’s a hint: Anytime you hear Al Sharpton say anything, assume the opposite is true. Al Sharpton doesn’t give a fuck about you, he only cares about his own enrichment and aggrandizement, and he is all too willing to destroy any innocent person in his sick and deceitful quests for “justice”. He just makes this shit up… he flat-out lies, knowing that lots of black people won’t double check him. He has never been right about anything he has tried to sell, and since he can’t ever find a REAL case of racism, he finds stooges to make up stories for him, people like Tawanna Brawley and the Duke lacrosse whore and Trayvon’s mom. He promises them wealth and fame, if they just stick to the lies he makes up.

The fact that this man has a national television show under the NBC brand is a travesty, although not completely surprising, given that this is the august news brand that deliberately edited the recording of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make him look like a racist. And the fact that this man sits with the President is a scandal and a national disgrace. He is a race-baiting criminal, a stuttering idiot that can’t even read and should be in prison for tax evasion, at bare minimum. How can you owe millions in back taxes for years, and not be in jail? Yet he consults with our President on matters of race.

Why? What are his qualifications? He’s just the best nigga we got, and he calls himself a Reverend?

A REVEREND? Wouldn’t you love to hear Reverend Al asked to extemporaneously quote some scripture? What passages would he recite? The verse were Moses told the Pharoah that “Resist we much”?

Just whom does this man give counsel and guidance to, in matters of their immortal soul?

If President Bush or President McCain or President Romney “consulted” with David Duke on matters of race, the outrage from Americans of all colors would be deafening. Don’t know who David Duke is? He’s a klansman and white supremacist that ran for President many years ago. The reason you have never heard of him is that he is irrelevant. He went back to private life, and all thinking people reject both him and his ideology.

But Sharpton is far more dangerous than Duke. For reasons that escape me, many people LISTEN to this vile criminal hoaxster. After decades of hate speech and frauds, he somehow has an NBC television show. He owes more than FOUR MILLION DOLLARS in unpaid taxes, and after years upon years of calling people niggers and crackers and spics and kikes and faggots and homos, after inciting riots that cost millions of dollars in damage and dozens of deaths, this man can get our President on the phone in an hour.

Think about that… how is that even possible?

There is no human being on Earth that I despise more than this walking piece of shit. I wouldn’t take the time to piss on his head if his filthy, oily hair erupted in a grease fire. If there is any justice in this universe, Al Sharpton’s last words will be, “I can’t breathe”, and he will utter those words sooner, rather than later.

The Crown Heights riots were based on his lies. The seven dead at Freddie’s Fashion Mart died on his lies. Tawanna Brawley was a lie. The Duke Lacrosse incident was a lie. Trayvon Martin was a lie. Michael Brown was a lie. Fat Albert Garner was a lie. It is all this man knows how to do! He should be in jail, and black Americans should be clamoring for his immediate arrest, not marching every time he lies again. We will have racial strife in this country until this man has shuffled off this mortal coil, or is made irrelevant like David Duke. Black Americans, you must reject this criminal charlatan and everyone like him, if you care about the condition of your people and your families.

If you are a young black man or black woman reading this right now, imagine that you have only TWO choices for a black role model for your child. Only two. Two paths in life, two examples to strive for, two sets of principles and ideals that your child will reach for… but only one choice, made by you, in this moment. Look out your window, look in your baby’s eyes, and decide, right now: Who would you want your child to emulate? Dr. Ben Carson, or Reverend Al Sharpton? Condoleezza Rice, or Foxy Brown? Allen West, or Kanye West? Herman Cain, or Little Wayne?

Michael Brown and Fat Albert Garner are not dead because they are black, they are dead because they resisted arrest. It does not matter if the officers involved were right or wrong in detaining or arresting them; that is to be determined by a judge and the legal system. We give police officers, black and white, the power to arrest people, black and white, for the good of society. If you refuse to comply with an officer’s lawful order to surrender your wrists to a pair of cuffs, you should expect to be brought to the ground and put in cuffs by force. Would you be just as outraged if Eric Garner was a white, six-foot-four, 350 pound Hell’s Angel with a lengthy criminal record that was being uncooperative?

If you don’t give a fuck about the white biker Eric Garner, you’re either a straight up racist or a hypocrite, and probably pretty damned stupid, too.

And if you are stupid enough to try to take an officer’s weapon, you should expect to be shot, and maybe even shot multiple times, simple as that. I know I do.

I don’t fear being shot by a police officer, not because I am white, but because I am a law abiding citizen, and in the unlikely event that an officer tells me I am under arrest, I am going to comply. Handcuffs aren’t even necessary. Even if I know he is dead wrong, I will comply and cooperate fully, and let my lawyer sort it out. It would never occur to me to try to run or wrestle with a cop, let alone try to take his gun.

The media is complicit in Sharpton’s charades, and more than happy to twist a story to create a racist narrative that gets viewers and website hits, and they perpetrate these lies, rather than dispelling them immediately, and they hide or ignore pertinent facts and evidence that undermine the narrative. They tell you that the security video of Mike Brown strong-arming a grocery clerk just minutes before he died is irrelevant, they didn’t tell you about his extensive criminal history, and they didn’t show you the social media photos of him shooting gang signs, just like they didn’t show you Trayvon’s cell phone fight videos or the cell phone photos of Trayvon holding his gun and the weed he was growing.

Speaking of gangs, did you see the pictures from Mike Brown’s funeral?

1409010974000-AP-APTOPIX-Police-Shooting-Missouri-Funeral

_77162165_347521c6-c9cb-40bf-92f1-11940907a9e1

Who wears red to a funeral? Why, members of the Bloods gang, that’s who. Maybe Mike Brown was a Blood, maybe not, but he knew someone very well who was, and that is Louis Head, his stepfather, pictured above, a known member of the Bloods gang, who has done multiple prison sentences for guns and drug dealing. In a statement he released after Brown’s death, he (or someone marginally more literate) wrote,

“The Constitution was written by the people, for the people, animals are not people. Animals cannot read. Acting like an animal will not solve the problems of people.”

Louis Head is better known as the “BURN THIS BITCH DOWN!” guy…

Why has this man not been arrested for inciting a riot that caused millions of dollars in arson and property damage? Suddenly, hundreds of people standing around this man turned into the very animals he mentioned in his statement, and started looting and burning buildings and hurting innocent people, physically and financially.

This picture made me tear up the first time I saw it, and it is still hard to look at…

I later learned that thousands and thousands of dollars poured in via the internet, and I am glad this woman will be whole again eventually. I would wager that a lot of WHITE people made that possible, and maybe she will rebuild in Ferguson, maybe not… but do you think Advanced Auto Parts will be back? Not fucking likely. Now you have to get a longer bus ride further down the road to fix your hoop-dee… be sure to thank those aforementioned animals Mr. Head whipped up.

What should have happened in Ferguson that night is that anyone seen looting or torching buildings should have been shot. Start with rubber bullets if you must, but I have no compunctions about a cop shooting someone who is burning or looting a business, and hurting some nice, innocent, hardworking lady like Natalie DuBose. Fuggum… I couldn’t care less. And ya know what? I would have the very same policy if it were WHITE people burning and looting. SHOOT THEM ALL. I don’t know shit about Natalie DuBose, but I would bet next week’s pay that she doesn’t buy into the notion that institutional racism is holding her back, or that black people can’t get ahead and can’t build success with their own hands and hard work, or that Mike Brown was some misunderstood teenager that tried to surrender. The police and the Guard should have taken whatever steps necessary to protect the property and businesses of innocent people like Natalie DuBose.

Failing that, the decent and law-abiding black men in this town should have tooled up and been on the rooftops and standing in the doorways of the businesses of Ferguson, well-armed and ready to defend their innocent neighbors. The Oath Keepers came in to do exactly that, and surprisingly, those businesses were not even approached. There have to be hundreds upon hundreds of law-abiding black men and women in Ferguson, clergymen and community leaders, military vets and lawful gun owners, Community Watch volunteers and basketball coaches and School Crossing guards and Cub Scout leaders that should have been there, manning the rooftops of your town, protecting not only your neighbors, but your community.

But somehow, you guys didn’t show up. This shit goes on only because YOU tolerate it.

I almost never use the phrase “African-American”… you know why? Because it sounds “conditional”, like an asterisk, like you are somehow in a category apart, and not truly an American. This phrase is one of the most damaging phrases in our verbal lexicon, and I have all but banned it from my vocabulary. You should too. If I must refer to an American’s melanin content, I just say “white” or “black”, and I admit, when referring to the criminal element in our society, I might even use the word “nigga” on occasion, if the moment seems to require it. Don’t call me racist; you don’t get your own words that white people can’t use, and I’ll stop using it when Samuel Jackson and Chris Rock and Jay-Z stop using it. But honestly, I don’t really like that word either… it’s an ugly word, with an ugly history that most young people don’t really understand, and the term I use most of the time now is “Trayvons”.

My taxi company is different than most, and we don’t have the traditional dispatchers sitting in an office answering the phones; my company utilizes GPS positioning and call routing software to direct calls to available drivers, so when you call my company, you are most likely speaking to the man that will be driving you. So imagine that you call my company and I answer my work phone, and I hear, “Yo, dawg, we be needin a cab up in dis bitch, you feel me? Me an my tree niggas, we be at da conuh of MLK and Mango Abenoo, in da alley behin da Kwickie Mart… how long it be?

I am going to tell you to call another taxi company, or just hang up on you. First of all, you have offended my intellect by deliberately choosing to talk like a nigga. It is the 21st century and the Age of the Internet, and it is high time to leave the “Amos and Andy” bullshit behind, Kingfish. Don’t blame failing schools or broken homes, you are an adult that could teach yourself English and diction by listening to AM talk radio and watching UHF broadcasting on a 13 inch black and white TV with tin foil on the rabbit ears. Three hours of listening to Rush Limbaugh every day on a 9 volt transistor radio would do you a world of good. You intentionally and deliberately CHOOSE to speak like a semi-literate nigga… what does that say about you, as a person?

Second, what possible incentive could I have to go pick up four young black males in an alley in da heart of da hood? Black males between 16 and 34 are a miniscule percentage of the population, but commit roughly half of all rapes, robberies, assaults, and murders. That’s not racist, that’s realist… if you have a problem with that math, don’t give me any shit about it… that’s racisss FBI stats, so take it up with Eric Holder.

I drive nice black folks all the time, coming home from work or dinner out, but you little Trayvons behind the Kwickie Mart will be waiting a loooong time for me to show up, homeslice… and I know a few black taxi drivers that won’t be coming to get you, either. I think of it like going swimming in a pond where there is a sign that says, “WARNING! ALLIGATORS! NO SWIMMING!” It may be perfectly fine to take a dip, and maybe nothing bad will happen, but is it worth chancing it and possibly getting bitten on the ass by an alligator?

Black lives matter, except for the 10 or 20 or 30 nameless black people that will die next weekend on Chicago’s south side, killed not by racisss cops, but by other blacks, most of them males, 16 to 34, listenin’ to gangsta rap and livin’ the thug life. Next weekend will be the same. And the weekend after that. And the weekend after that. The same shit goes on in Miami and New York and Philly and Los Angeles and Baltimore and Oakland every damned weekend, too. Do those black lives matter?

Of course they do. Or at least, they should… but it is ONLY a big deal when a black guy dies at the hands of a white cop or a white guy or a “white Hispanic” guy… why is that?

So after the Ferguson police did what was quite probably their most exhaustive criminal investigation in the history of that police department and found no evidence or credible witnesses that did not corroborate the officer’s story, Eric Holder and the full force of the United States Justice Department swooped in to make sure that this racisss white cop was brought to justice, just like they swooped in to find ANYTHING they could scrape together to bring charges against George Zimmerman. And just like the George Zimmerman case, after yet another exhaustive investigation, they quietly determined that they could not find one scrap of evidence that the Michael Brown shooting was in any way racially motivated, or that the incident happened any other way than the officer described. Michael Brown tried to seize a gun from a cop, and he was was shot. He would not comply with the officer’s commands to get on the ground, and he charged the officer, and he was shot again, several times.

Not one single witness, upon closer questioning, said that Michael Brown tried to surrender or raise his hands. He charged the officer, and was killed.

“Hands up-Don’t shoot” never happened. IT NEVER HAPPENED. All these protests and all this damage and all this pain and all this death is based on a lie, perpetrated by the media, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama.

Black lies matter.

Black Americans, can a white guy in his fifties “get real ” with you? I hear Barack Obama and Eric Holder and Al Sharpton call for a “national discussion on race” from time to time, but a discussion really isn’t needed. Can I cut to the chase? Can I tell you what is wrong with the black community, what is at the very heart of all the so called “racial injustice” in this country, the one single thing that would fix 90 percent of all of our so-called racial problems?

If you think about it seriously, and honestly, it really is simple. Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice did not die because of racism or police brutality or loose gun laws or Stand Your Ground or excessive force or profiling or discrimination or poverty or injustice… at the very root of why these boys found themselves in these circumstances is something much more basic. These boys really died because of one simple and fundamental thing: poor parenting.

I know that stings, or at least it should, but it only stings because it is the truth.

I was not some Honor-Roll white boy… my parents were divorced, my neighborhood was less than great, and I quit or got thrown out of pretty much every decent high school in my county, except the last one, which was about 80 percent black, just a few blocks off MLK. I may or may not have allegedly committed several acts of borderline illegality in my teen years, and I was actually pretty lucky to not get in any serious trouble. But even in my wild teenage years, the idea of attacking a citizen or resisting arrest or trying to wrestle a cop’s gun away or to pull a fake gun on the cops NEVER occurred to me. I was raised with a fundamental sense of RIGHT and WRONG, and if the cops are here, you have probably gone too far, and now is the time that you should cut the shit and do what you are told.

Black Americans, you have got to get your shit together. Only you can fix this. Only you can end this pain and stop this violence. Democrat politicians can’t, government programs can’t, police can’t, white people can’t, only you. You must make this nihilistic thug culture of violence and self-fulfilling prophesies of prison and death unacceptable in your house, on your block, on your street, and in your community. You must stand as a community and shun those who behave this way. You must raise your kids to know right from wrong, just like this white boy from a broken home in a less than great neighborhood was raised.

father-of-the-year

What kind of future lays ahead for this possibly bright and talented boy? Do you think he will grow up to be a scientist or engineer or a software coder that becomes the founder of the next Apple or Google? Anybody want to bet a hundred bucks on this kid NOT being in the back of a police car by his sixteenth birthday, or in prison or dead in the gutter by twenty-one?

These people behind this “hands up- don’t shoot” meme seem to think they are part of some glorious and righteous civil rights movement, somehow akin to the early 1960’s. Ferguson is no Selma or Birmingham, Al Sharpton is certainly no MLK, and Michael Brown is definitely no Emmett Till. Martin Luther King would not approve of ANY of this bullshit. Something has changed since Little Rock and Selma. When did these people…

Little Rock 9

…turn into these people? And what caused that?

Not the Little Rock 9

The problem in the black community isn’t black Americans, it’s Trayvons. It’s niggas. It’s gangstas. It’s thugz. It’s rappers. It’s criminals. It’s twerkers. It’s a mindset that black people have no chance to better themselves unless they break the law. It’s the culture that allows these things to exist, instead of a culture of success, born of hard work and education. It’s the confluence where gangsta rap and thug culture intersect with broken homes and poor parenting, and produce young black people, a lot of them male, that decide that black lives really don’t matter, because their parents never gave them the plan or held them to any standards of acceptable behavior, and so why not be a gangsta and have a few years running wild, knowing they will be dead or incarcerated in the next decade?

This isn’t racist… I am judging you by the content of your character, not by the color of your skin, just like a REAL Reverend asked me to do some fifty years ago. I have often said that so many black Americans have lost the right to invoke Martin Luther King’s name. I stand by that. This man died, shot through the chest, just to give you simple equality, and what did you do with it?

Black Americans, only you can fix this. You must raise your children to reject this culture, and put them on a path to success. This is most likely the most important thing you will ever do with your life. Yes, it is hard, I get that… but you must do your best to raise your kids with a fundamental set of values and reject ALL of the things you know are bad for your kids, right down to the music they listen to. I know you can’t “ban” music… but most rap should be in a small “niche” category, smaller than “punk” or “bluegrass”, that very few people listen to.

Be honest… this shit is awful… black musicians DEFINED the music of the 20th century with unbelievable soul and talent, but now any criminal jackass that can spit rhymes about bitches and ho’s and fuckin’ and slingin’ and smokin’ and shootin’ and killin’ is on the radio, and more importantly, in your kid’s phone.

I have an interesting experiment I run in my car occasionally… I ask college kids or passengers under 30 to name THREE black musicians that are not rappers… and a lot of them can’t do it. I get Michael Jackson occasionally, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston sometimes, and one guy really surprised me by saying Lenny Kravitz.

I simply can’t believe that the grandchildren of the people that gave us Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and BB King and Louis Armstrong and Etta James and Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and Duke Ellington and Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner and Billie Holiday and Curtis Mayfield and Quincy Jones and Wilson Pickett and Stanley Clarke and Thelonius Monk and Slash and Wynton Marsalis and Gladys Knight and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Sly Stone and Sidney Bechet and Aaron Neville are now listening to Snoop Dog and 2 Chainz and Young Jeezy.

When did “When A Man Loves A Woman ” turn into this “shake dat ass ” shit?

How far have you folks fallen? Sweet Jesus, you guys used to make the BEST music. What is this rap shit? These lightweights are the musical equivalents to professional wrestling… yes, they are “performing”, in a manner of speaking, and it “sounds” like music, but it really isn’t. And even if YOU happen to like it, it is bad for your kids. It tells them it is OK to be a whore or a gangsta. It’s the music of Trayvons, and it is polluting the minds of your children.

Maybe you will fail in instilling this sense of right and wrong in your child; the streets are hard, and the culture is overwhelming, but you have to try. Some kids can’t be saved; I know that for a fact. I know a white guy from my youth that was just destined for prison life, and nothing could have saved him. I think it bears mentioning that he came from a divorced family, both parents alcoholics, and not a lot of structure in his life or emphasis on performance in school. Last I heard, he was doing a long stretch for burglary, identity theft, and fraud.

Maybe I too will fail in raising my daughter; criminality is not exclusive to the black community, and many white girls grow up to be addicts and hookers and shoplifters and embezzlers and even killers, but I am determined to do my best, and my daughter will be well-grounded in the concept of right and wrong, and I feel pretty confident that my Punkin’ will probably never get arrested, and certainly not get shot by a cop. Do you have that same confidence?

Black lives matter. But black lies matter too. They matter to taxi drivers a thousand miles away, held up in traffic jams caused by phony protests, late getting to a passenger.

Black lies matter to nice people trying to enjoy a simple dinner out in my little Florida town.

Black lies matter to hardworking people like Natalie DuBose, just trying to provide for their families and working hard to be successful, and trying to build a better life.

Black lies matter to the families of the two officers shot in Ferguson just last week.

Black lies matter to the family of Zemir Begic, beaten to death by feral little Trayvons with hammers, to avenge Michael Brown’s death.

And black lies matter to the families of NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, assassinated in cold blood, because “Hands up- don’t shoot”… two innocent NYPD officers, shot dead because of a lie, a lie perpetrated by the media, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama.

And black lies should matter to you, too, black Americans. It is you paying the steepest price for them. You are paying in crime-riddled communities and incarcerated men and dead children.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But only you can fix it, and it starts with you, and what you teach your children.

Black lies matter.

Recommended reading: Stop Being Black

*Hat-tip to Bmore at The Little Place In The Forest for the art at the beginning of this post. The first time I saw that image, it hit me like a punch in the chest. Well done, Sir.

As I try to slap this book together, I am finding the most challenging aspect so far is trying to envision some sort of over-arching vision, a way to organize this stuff in a way that doesn’t get tedious for the reader. The blog format I have here works pretty good for what I have been doing the last few years, just telling a short story or posting up some jarring political rant, but a book with random stories just jumbled together seems “clunky” to me… just doesn’t seem to have any “flow”. But I was told by someone whose opinion I respect (but don’t necessarily always agree with) told me that the most important thing is to get it all written down, and worry about organization later. So far, I have been doing just that, and I write something on it every day, even if it just a couple of paragraphs.

It is slow going…in hindsight, I probably should have tried to get halfway finished before I called myself out. I was steering toward an end product that was part memoir, part how-to manual, and sprinkled with political stuff. More than one person has told me I should leave out the political stuff, rather than chance offending the delicate sensibilities of a liberal reader who happens to pick it up, but if you have read my blog, you can probably guess how I feel about that.

My first thought was, “Stop being a pussy. The greatest political experiment in human history is on the verge of collapsing, so you need to start paying attention, you need to think, and you need to grow a pair, if you give the tiniest little fairy fuck about your future and the future of your children. And if you ever use the word “microaggressions” in my presence, I will punch you in the snout. Things are that fucking serious.”

WordPress stats aren’t the best, but between those and my hosting stats, I would estimate The Pig Trap has been read at least 100,000 times here, and pasted in toto on a few other sites, so who knows? Stop Being Black and Let’s Advance The Discussion also have impressive tallies… well, impressive to me, anyway. A Few Thoughts On Current Events was posted six days ago and is getting several thousand reads a day. I’m sure that there are people reading this that also have their own blogs and would panic if their pageviews dropped that low, but I’m still a little amazed that this many people have read the disgusting stories and political ramblings of a cranky taxi driver AT ALL, let alone click the “Like” button or email my link to a friend. My read of my stats is that most people come for the politics, and they stay for the afterparty with the drunks and whores.

And, I kinda think it is part of the brand, at this point. I think my occupation doesn’t validate my worldview, it aggravates it… but it’s just who I am now.

So, let me ask you guys… what do you like about this dirty little alley of the internet? What would you like to see? What are your favorite posts? What would you like to see more of? How can I write the book for YOU?

People in my car sometimes say, “Tell me your best taxi story…” and I can’t. I think that putting political posts aside, my favorite story is one that has very few comments and an unimpressive number of pageviews. It’s You Dairy Queen Muthafuckahs Ain’t Shit, Bitchezzz!. I just can’t seem to tell that story in my car, but I laugh out loud every time I read it back, more than two years later. I drove away from Kyle’s place laughing for ten solid minutes, scribbling notes on a legal pad at stop lights… and I still have occasional nightmares about The Skankopottomus… and I wil never forget Amber or Miss Bolivia.

So click the link to the left for this post or the comments bubble above, and give me your opinions, your guidance, your input, your suggestions, rants and raves, cheers and jeers… any and all input is welcome and will be carefully considered. Even if you find this post long after it was posted, your opinion might be the one that causes a re-write. How do I write this in a way that would make you drop a few bucks for a copy?

A Few Thoughts On Current Events

Posted: 2nd March 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags:

If you have read my post The Pig Trap, you know of my absolute bewilderment at the current state of our country. Our government is utterly lawless, just making shit up as they go along, creating regulations and executive edicts to bypass the Congress and the Constitution, committing crimes in the furtherance of those goals, and nobody ever gets in trouble, unless he’s screwing someone he shouldn’t be, and nobody ever loses their job or goes before a judge, and most importantly, nobody seems to give a fuck. Everything is just fucking dandy, as long as we can binge-watch Girls and Entourage on HBO GO and Katy Perry’s next single doesn’t suck and that hot chick from Club Plush texts me next week…

I wake up every day around two or three in the afternoon, make a cup of coffee and turn on the news, just waiting for the day when it finally happens, the day that something finally snaps, and I am listening to Sheppard Smith breathlessly trying to describe shaky video of a mob of 500,000 or 800,000 pissed off taxpayers that has invaded Washington and are lining every street in D.C., armed to the teeth, and erecting scaffolding on the National Mall.

Actually, that’s not how I think it is going to go, but I promise you… what can not go on, will NOT go on.

A couple days ago, a five member panel of unelected bureaucrats called the FCC voted 3 to 2 to seize control of the internet for the Federal government, without so much as a “by your leave” to the Congress. It’s not like your Congressman or Senator did this, these were three UNELECTED political appointees, all DEMOCRATS, which I think is worthy of mention, and they just decided that they have the power to regulate what you say and what you view on the internet, without asking you what YOU think about that. They came up with a big fat Rule Book For The Internet that they would not show to the public before the vote, and now that they have deemed they have the authority to do this and voted to institute their new Rule Book For The Internet, they STILL won’t show the public their new Rule Book For The Internet.

How is that not a Joe Biden-sized Big Fucking Deal for you? THREE PEOPLE you never heard of and certainly never voted for just took over control of the internet for the government, and they are not showing the public what the new rules will be. Does that mean websites will have to get a government “license”, like radio stations? And will they have a list of bad things they can’t say, or they will be fined and maybe even LOSE their license? Nobody knows, because they will not show the public the rules they are creating.

What if you call some dude in your Twitter feed a faggot, and you get a $25 ticket, deducted from your debit card or your ApplePay or your Paypal or your Netflix account? Will you need a “user’s permit”, or a government assigned ID that tracks your every website and keystroke, because terrorism, or something…? Can they suspend your access if you are deemed to be an insensitive homophobe or racist, or even BAN you from the internet? Nobody knows, because they will not show the public the rules they are creating.

I swear, I have asked dozens of people about this in my car over the last few nights, and the most cogent reply I have heard was something like, “Whatever… as long as my NetFlix is streamin’ good, and I can play Call of Duty without any lag, I’m chill…”

Obama has granted amnesty to some five million illegal immigrants via executive order. There’s just one problem with that; HE CAN’T DO THAT. He has said so himself, in public, on camera, more than twenty times. But he just did it, in a naked and blatant display of unconstitutional criminality, and resistance to this act seems almost nonexistent in Washington.

Just a few days ago, it was learned that the Treasury Department gave three billion dollars to several large insurance companies to keep them afloat, because no thinking person wants to sign up for this horseshit called ObamaCare, and the insurance companies will go bankrupt giving away “free” healthcare without total taxpayer compliance. There’s just one problem; THEY CAN’T DO THAT. Only Congress can authorize the spending of taxpayer money, and when Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, kind of a stickler when it comes to money, asked the Treasury about it, they basically told him to fuck off.

Sweet Jesus… can you imagine the uproar if George Bush illegally ordered the Treasury to give three billion taxpayer dollars to Exxon and Haliburton, and told the Congress to piss off? The Internet would be melting down and the Democrat Congress would be drafting impeachment documents before the sun went down. Dan Rather might have suffered a stroke on-camera.

That’s a lot of money, by the way… I know it is hard to get your head around, but let me whip out my handy yardstick… there are 86,400 seconds in a day. Most people can grasp that; converted to dollars, that’s a modest house, a really nice car, or a boat guaranteed to get you laid.

Three billion seconds ago was 1920. So try to imagine the giant warehouse required to stack up $86,400 in one hundred dollar bills every day since 1920. That’s a lot of fucking Benjamins. I’d be interested to know how many dump trucks it takes to haul that to the bank.

Let me repeat: This was not on the television news and in damned few newspapers. How is this not the sort of thing that puts angry people in the street, and Congress demanding (figurative) heads on platters?

If you went into work tomorrow and diverted $3,000 of company money to someone without authorization, you would be arrested and charged with theft and embezzlement. But the government just stole THREE BILLION TAXPAYER DOLLARS and gave it to huge corporations, and it doesn’t even make the news. Don’t liberals hate big corporations and the One Percenters like Mitt Romney that run them? Does the phrase “corporate welfare” ring any bells here?

Where is the outrage, liberals? Where is the outrage, media? Where is the outrage, Congress? Why is no one in handcuffs? How is this not a Constitutional crisis that blows runaway llamas and dumbass “I can’t breathe” protests off the internet? Am I the only one that noticed this? Why isn’t Paul Ryan himself calling a news conference on this matter?

I was reading about this story at HotAir.com, when a commenter that goes by the name BoxHead1 made a post that resonated with me… I don’t know this person and given it’s erratic formatting, I assume he or she was typing into their phone. I was going to clean up the formatting and typos, but I think I will leave it as is.

Back in 1980 we gave Lee Iacocca of Chrysler a 1.5 bililion dollar loan to keep him in business. We took 6billion of his in collateral.

This was very controversial. It passed easily but there were 160+house and 43 senate that voted against it. It was very very controversial. And remember they put up 6billion collateral and it was JUST A LOAN.

Fast forward to 2015 and some unnamed people transferred 3billion to some companies and it’s not controversial. No one even votes or notes it(except on the wingnut sites).

Think about this; People always talk about progress from generation to generation. Young people and lots of old people just assume things get more civilized and “smart”. New is better.

But contrast the way the populace reacted to a 1.5 billion dollar loan in 1980 to the empty headed no knownothingism of today. The people in 1980 must have been more awake, constructive, smart, literate, analytical, thrifty, independent… than the people of today. How else can you explain the change?
The drugs or the schools or the position of the earth… something has changed.

BoxHead1 on February 26, 2015 at 11:17 PM

You are correct, BoxHead, something HAS changed. I see it every night in my car, people that are utterly clueless and completely oblivious to this shit, and can’t bring themselves to give a fuck, even when you bring things like this to their attention. I am old enough to remember the Chrysler loan debate, one of the first political stories that caught my attention at that young age. I remember thinking in the middle eighties that Lee Iacocca could make a credible run at the White House with a slogan like, “Keep America Turning A Profit. ” And the Chrysler loan wasn’t some “Too Big To Fail” BAILOUT, it was a loan, with 400% collateralization, and it was paid in full.

In 1979, a 1.5 billion dollar LOAN was a Joe Biden-sized Big Fucking Deal, but today, a 3 billion dollar THEFT by the government doesn’t get 30 seconds on the nightly news.

Just a few days ago, the government announced plans to ban one of the most common bullets used in the AR15 rifle. Since they could not find popular support to ban the most common rifle in America, even after Sandy Hook, the government has decided to illegally ban the ammunition that goes in them. There’s just one problem; THEY CAN’T DO THAT.

Oddly enough, even as a stalwart supporter of the Second Amendment, I’m not really bothered by that. Would you like to know why I am not particularly worried about that? It’s because I think that the people that will fix this shit already have plenty of that ammo squirreled away, and have been “rolling their own” for a looooong time now, and that very soon, there will be plenty of it lying around on the ground anyway, easily picked up…

I’m not really following the early chatter about the 2016 election… I’ll start paying attention around June of 2015, if we get there. Personally, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if for the first time in history, elections were held EARLY, due to exigent circumstances…

What can not go on, will NOT go on.

* Post edited to correct a couple of typos… this is the second rate shit you get when I try to work fast. – The Hack

My Date With An Uber Driver

Posted: 17th February 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

I don’t remember how I found this… maybe I clicked a link in a comment on an article about Uber, and I found this YouTube video. Watch it all, and then read the post immediately after this one, “Batshit Crazy”.

Still think I am making this shit up?

Then think about this: these people can vote, without so much as three question quiz about the electoral process they are participating in…

splatter

Updated 21 February:

Part Two.

Wow… just wow…

Batshit Crazy

Posted: 9th February 2015 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Occasionally, I get people that have read my blog who think I am making this shit up. They say, “C’mon… people don’t really behave like this, do they? Are people really this crazy fucked up? You are at least exaggerating a little, right?”

No, I’m not. I don’t have the imagination to dream this shit up. If anything, I am astonished, horrified, and repelled when I encounter these people. And I get “crazy fucked up but not blog-worthy” every damned night.

For the last year or so, I have carried around an old, deactivated cellphone, that I keep charged up and in a neat little hidden place in my car, and if someone seems like they might be blog-worthy, or if they suddenly seem like they might be a problem or even a safety risk, I turn on the voice recorder and I have an audio recording of the ride, easy to download to my computer and to refer to later as I write about them.

So on a painfully slow Sunday night a few months ago, the manager of a nice restaurant calls me directly. Geraldo is a great guy that I drive home two or three times a month, sometimes more. It is always a nineteen dollar ride with a six dollar tip every time, so I always try to accommodate him. Tonight he says he has a patron that needs to go on a long ride that should be about sixty dollars or more, but she only has $45 cash and no cards. This is a severe discount with no tip forthcoming, but on a night this slow, there are damned few $45 rides to be found, and sometimes you just have to burn the gas and add the miles to your car, and go make the cash tonight. If you won’t do it, somebody else will…

As I was debating this ride in my head, but already driving in that direction, I heard a scuffling sound on the phone, like the patron wrestled Geraldo’s cellphone out of his hand, and this female voice says, “Don’t fuck with me, alright? I’m not some new girl on the block, I’m from D.C., ya know, so I know all about corruption and taxi schemes and dispatcher payola and the shit you guys do for organized crime and Rick Scott, so just send Mohammed or Mustaffa or Achmed over here, and let me talk to him directly, and let’s just cut out the dirty money, okay, mutherfugger?”

I said, “Uhhh… Wut?” but she ended the call.

So I pulled up in front of Geraldo’s restaurant three or four minutes later, and my keen taxi driving instincts told me that this was a situation I definitely want to survey first-hand, rather than wait for it to come staggering out the door toward me, so I parked and went inside. Geraldo shakes my hand as I come in, and he says, “I know this girl but I haven’t seen her in years, and I don’t know why she is acting like this… can you get her home?”

Sitting at the bar is an attractive woman about 35 or 40 years old, wearing a pretty sexy turquoise dress and high heels. She looks at me and says, “You aren’t Mohammed… where is my taxi driver?”

I said, “Well, I MIGHT be your taxi driver, ma’am, depending on how the next sixty seconds goes… now tell me again where you need to go?”

She says she needs to go to an address that I know is at least ten dollars past a well-known landmark hotel in another town, so this is a sixty dollar ride or better, but she SWEARS this has never been more than forty dollars before, and anything more than that is just being funneled to crime syndicates, and Governor Rick Scott is getting a fat slice.

Yeah, she seems a little off-kilter, but she doesn’t strike me as belligerent or violent, and she didn’t even really look or sound drunk, and tonight was REALLY slow, so I decided to take care of Geraldo’s patron, in order to maintain our good relationship and make a little money tonight. I told her to hand me the money and I head back to the car, and several of the staffers and patrons had this expression on their faces like she might have made some sort of scene before I got there, and Geraldo slips me a ten for getting her out of here.

A staffer from the restaurant follows me out, carrying a double-height milk crate, like two milk crates stacked on top of one another, but no “floor” in the top one, and it looks heavy. I can see a bunch of CD’s and a boom box on the bottom, some clothing, and what appears to be a bedroll and pillow on top. I opened my back hatch and the staffer put her crap in the back of my car, then I opened the passenger door for the woman, closed it behind her, and as I walked to my door, I wondered, “Who travels with a giant milk crate full of CD’s, a bedroll, and a pillow?”

And in that three or four seconds walking to the driver’s door, the only thing I could come up with is, “Hey, I have a place we can fuck…”

So we are on the way, and I asked her what happened, and she said her car broke down, so she found a safe parking place to leave her crippled car, and walked to Geraldo’s restaurant, carrying the heavy milk crate full of shit. But it was worth it, because she did some sort of “Rock The Vote” event today, and she did her part to get Rick Scott out of the Governor’s Mansion.

And then, she really started talking, and the shit she was spewing was just unbelievable. I turned on the voice recorder on my spare phone within ninety seconds or two minutes of her getting in the car. Sometimes when I get someone interesting in my car, I try to “steer” them into interesting conversations, but this chick knew the fast route to Crazytown much better than me, and I just let her talk. You might hear my voice four or five times… but my last line is pretty good…

So if I told you that this woman hopscotched around topics from blowing Bill Clinton to getting her car repossessed in college to rappers Naz and Tupac and Ice Cube (who, by the way, if you look closely, has two right hands) to Rick Scott killing his dog and feeding it to people by Meals On Wheels to getting thrown out of a Hallmark store to Clarence Thomas to locking down the cocaine market in this county to the email that could have prevented bath salts and cannabalism and that guy getting his face chewed off in Miami to figuratively thinking about skinning people and turning their thigh muscles into jerky and serving it to friends, that would be total bullshit, right?

My audio recording of this woman is 31:22 long. I edited out all the possibly identifying parts of this recording, and even with all that crazy shit edited out, it is still over 14 minutes long. Listen to the whole thing… if you skip 30 or 45 seconds, you might miss the part where she talks about getting an unwanted baby (there’s a lot of them in Florida) and cooking it in a locked car, just so she can get arrested and give an interview to Huffington Post.

No, really… she said that…

It’s an old saw, but it really is true. I just can’t make this shit up…

Vignette: You Know Who You Look Like?

Posted: 21st December 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
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In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting, and sometimes an object. -Wikipedia

This one might be a little lame, but we liked it in the moment…

A group of three people flagged me down the other night, a guy and two girls, and one of them looked, I dunno, “distinctive” might be the best word. She was attractive, middle twenties, with very short, pale platinum blonde hair, almost white, and she had this “euro” kinda look going… hard to describe, but she immediately reminded me of a character from a film I really like. They get in, and they are only going fourteen or sixteen blocks, and the girls are talking away, and the blonde says, “So anyway, this woman came into work, and she remembered me from the Jockey Pub! I used to go there all the time to see my best friend Franco, because he worked right across the street, so after work he would come over and we’d do happy hour… but I haven’t been there in like two years! But her face lit up and she said, “You are Franco’s friend, right? Franco from Brazil, right?” I just couldn’t believe this bartender remembered me from so long ago!”

I said, “Well, you do have a very unique appearance… I was going to say it when you got in the car, but you girls were talking and I didn’t want to interrupt. You know who you look like?”

The blonde says loudly, “Ohhhh, boy, here we go… I only get this shit five or ten times a week… go ahead and say it… who do I look like?”

I said, “You look like “Switch” from The Matrix. I would remember you, too.”

Switch

That wasn’t what she was expecting to hear. She said, “Huh… that’s a new one. The Matrix is soooo 90’s, but you are older, so I get it… I see it…”

I laughed and said, “Well I’m not THAT old… who do people usually say you look like, five or ten times a week?”

Her two friends are already laughing, and she says, “Brienne of Tarth”, from Game of Thrones.”

Brienne

I am a giant mark for Game of Thrones, and I busted out laughing, because this girl was a little over five feet tall and might have weighed 110 pounds soaking wet, and I said, “Well, you are only two or three feet too short for that role, but hey… they are both some badass blonde bitches, bitches NOT to be screwed with… much like yourself, amiright?”

They are all laughing and I am pulling up to their destination. I said, “Why does everyone seem to associate you with these heavily-armed and lethally dangerous women? Are you currently carrying any broadswords or battleaxes or handguns or Claymore mines that I should be aware off?” They got out laughing, and gave me three fives for a six dollar fare.

As I read this back, it feels a little weak… maybe ya had to be there, but we all got a good laugh in that four minute taxi ride… blogworthy, but not bookworthy.

Taxicab Depressions: The Book

Posted: 16th December 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Sometimes when people ask me if I like driving a taxi, I respond, “I’d rather pound my nuts flat with a wooden mallet.” That may be a bit of hyperbole, but not much. This really is a nightmare gig, at least for me. It’s not the hours or the driving or the traffic, it’s the people. This would an awesome job if I were driving around cardboard boxes; I really should put in an application with FedEx. But these wasted idiots just grate on me and grind me down… I am no fan of intrusive government, but I could make a very good case for all adults in the United States being issued Drinking Permits, that can be suspended for 30 or 60 or 90 days by any cop, bartender, cocktail waitress, bouncer, paramedic, or taxi driver, on the spot with a phone app, if you are being a belligerent douchebag. It’s been more than four years now, and I am getting really burnt out.

I have had a few jobs in my life where I picked up heavy shit all day long, and nothing I have ever done wears me out like driving this car. I’m exhausted, all the time. I sleep eight or nine hours, and when my alarm rings to get me out of bed, I could go right back to sleep for four hours more. My days off are sacred, and I often sleep ten or eleven hours on those days. The rule in my house is that Daddy is not to be woken up unless something is burning or bleeding. Anything else can wait. But oftentimes, I have to get up early on my days off anyway, because my wife needs me to pick up my daughter at daycare, or I need to go do something that can only be done in the daylight, like deal with my mechanic or go to the bank or the DMV or the Post Office or some other institution that closes at 5 PM sharp.

Driving a taxi is not so much a job, it is more of a lifestyle, and it is a lifestyle I’m not really suited to. I work ten or eleven hours a day, and I’m a piker, compared to some of the guys in my company. Some of these guys work twelve, thirteen, even fourteen hours a day. I simply can’t do that. After eleven or twelve hours, I am so tired and usually so angry that I am not safe to drive. One guy in my company boasts that he hasn’t taken a day off literally in years. He’s on day shift, so he tends to encounter a lot fewer drunken jackasses and he runs little errands in between passengers and on the way home, but, still… c’mon, man… really? I said to him once, “Don’t you have shit to do? Don’t you need to do laundry or cut your grass or go to the Home Depot or go shopping for something? Don’t you have a wife or girlfriend or Mother-in-law beating your ass to fix something around the house? Don’t you ever think about just “fucking off”, and going fishing or going to the beach for a day? How can you not have a day off in years?”

I have no friends, no social life, no hobbies, no interests, no exercise, no fun, no recreation, no idle time. The last movie I saw in a theatre was The Dark Knight, whatever year that was. I have been out to dinner with my wife precisely three times since my daughter was born, and two of those were for her business. I watch one or two TV shows per season; I DVR Game Of Thrones and Sons Of Anarchy and Justified and True Blood and Archer to watch with my wife on one of my nights off, but my massive cable bill is for the benefit of my wife and child. I see my daughter for eight hours a week, from 5 PM to 9 PM, Mondays and Tuesdays. Somehow, that feels like “visitation”, and I don’t like it. And it really bothers me that I work more hours in ONE DAY than I see her in A WEEK. I see my wife about twelve hours a week, on the same days. I see my extended family, sixty miles away, on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I write this blog between passengers on my iPad.

This is it. I work, and I sleep. I drink beer for an hour or two after work to decompress and sedate myself before bed, and I get up the next day to do it again.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful for this job, or at least grateful for the income it provides, especially in the Obamaconomy. If I must do this shit to provide for my family, I am so glad that I do it for this company. I really do work for the best taxi company in the area, and I would not make the money I make at any other taxi company in town. My fellow drivers Jay and Karneesh The Mexican and Darren and Mike The Noob are some of the best in the business, at least where I work, and I am proud to be associated with them.

I have often said that driving a taxi is like being a lap dancer… it’s degrading and humiliating and you feel disgusting at the end of the night, but look at all the money you made. So if I must do this, I am thankful to work for the best tittie bar in town.

This is a hostage situation. The only reason I do this is because of my daughter. I can’t just quit and go get some $10 an hour construction job; I make that job’s weekly pay on an average Saturday night. That paycheck won’t cover daycare and a roof overhead.

In a way, taxi driving is quite seductive on a certain level. As long as you don’t drive like a fool and get tickets and accidents, don’t rip off the customers or the company, don’t make enemies of your other drivers or seriously piss off management, and IF you can deal with these un-fucking-believable people, you can make good money and have a job for life. I call them “lifers”… no matter what their skills or background, this is the end of their resume, and they will never do anything else. Some very smart and very talented people get seduced by that money and security… I know a guy that reads Plato and Socrates in his car, not on an iPad, from two-inch thick books, late thirties or early forties, quirky but brilliant, and I doubt he will ever do anything else. He’s a lifer, and most of the guys in my company are lifers as well.

I like and respect every single man in my company, but I don’t want to be a lifer. I will do this job until I am 90 years old, if that is what it takes to provide for my family, but I really want out of this car.

My last job was actually pretty cool. I ran into a guy that wanted me to build a five or eight page “online brochure” website for his agricultural business, with a prominent “Call toll-free for more information” blurb on each page. After looking at their products and their business, I flew across ten or twelve states to meet the owner and his senior staff, and gave a presentation on why that instead of paying me $300 or $500 bucks for this website, they should put me on the payroll as their marketing director, and I blew them away with my presentation. I recognized that their customers all lived in rural areas, and generally had to drive a long way to obtain their products from a retailer. Their only other alternative was a fairly lengthy phone call to the main plant to place their order and arrange to have their product shipped to them, something that consumed a tremendous amount of telephone time for both the customer and the company’s staff. The addition of a website with a shopping cart and multiple shipping options took their business to the next level, and over six or seven years, their sales quadrupled. I took over all their logo and label design, ad layout, and the creation of all their brochures, sales sheets, and other support materials. And lemme tell ya, these guys needed my help, because nobody in this shop had the requisite skills to make a compelling “Lost Pet” poster for a missing cat.

So for years, I made a good living in salary and performance bonuses by rolling out of bed at the crack of noon, making a cup of coffee, and sitting down to my computer in my pajamas and laying out next month’s national print ads in CMYK. I talked to my boss on the phone once or twice a week most of the time, I set my own hours, and as long as I met my deadlines and sales kept going up, I was golden, or so I thought. But it all unraveled when I caught the owner of the company red-handed trying to steal from me, and when I say steal, I mean a project that would have made by my conservative estimate $10 or $20k per month. I can’t forget that and let it slide, and I quit, a year after the economy went to shit in 2009. Nobody was hiring anywhere, and at the time, I felt lucky to land a job at Jack’s Taxi.

What I would like to do is get back to that marketing job, but working for my wife. I’m not a boastful man, and if I say I can do something, it’s only because I know I can. With my skills and background, I could make my wife’s real estate business HUGE, if I just had the time to blog for her, to design ads and brochures for her, to do her marketing full-time from home. I also have 20 years experience in portrait and commercial photography, and with a few cameras and lenses and some time to study and practice, I could become a competent and maybe even an above-average architectural and interior photographer, working exclusively for my wife’s ever more upscale clientele. If I could do that, I might even have something people call a “social life”, and maybe even some “spare time”…

And if I had some spare time, I would probably devote more time to writing.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a teenager. When I was in school, writing book reports and essays and term papers were always the most enjoyable assignments. 800 out of 800 on the SAT Written and Verbal, so bring on the essay questions on the final exam, bitchezzz…! But back in those days, we had these things called “typewriters” with no “delete” key, and you could spend six months or a year pounding out a manuscript, and publishers would send it back unread… it was incredibly difficult for a new writer to break through, and being a practical man, I chose the path of least lesser resistance, and went into photography instead. But now with e-publishing and self-publishing, anyone can write about anything, and put it up online and see who salutes.

So I have started to write Taxicab Depressions: The Book. I have notes on my iPad about nearly fifty stories I haven’t had time to write down and put up here on the blog. Of course, that means probably even more infrequent posting on a blog that has sporadic posting at best. I regret that, but I have to do this… I have to try. If it sells beyond my wildest expectations and I make half a year’s salary, or maybe a year’s salary, that’s the cushion I need to jump out of the car and throw myself into building my wife’s business.

And if I had just fifteen or twenty peaceful, rested, and mostly uninterrupted hours in a week to write, I bet I could produce some salable stuff. You know what I think I would be really fuggin’ good at?

Children’s books.

Stop laughing. I mean it. I’m thinking of stuff a lot of kids don’t know, stuff like the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, spelled out in a way that kids eight to sixteen could grasp. I can still sing at least three or four songs from “Schoolhouse Rock”… stuff like that sticks in a young mind, if well executed. Of course I would never infringe on a copyright, but I could write “Schoolhouse Rock” and “Rush Revere” styled work six times a year on various historical events and lessons, geared for young minds and fun to read.

Or maybe I could start a political blog, and post insane screeds like The Pig Trap and Stop Being Black and Let’s Advance The Discussion twice a week… but that doesn’t really sound like a money-maker, it sounds more like a good way of making myself a target for an IRS colonoscopy every other year, no matter who the President is.

Or maybe I could write a novel… I have an idea for a novel that oddly enough, revolves around a taxi driver and a very unusual passenger… part Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, part Michael Mann’s Collateral, with a heavy dose of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Too easy… I could pull that off in a month.

I read and personally approve every comment posted on my site. I thank everyone that gives me positive feedback, and I even post comments that are “neutral” or “negative”… but I have never actually had a negative comment. That really surprises me, given the tenor of some of my political posts and the long reach of the liberal outrageously outrageous outrage manufacturing machine. I’m not censoring a bunch of “you suck!” comments and keeping you from seeing them. My blog is what it is… you like it, or you do not. Everybody that makes the effort to comment on it seems to like it.

Many of my readers have praised my writing, and I get that a lot in my car, when I pick up someone who has read Taxicab Depressions. One of the stories I have for the book is “My First Fan”, a guy that got in my car one night and asked if I had ever heard of this crazy-ass taxi blog he had been reading recently. When I told him it was mine, he didn’t believe me, and started quizzing me about my own blog, asking me questions about Roadkill, where my wife is from, the weed dealer that lost his phone, etc. He was wasted and positively astonished he was riding with me. He said, “Man, you should write a book.”

I hear the five word sentence, “You should write a book,” three times a week, minimum.

One bit of praise that really caught my attention came in the comments for The Pig Trap. Chris Muir posted this:

Brilliant clarity,prophetic.

And then he followed it up with this:

You’re obviously meant to write.Please continue with more!

In case you don’t know who Chris Muir is, he is a political cartoonist and the author and producer of Day By Day, a right-leaning cartoon that lampoons the corruption and chicanery that we call our Federal government these days, and he does it with a razor wit, much sharper than mine. A very good writer once wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” and while I am off on these crazy, rambling rants, Mr. Muir is confined to making his point in three or four dozen words.

Love the work, Mr. Muir.

I have enjoyed his stuff for years, at least since 2011, though I confess I only visit his site maybe once a month… my internet time is limited, but he’s been in my bookmarks for a long, long time. But here’s a guy that seems to have found his voice, found a way to channel his art and writing into something that is meaningful, and he is encouraging me to write more. His opinion carries a lot more weight than some wasted idiot in the back seat of my car who thinks I can tell a funny taxi story; he at least seems to be making a living at his art, and I am going to at least try to follow his counsel.

So, I’m doing this. Taxicab Depressions: The Book is coming.

Expected publication date: I haven’t got a clue. But I have to try.

Tonight I spent a little time writing about a guy that puked right behind me, and later finding a chunk of macaroni in my hair when I got home. Yes, that happened.

I don’t know how long this will take, but I have to try.

Which brings me to the other thing I have to mention here… I have said many times that I don’t write this blog for money; Taxicab Depressions is a shameful display of naked vanity, not fit for polite company, and a relatively inexpensive way to blow off some steam and do something that feels “creative’, in an otherwise dull life with very limited spare time. But I have added a PayPal Tip Jar with this post… people have said more than once that I should do this over the years, and I resisted doing that, though I’m not really sure why. But any contributions that come via this PayPal thing aren’t going to buy me beer or an oil change. Anything donated to Taxicab Depressions will go to buying me out of this car and letting me have the time to REALLY write.

You can also help by giving me links on your blogs, in discussion forums, Facebook posts, and Twitter. Any help is deeply appreciated.

A while back I said that if I were being paid fifty bucks a post, I would do this daily. I thought about doing just that, seeing if people would pay me a bounty for a post here, but that feels wrong, and one thing about marketing I know for certain is, “Thou shalt not over-promise and under-deliver”. If thirty people hit me up for that tomorrow, I would spend months catching up. I promised a book, and I am a man of my word, so a book is coming… even if it sucks, it is coming. I have called myself out.

I can’t promise when, but it is coming. I have to try.

For my daughter, I have to try. That’s just who I am.