Sad Day

Posted: 30th April 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
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riley

Had to put down one of my dogs Monday… I mentioned Roadkill before, but never mentioned Riley, my Black Lab. Riley was very old and very sick, arthritic, going blind, and riddled with tumors, and his time had come. As George Carlin said, you aren’t buying a pet, you are buying a small tragedy.

Riley was about 12 or 18 months old when we got him. He was living in the back yard of some people that didn’t really want a dog, but just didn’t have the heart to kill him. He was on an eight or ten foot chain for nearly his entire life, always outside in Florida’s alternating heat/pounding rain, getting fed 3 or 4 times a week, and drinking nasty rainwater out of a kiddie pool full of algae and mosquito larvae. His previous owners were blowing town, and my hunnee heard about this dog from someone who came in to where she worked, asking if anyone could take this dog before they beat feet. So she got the number and went over there (without even talking to me) and put him in her car. Had she not done that, they would have turned him loose, or just left him chained in that back yard.

My first thought when I saw him was, “Why did my wife bring a dog here to die…?” His ribs were showing, his coat looked like a fuzzy old sweater, and he was crapping blood.

So we spent a month or two bringing him back to life… in time, he rounded out at about 85 pounds. At first, we had trouble getting him to go outside on a chain… he acted like he thought he would be chained out forever again, and couldn’t get back in the house fast enough.

Once he figgered out that being outside didn’t mean he’d never come inside again, he insisted on being outside for extended shifts of watchdog work. He punched in every evening for sentry duty, and he was incredibly alert. And woe be unto you, if you are any sort of snake, possum, dog, raccoon, cat, or any other creature that creepeth or crawleth upon this Earth… he will be on you like a bad rash.

And should I walk outside and find him snoozing, he immediately snapped to attention, like he’s thinkin’, “Oh shit! The boss caught me sleeping on the job!”… and he immediately did a perimeter sweep of the yard to check for intruders…

Interesting story (well, at least to me)… I went outside one night around midnite to have a smoke, and Riley walked up on my left side, sat down, and went on “high alert”, sniffing the air and scanning the yard. I was looking up at the stars, and suddenly Riley bolted to the far corner of the yard at full speed and pounced on something… he startled me with this sprint. It’s dark over there and I can’t see what is going on, but Riley came trotting back to me… he comes right up to me and drops a stunned possum at my feet. He walked around behind me, comes to my left side again, and with great flourish and with enormous pride, he plants his butt on the patio, wags his tail a little, and looks at me as if to say, “How about THAT…?”

I was stunned… I haven’t taught this dog anything but basic commands, and he is bringing me food… He brought meat to the alpha, rather than eating it himself.

I’m gonna miss that dog… I called him “Old Man” the last couple of years as he got slower and greyer in the snout, but I’m going to remember the jet-black sentry, the watchdog and hunter, the dog that brought me a possum to eat.

I miss ya already, Old Man…

Regarding “The Pig Trap”

Posted: 19th April 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
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As I have said more than once, the main point of this blog is just simple therapy for me… I just need a creative way to blow off steam, and beating my wife, taking up recreational heroin, or soaking these drunken douchebags down with bear mace and leaving them gasping and writhing in the gutter where they belong don’t seem like great options. Nobody reads this blog except a handful of my regular passengers, a few cool, smart people from out-of-town that I direct to it, and people at HotAir.com that I sometimes direct to a post over here, if it is funny or has some bearing on current events. I don’t do this for money; you will note a distinct absence of banners and Google ads on my site. On a good day, I get 30 or 50 uniques a day… I think my record was 375 or 400 the day after I posted Stop Being Black.

That is, until I posted The Pig Trap.

I wouldn’t say this is “going viral”, but we do have a serious case of the sniffles here, and nobody is more surprised than me. Tens of thousands of people have read this post. I look at my stats, and I can’t believe what I see… no less than ten thousand people read that post Thursday. Hundreds of hits are coming in from Australia, of all places. Dozens of websites have linked to this post, people have copied and pasted the whole fucking thing into their blogs, people are pasting the link into discussion forums, Twitter and Facebook are blowing up and sending hundreds of hits per day, and I can’t believe some of the websites I am getting traffic from…

I am seriously humbled by what I am seeing… thank you all. I don’t do this because I want to be the next Thomas Payne… I do it because I just want to vent a little, and I like writing. And I want to reiterate that I am not an advocate for violence, it’s just that I look at what is going on today, and I don’t see the alternative. I don’t think of myself as a particularly brave man, and I get nauseous if I think about this shit for too long. I don’t want to see what I know is coming. I wish that someone smarter than me would stand up and say, “This is how we fix this!”

But I just don’t see that guy…

Apparently, I have struck a nerve… and I probably just got added to a list.

But as I once heard David Codrea say, “If you have ever filled out a 4473, you are already on a list.”

Thank you again.

The Pig Trap

Posted: 14th April 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
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cops

America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution (1996)

I had a very memorable and thought-provoking passenger a while back that I never wrote about because while I found him fascinating, he seemed a little too political for what was always intended to be a fun blog to read and some cheap therapy for your humble driver and writer. But in light of all the scandals that have erupted lately and the EpicClusterSharknadoFuck that is ObamaCare, I have been thinking about a few things he said to me, so I’m going to commit them to paper (or pixels), if only for my own reading. So if you just want to read about moron drunks and belligerent whores, skip this post…

But if you are interested in catching up on current events that just might personally affect you soon, please read on…

It was June of 2012, when I got a call to pick up a gentleman at a resort hotel at around 4 AM going to the airport. I was a little surprised to see “Mr. Wheeler” waiting for me in front of the lobby, five minutes early, standing by his suitcase. Generally, people keep me waiting on these calls, still half asleep, late coming down, trying to get checked out, dicking around with their luggage and what not. He was in his late 50’s or early 60’s, fit, wearing a navy blazer and was obviously a business traveller, but he also had a certain posture and demeanor that made me think he was ex-military. We load up his luggage and hit the road, and I am chatting with him as we are heading to the airport. I ask what kind of work he does, and he says he is in “executive security”. I said, “Oooh, that sounds interesting… you mean like bodyguard work?”

He says, “Something like that… executive protection, security systems, personnel screening, entry/egress control, things like that. It sounds much more interesting than it really is… I spend a lot of time shuffling paper around and reading emails.”

I said, “You have the bearing of a military man… am I correct?”

“Yes, Sir… 22 years in the Marine Corps.” I thanked him for his service, something I always do when I encounter a member of our armed services. My standard line is, “Thank you for your service. I think you should hear that every damned day for the rest of your life, and your first beer should be free anywhere you go.”

So we are chatting on the drive, and the story on the radio is Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress over the Fast and Furious fiasco. I said, “Can you believe that shit? This asshole intentionally sends guns to Mexican drug gangs that will no doubt end up killing thousands of people, and then he lies and stonewalls the Congress? How is this deceitful douchebag not in shackles and an orange jumpsuit? And more to the point, how does someone like this ever ascend to the office of Attorney General?”

“He’s part of the Clinton machine… he knows low people in high places. He came up under Janet Reno… you know who that is, right?”

“Oh, yes, I know… the crazy dyke that gave the order to burn down the Branch Davidians in Waco. But what I don’t get is how they ever thought they could pull this shit off… people aren’t THAT stupid. If you say you are tracking guns, although you have no actual means of tracking the guns, that makes you look both dishonest AND moronic, and your cover story doesn’t make any sense. This didn’t have anything to do with illegal gun sales… any idiot can see that. So what was the REAL plan here?”

Mr. Wheeler says, “Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”

I said, “Yeah, I know it… the most obvious answer is almost always correct… but I don’t think we need an instrument that sharp. I think Occam’s Rubber Spatula would seem to indicate that this is a push to vilify guns and gun owners here in America, as a pretense to drive stricter gun control. Obama was just on TV not too long ago with the President of Mexico, saying that American guns were responsible for the violence in Mexico, and now American weapons are showing up at crime scenes. It seems to me that an organization with the money and resources of an international drug cartel certainly knows where to pick up weapons, even if all American sources dried up completely. I assume they could go south of the border to Central America and get all the M4’s and AK’s they want… most likely full-auto… am I correct?”

Mr Wheeler replied, “There is certainly no shortage of guns and corruption in Central America. If you have the means to smuggle a ton of cocaine, you can probably smuggle a ton of guns, too. But this was easier… the Justice Department and the ATF made the contacts and set up the networks, told the gun shops to cooperate, so all the Mexicans had to do was send in a straw buyer, make the purchase, and move the weapons south of the border.”

I said, “These people aren’t very smart… there are something like 300 million guns in America, and they have a robust shelf life. Even if all gun manufacturing stopped tomorrow, there would still be an abundance of guns in America for decades. The only way to disarm Americans is mass confiscation, and I feel pretty certain that would spark a civil war. I know several gun owners that would rather fight than give up their guns.”

Mr. Wheeler said, “Oh, I know dozens… perhaps hundreds that feel the same way. I really don’t think confiscation is something you need to worry about, because it will never work. There are simply too many of them, and too many people have guns that there is no record of. A confiscation program would only piss off the most dangerous people in America… the people who would shoot back. You are correct, a mass confiscation would provoke a civil war.”

I said, “Well, you are a military man… what would that look like?”

Wheeler said, “Well, it wouldn’t look like the first Civil War… no lines of men standing in ranks and shooting across a field at each other, no “North and South” or sharply defined state lines for friendly and enemy territories, at least, not in the beginning. No, it would look more like Iraq or Afghanistan, with house to house fighting, IED’s, snipers, small factions and independent militias operating on their own, refugees streaming away from battle zones in all directions…”

“But the first question to ask is who would the combatants be? I mean, the Army isn’t going to just roll out onto the street in tanks on day one, so my guess is that it would start out as a police action, with Federal agencies like ATF and FBI taking the lead, supported by local law enforcement. But once people start shooting back, they would have to ratchet things up, do things like institute curfews and roadblocks, and they would eventually try to press the various state Guard units into service. That’s where it all goes squirrelly, because both local law enforcement and the Guard will be riddled with people who support gun rights, regardless of what laws the politicians pass, and they won’t be crazy about having to police, and maybe even fight against, their own people. The Governors may well object to the state Guard units being activated and may not wish to cooperate…”

“And it is not clear to me how many LEO and Guardsmen would remain loyal to the government and how many would join the “rebellion”. My guess is that both sides would be riddled with defections, informants, and spies. But what if, say, the Gulf states like Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida secede, and they take control of all military bases and equipment, and you suddenly have gone from an insurgency with rifles to a breakaway nation, or maybe several breakaway nations, armed with fighter jets, drones, tanks, and a navy? Whoo, buddy… now all bets are off… kiss posse comitatus goodbye. This would be the ugliest thing this country has ever seen…”

I asked him several “what if” questions and let him riff on them… I just let him talk and wargame out the Second Civil War, there in the back seat of my car as we drove to the airport, and he painted a picture of horrific death and destruction. Once this conflict started, even the best-case scenarios he described sounded truly grim. He seemed to believe that civilian casualties would be extremely high, given how much fighting would centered in and around large cities, and that food would be used as a weapon, causing famine and starvation on a terrifying scale. Booby traps, IED’s, rampant bombings, drone strikes, snipers, local-level assassinations, mortars and shelling, death squads (both government and rebel), reprisal killings, torture… it sounded more like the Middle East than middle America.

Wheeler got quiet for a few moments, and then he said something that I will never, ever forget.

“These people are playing with matches… I don’t think they understand the scope and scale of the wildfire they are flirting with. They are fucking around with a civil war that could last a decade and cause millions of deaths… and the sad truth is that 95% of the problems we have in this country could be solved tomorrow, by noon… simply by dragging 100 people out in the street and shooting them in the fucking head.”

And lemme tell ya, he had the list… he rattled off 25 or 30 names of well-known, prominent politicians, mostly Democrats, but a few Republicans, several members of the current Cabinet, a couple of Obama’s “czars”, a couple of figures from the Bush administration and the Republican establishment, several media company executives and on-camera newscasters, reporters, and pundits, a couple of people who are active in leftist politics but not in elected office… he had obviously thought about this to some degree already.

I was struck by his cold, detached, matter-of-fact tone. I said, “Dude… that’s more French Revolution than American Revolution. Do you really think that is the way to go?”

Wheeler said, “I believe in efficiency and economy of action. You wouldn’t trade one hundred of those criminal bastards for ten million of your fellow Americans?”

I don’t remember if I actually answered out loud, but in my my head, the answer was, “Yeah, I probably would…”

splatter

The Founding Fathers wouldn’t have put up with any of this shit. The Founders started blowing people’s heads off because the government put a tax on their breakfast beverage… and it wasn’t even coffee. Can you imagine how batshit those guys would have been on a double espresso?

Dennis Miller

This conversation with Mr. Wheeler took place long before we learned of the IRS scandal, the NSA scandal, the litany of lies associated with the rollout of ObamaCare, the AP/Fox snooping, the executive overreach of the Obama administration, and all the other sundry and everyday lies and corruption of what passes today for a “representative republic”.

So as I think about all the horrible shit the government is doing today, I can’t help but think about the Founders, and what they would think about current events and the state of the republic they left to their heirs. I make no claim to be a historian or a scholar, but I have only personally met a handful of people that have read more history than me. History, particularly American history, was always my favorite class in school, along with American and English Literature. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence many, many times, and I can’t help but notice that the indictments of the Declaration seem eerily familiar today. Many people reading this probably haven’t read the Declaration since high school, if they ever really read it at all, so indulge me… go ahead and read this next section out loud, and listen to the reasons the Founders felt it necessary to defy their government, load their guns, and take on the most powerful military on the planet.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

So in the context of the early 1770’s, what would the Founders think about the government secretly and illegally trafficking thousands of military-grade arms to criminals, brigands, and pirates, knowing full well that those criminals will kill thousands of innocent people with said arms, as a ploy to disarm their own citizenry… and when caught red-handed in this criminal and despicable act, the governmental appointee responsible for executing this disgraceful policy lies, dissembles, and stonewalls, and suffers no sanction or penalty?

What would they think of the government reading, and oftentimes copying and warehousing, every single letter of their correspondence, their diaries, their conversations, their most private and intimate of communications?

What would they think of government agents standing on rooftops and street corners, monitoring and documenting the comings and goings of every citizen every day of his life, whom they speak with and associate with, and what they purchase and from whom?

What would they think about their government spying on journalists, town criers, and pamphleteers, and swearing out false oaths to judges to have them surveilled?

What would they think about government tax agents given specific orders to harass, intimidate, penalize, and obstruct any person who speaks for peaceful, legislative reform of the government or is critical of the government, even demanding that they document the content of their prayers?

What would they think about a government that routinely ignores laws already on the books solely for material and political gain, a government that creates punitive laws through specious methods, and then exempts themselves from being subject to those laws, and when their agents, officials, and appointees are caught in serious crimes and malfeasance, they are simply reassigned and protected by the government, never to face trial or pay any penalty for their acts or the harm they inflict on ordinary citizens?

I’ll tell you what I believe… I believe the shooting would have already started. It’s not that I want something terrible to happen, it’s that I am positively astonished that something terrible hasn’t already happened.

The Founders set out to create a limited government. They did not create a Constitution that spelled out what the government may not do, they created a Constitution that detailed exactly and precisely what the federal government MAY do, and nothing more. This far, and no further. All other powers were specifically and deliberately left to the individual states, and to the people themselves. The Bill of Rights was added at the insistence of several of the Founders to protect the individual citizen from future tyranny and avaricious government.

Yet today, our government has no compunctions about monitoring all my communications, tracking my movements, deterring my business success with punitive taxes and onerous regulations, accessing my banking records, compelling my participation in an ill-conceived healthcare system that will most assuredly give me substandard care and higher prices and may violate my personal wants and perhaps even my religious beliefs, and regulating almost every aspect of my day-to-day life, right down to the type of the car that I may drive, the lightbulbs I am allowed to buy, and the kind of toilet I am permitted to shit in. And thanks to the NDAA, if my government deems me to be a terrorist, I can be black-bagged and zip-tied, arrested without warrant or charge, held incommunicado without legal representation indefinitely, and perhaps even tried by a military tribunal in secret and summarily executed.

So tell me again… just what are the limits of my so-called limited government?

I feel like I have been ripped off. I recognized at a very young age that I had won the lottery; of all the millions upon millions of people born on this planet the same year as I was, only a small segment of them were lucky enough to be born Americans, and now, a small group of lying and avaricious politicians and leftist activists have stolen my birthright.

All I want is the government that I was promised by my ninth grade civics teacher… a government of laws, not of men, a government with checks and balances, lawfully enforced to restrain and contain the government from infringing on the rights of populace. But all of this has been swept aside in my lifetime; now criminals like Eric Holder and Charlie Rangel and Al Sharpton and Lois Lerner and Jon Corzine suffer no sanction or consequence for openly and nakedly breaking the law. They are now part of a protected class, when 250 years ago, they would have been lucky to only have suffered being tarred and feathered.

I would be content with an ordinary and ultimately forgettable life. I’ve strived for excellence from a young age, but never been consumed with the pursuit of wealth, fame, or power. I would be satisfied with enough money to take care of my family, to send my progeny to college, to live in modest comfort and to enjoy a few vacations and indulgences here and there, and to leave my children with a better life than I had. I am a simple man with simple needs. I would like to die in my bed at the age of 106, surrounded by my children, grandchildren, and my 22 year old second wife, with a couple of old guns in the closet, now rusty and dusty from disuse.

But I don’t think that is going to happen. I truly believe, deep in my heart, that I am going to need those guns before I die, and not for a burglar.

I see only two paths for America today. First, some miracle will happen in which a couple hundred constitutionalists like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Trey Gowdy will be elected to the House and Senate over the next few election cycles, and something resembling the Founder’s republic will be restored, but given the current climate of relentless progressivism, massive bureaucracy, government dependence, and voter ignorance, that seems like a very remote possibility.

The second path is that complacency, ignorance, and indifference will allow more progressives and communists to be elected, the federal government will continue to grow and amass power unchecked, and one day very soon, we will we will witness the birth of a police state that will make the Gestapo, the KGB, and the Stasi look like pikers and dilettantes.

Hell, the argument could be made that the police state is already here. I read an article not long ago about the Stasi Museum in Berlin that described the files that the East German secret police accumulated over the course of forty-five years, and it is nothing less than staggering. Imagine a shelf, 65 miles long, crammed with file folders full of photos and detailed handwritten and typed notes about almost every citizen of East Germany. I’m not really up to speed about the state-of-the-art data storage devices of today and what they are able to store, but I would bet that entire 65 mile shelf of paper and photographs would today fit in a metal and plastic box about the size of a standard four-drawer file cabinet. But if I am wrong about that, no need to worry; your government is building a 1.5 MILLION square foot storage facility in Utah to hold all your vital information.

splatter

Wild Boar

In my previous occupation, I worked as the marketing director for a company in the livestock industry, and I once took a business trip to Texas to interview a gentleman and take some photos for the company’s website and print advertising. I could tell you his real name, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you unless you happen to be involved in the world of show animals like cattle, lambs, and goats. But in the circles he moves in, “Kevin” is an absolute rock star… getting his endorsement for my company’s products was on par with Michael Jordan for Nike shoes or Eric Clapton for Fender guitars.

I flew into Austin, rented a car, and drove for a few hours to Kevin’s ranch, not far from Waco. Kevin was a massive bear of a man, 6-3 or 6-4, with big hands, big boots, a big gut, a big smile, and a big heart. He seized my hand in his giant, calloused paw and pumped it vigorously… it was meaty and leathery, and felt like a catcher’s mitt. You just couldn’t help liking this guy… Kevin had a way of making you feel like you were already lifelong friends, he was just waiting for you to catch up.

We did the interview over tall glasses of iced tea and delicious BBQ pork sandwiches, and then went outside to shoot photos of him around his pens and barns and out buildings. We wrapped up around four in the afternoon, and Kevin and his wife insisted that I stay for dinner at 6:00. We had a couple hours to kill, so Kevin suggested I go with him while he did a little work around the ranch.

We went out to a barn and got into a dilapidated, beat-to-shit Ford pickup. It was an early seventies model, rusted, dented, missing the passenger-side window, driver’s side mirror, and rear bumper, so it was also missing a license plate, and it had a screwdriver hammered into the ignition switch. The bed was removed and there was a rough-hewn flatbed made of pressure-treated lumber in its’ place, with a mechanical apparatus of some sort on the wood. Kevin was very successful in his business and had plenty of money, so this Mad Max piece of shit stood in stark contrast to the newer Ford diesel he took to the livestock shows. I would have bet this old beater hadn’t run in decades, but it started right up. Kevin threw a little Playmate cooler and several plastic buckets in the back of the truck, handed me a beer, and we took off, following deep wheel ruts that meandered around his property. Kevin’s ranch was huge… if he told me how many acres, I don’t recall, but I thought square miles was a much more useful unit of measurement for a tract of land so huge.

I asked Kevin what we were doing, and he said we were going out to feed the deer. His property had all sorts of wildlife on it, including deer and wild pigs, and he supplements their usual forage with grain and veggies and other goodies. He explained that he harvests several deer and pigs every year, and all the animals on his ranch, domestic or wild, were very well fed. In fact, those mouth-watering pulled pork sandwiches we ate earlier were from a wild pig he had killed, butchered, and barbecued himself, right here on his ranch. The strange apparatus on the back of the truck was a feed dispenser; we pulled up to a little clearing and he dumped the contents of several of the buckets in the top of the machine. He got back in the truck and he threw a toggle switch, crudely screwed into the metal dash, and put the truck in gear. The machine in the back made a grinding, rattling sound, and a mixture of chopped carrots, apples, and dry corn slid down a chute and spilled onto the grass as he slowly idled along the tree line.

He shut off the feed dispenser and he pulled away about fifty or seventy yards, then stopped and killed the engine, and said, “Watch this…”

We spun around and looked out the back window, and within two or three minutes, no less than ten or twelve deer emerged from the woods and started eating the corn and veggies. A few of them eyed the truck warily for a moment, but they all placidly started devouring the bounty Kevin had spilled out of the side of his pickup.

Kevin said, “It’s like the ice cream truck… they hear the music, and they come running out to get the goodies…”

I said, “You have conditioned them to come to you… I guess that takes the difficulty out of shooting one of them…”

Kevin replied, “This isn’t about sport, it’s about feeding my family. I don’t have time to haul my fat ass up into a tree stand at 5 in the morning. I get my deer in a half hour, and I can be choosy.”

We tooled around his property, drinking beer and dumping corn and veggies here and there at strategic points, and then we came to another clearing with a strange metal object. Kevin put the truck in park and told me to hop out with him. There were three eight-foot pieces of crude steel tubular fencing that looked sort of like the metal barricades that get put up at parades for crowd control, but about five or six feet high, and forming half a hexagon They were obviously hand-made; they just didn’t have the finish of a commercial product. Kevin grabbed the last two buckets out of the back of the truck and told me to bring him two more beers.

In front of the steel tubing was a shallow concrete “bowl” that I believe was the top of a large birdbath, sunk into the dirt. Kevin filled it with loose corn and small ears of corn, then dumped in the contents of the second bucket. This bucket contained table scraps, potato peels, onion butts, bacon grease, and other household garbage, and it smelled pretty ripe. I asked Kevin what was up with the fencing, and he told me this was a pig trap. He then opened the two beers and dumped them in the bowl, saying that pigs love beer.

Kevin explained that pigs are highly intelligent animals, and can be quite dangerous. They are powerful beasts, very fast, and armed with fearsome tusks that can gore a man to death in short order. He said that commercial traps are available, but pigs are smart, and will often be wary of a new metal object suddenly appearing in their environment, and his home-made trap was much more effective. He told me that these three sections are left up year round, and over time, the pigs learn that this metal object poses no threat, and there is frequently delicious corn, slop, and beer to be had here. The scent of the slop and beer travels a long way across the property, and over time, the pigs are conditioned to not fear the strange metal object. Kevin showed me how they had formed a soft trail around one end of the fencing as they came in and out to the bowl.

When the time comes to harvest a pig, Kevin adds a section of the fencing, refills the bowl a few times, and the pigs ignore the new section of fencing. A week or two later, he adds another section, and keeps the bowl full. Finally, he puts the last section up right on the trail they created, and this section has the trap door in it. A screw eye is twisted into the end of a corn cob, and a cable is attached to it, and is connected to a pin that drops the door. As soon as a pig picks up the corn, the pin is pulled, the door is dropped, and the pig, and perhaps one or two or three others of his group, are trapped. In the morning, Kevin can simply walk up to the cage and dispatch the beasts with a handgun, without risk of personal injury or spending a lot of time stalking the animals in the woods with a high-power rifle.

I can’t get Kevin and the pig trap out of my head, because it is a perfect metaphor for the surveillance state our government has built. It has been erected slowly over time, one piece at a time, so as to not panic the populace. And the government seems to have been wildly successful, because the American population at large seems completely unphased and unalarmed at what has been built over the last twenty or thirty years.

The government is reading and storing all of my emails? No big deal; I’m not a terrorist, so I am OK.

The government is listening to and storing all my phone calls? Whatever, I don’t talk to terrorists.

The government is tracking and storing my location? So what? I don’t go anywhere that is suspect.

The government is targeting political enemies and surveilling journalists? Who cares? I’m not an activist or a partisan, so this does not affect me.

This isn’t a Republican vs. Democrat issue, it isn’t even a conservative vs. liberal issue… this is an American vs. un-American issue. Do you wish to be a free American, or will you accept becoming a slave to a massive and all-powerful police state? You are either an advocate for freedom and limited government, or you are an advocate for tyranny. There is no gray area, no middle ground to be found here. This government has slowly amassed powers over the last hundred years that would horrify the Founders of this nation. As I stated earlier, I can’t believe the shooting hasn’t already started.

For you liberal readers out there, let me offer this: pick your favorite right-wing boogieman, the craziest fascist evil criminal wingnut that there is, and make that person the President…. President Dick Cheney, President Rick Santorum, President Charles Koch, President Alan West, President Michelle Bachmann, President Rush Limbaugh, President Glen Beck, President Joe Arpaio, President John Bolton, President Ted Nugent… whoever really freaks you out.

Now ask yourself this question: Do you want that person to have the power and the surveillance apparatus and the unchecked force of the IRS that Barack Obama and this massive government now wields?

This should scare the shit out of you… ask yourself how you would feel about the Palin administration having the power to track your every move, listen to your every call, read every email and text message, cross reference all your email contacts and Facebook friends, scrutinize every Visa card purchase, reexamine the last decade of your tax returns for any rounding error you might have made, and the ability to call up your complete medical records with a couple of keystrokes, for you, your family, and everyone you know, right down to every antidepressant prescription, bunion surgery, psychiatric visit, Low-T diagnosis, encrusted carbuncle, PAP smear, and vaginal wart.

Is this getting creepy yet?

Suppose your kid needs a kidney transplant, but it turns out that Uncle Jack is union guy and a fundraiser for your state Democrat party… well, we all know that crazy President Palin was lying about those “death panels” doncha’ know, but jeez-o-pete, there sure are a lot of irregularities in your HHS paperwork and your tax returns and your insurance documentation and your website information and your credit report and stuff, and it might take months to sort this whole kit and kaboodle out. But be patient, you know how slow things are, now that the ACORN Health Care Navigators unionized and expanded out to every hospital and clinic in America… but your child’s IRS Form 6488-B says your deductible should be $16,000, not $9,000 as you claimed here on line 173 of your HHS 871 form… and there is some sort of red-flag hold thingy here due to your Uncle Jack’s union exemption status, because of that whacky Detroit thing… It sure looks like Uncle Jack’s paperwork is even more screwed up than your file… yessirree, this could take a long, long, long time to weed through, and good golly, we seem to have a whole lotta Mexican patients in this hospital, and they are all in line ahead of little Scooter there… Just you and that little tadpole of yours hold your horses, and we’ll get this paperwork straightened out over the next few months, okey dokey?

But whatever you do, when your kid dies, don’t do news conferences, don’t start blogging, don’t start calling out the government publicly, don’t become an activist, don’t go on FOX News, and definitely don’t become an embarrassment or a pain in the ass to this government, lest you find yourself being gang-audited by the IRS, if not declared a terrorist and having your door kicked in by armored agents at 4 in the morning, who are here to shoot your dog, terrorize the rest of your kids, and to take you to an undisclosed location in zip ties, where there are no lawyers, no phones, no sunlight, the food really sucks, and no one can confirm or deny that they have ever heard of you.

I like Sarah Palin, but I don’t want President Palin to have that power. I really liked Ronald Reagan, but again, I wouldn’t want him to have that power. I really, REALLY like Ted Cruz. I think he is a man of principle, of integrity, of honor, and perhaps the most Constitutionally-grounded politician I have seen in my lifetime. But in spite of all of that, I don’t want President Cruz to have that power.

So take a guess at what I think of President Hillary Clinton or President Nancy Pelosi or President Chuck Schumer or President Cass Sunstein or President Michael Bloomberg or President Diane Feinstein or President Al Sharpton or President Howard Dean or President Harry Reid or President Van Jones having that kind of power…

As I write this, there are several things happening that I think warrant national attention, yet the media makes little or no mention of them, and a vast percentage of the populace are blissfully unaware of any problem, so long as Facebook and Instagram are working properly and the next season of The Bachelor doesn’t suck. Here’s one issue: our government has an estimated 90 trillion dollars of upcoming bills, and no real idea on how to pay those bills, other than running the Treasury’s printing presses until they overheat. But hey… people can’t follow that shit… it doesn’t mean anything… the government will fix it… right?

90 TRILLION dollars? If you owe me two hundred bucks, you can bet that I will avail myself of every possible option in my power short of physical violence to see that debt paid. Do you honestly believe that people are not going to DEMAND to be paid those bills? Part of the problem here is that the American people don’t seem to grasp what a trillion really is… millions, billions, trillions, gazillions…. it is almost too big to comprehend, but I found an easy yardstick that makes this number somewhat understandable.

One million seconds ago was eleven days ago.

One billion seconds ago was 1982.

One trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC. Mankind was eating worms and the paleolithic equivalent of roadkill, the assault weapon of the day was a stone axe or a really strong pointy stick, and we had not yet domesticated the dog.

And we have NINETY TRILLION DOLLARS in bills to pay. People don’t seem to grasp that we are living in the Second Great Depression. The reason that they don’t see it is that unlike the first Great Depression, we don’t have 20 percent unemployment, bread lines, and shanty camp Hoovervilles… today we have doctored statistics, EBT cards, Section 8 housing, and Obamaphones. Poor people in America aren’t going hungry, they have Type-2 diabetes from being obese and flat-screen TV’s to watch all day… and all of this is put on the credit card, for our kids to presumably pay off after we die.

As I write this, our government has purchased 1.5 billion rounds of hollow point bullets, which is enough ammunition to shoot every American in the head five times, with plenty of ammo to spare. By way of comparison, our troops in Iraq used roughly a mere 70 million rounds per year. The Social Security Administration… you know, the people that send checks to your Aunt Millie every month, has ordered 174,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets. What is remarkable about these purchases is not the size of the order, but the type of ammunition procured. The US military does not use hollow point ammunition, per international treaty. And the bulk of this ammunition is 9mm and .40 caliber, which are favored by domestic law enforcement for use in their handguns and submachine guns. A purchase of this size cannot be explained away as training or a bargain-shopping bulk order… people that run up 90 trillion dollars in debt are not coupon-clippers. So the question that needs to be asked is, “Who does the government intend to shoot?

As I write this, an estimated 100,000 citizens in Connecticut are openly defying the state’s unconstitutional “assault rifle and high capacity magazine” registration legislation, hastily passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. They are refusing to register an estimated 300 or 400 thousand weapons and potentially MILLIONS of magazines that were perfectly legal and constitutionally guaranteed the day before the law was passed. They are all now felons. To put that number in perspective, the entire British army, navy, and air forces numbers right around 100,000 personnel. So you have a group of American citizens the size of the entire British military, armed to the teeth in tiny little Connecticut, and cops are putting up YouTube videos and Facebook posts saying they can’t wait for the armed raids to start.

As I write this, virtually every law enforcement agency in America has been militarized to a degree that would horrify the Founders and offend their distaste for standing armies amongst the citizenry. SWAT teams, tactical gear, balaclava masks, body armor, grenades, night vision gear, submachine guns, and assault weapons… or more accurately, “patrol rifles”… personally, I find it fascinating that if a police officer were to hand me his “patrol rifle” at the range to try out, it would instantly transform into an “assault weapon”.

But that isn’t all… local police departments are tooling up with Hummers, tanks, and armored vehicles. I’m still not sure why Hooterville needs a MRAP, but this is happening across the country. And beyond that, nearly every alphabet agency in the federal government now is issuing weapons… the IRS just bought a shitload of shotguns, no doubt very useful in enforcing ObamaCare compliance. The Department of Education now has guns, the Bureau of Land Management now has guns, even the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has been armed… that’s right, the government’s fucking weather men are now issued arms. Don’t you find it striking that the same government that wants to disarm the citizenry so badly is issuing guns to schleps that couldn’t make the cut at the Channel 4 local news?

As I write this, our healthcare system is in smoking ruin, with millions of Americans losing their insurance and forced into expensive plans they don’t want with services they don’t need, and the real pain won’t come until Obama stops unlawfully delaying the employer mandate, and when that finally kicks in, tens of millions of people are going to be very, very pissed off. Yes, our healthcare system is now under the control of the very same bloated federal government that can’t get bottled water and baloney sandwiches to fucking New Jersey in three weeks. And tasked with enforcing this nightmare is the IRS, which has been exposed as hopelessly corrupt and criminal, and now weaponized for the political left in America.

And as I write this, the woman at the heart of this criminal conspiracy has just been held in contempt of Congress, and guess what? Her case is now referred to the Justice Department for disposition, and will land on the desk of the first Attorney General to ever be held in contempt of Congress. How do you think that is going to go?

I think it is going to go badly. Bill Clinton was impeached over less. Richard Nixon resigned over less. But Lois Lerner is going to skate. Obama already has her pardon typed up, just waiting to be signed and dated.

Sometimes I feel like Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies… like I have knowledge of the future, and I look at the idiots in my car and the people walking down the street, completely oblivious and engrossed in their iPhones, and I think to myself, No, you aren’t going to make it… and you, you are totally fucked, too…. and this jackass over here doesn’t have a prayer

But the sad fact is that I probably won’t make it either… I have zero military training, I’m on the high side of fifty, well past my prime, but perhaps guile and determination will be enough to make it through the coming conflagration. And just like Sarah Connor, the purpose of my life has been transformed; now the only thing that matters is preparing my daughter for the world that is coming, and trying to protect her and teach her what she will need to know to survive in a country I don’t even recognize anymore. But she is only four years old… she’s probably a casualty as well.

And that makes me very, very angry.

Like I said previously, this isn’t a Democrat versus Republican issue, they are two sides of the same coin. The Democrats advocate gigantic government to benefit and support the unions and racial minorities in this country, and the Republicans advocate gigantic government to benefit business in this country. But they both support a gigantic Federal government. This isn’t Democrat versus Repubican… it is US versus THEM… the everyday people versus the political class. These people don’t give a fuck about you… they just want your vote, and your money in taxes, regulatory fees, and donations. And once entrenched, they enrich themselves, their families, and their cronies, and they demand even more money and even more regulation and even more tribute and even more control over their serfs.

And their poster child and pinup girl is Moochelle Antoinette Obama… she serves no real purpose, just a vindictive, nasty racist, and it is infuriating to see her jetting around the globe on month-long multi-million dollar taxpayer funded vacations in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard and Africa and China with her massive entourage, shoveling caviar and foie gras and Kobe beef and truffles and whole lobsters in her woodchipper maw, while she demands feeding our children school lunches that look like this…

Some may be shocked or offended by my language, but I feel perfectly justified in typing that last sentence, because I am part of the 53 Percent… you know, the 53 percent of people that actually pay taxes and pick up the check for this shit. These people are beneath contempt. Their greed, hypocrisy, and sense of entitlement are beyond appalling. We don’t have elected representatives anymore, we have elected rulers… cake, anyone…?

Maybe I’m crazy… maybe I’m paranoid… what the fuck do I know? Maybe I’m just a dumbass taxi driver that spends way too much time reading crazy websites on the Internet. My intellectual betters are already telling me that everything is fine, these problems will work themselves out after another election or two, and that a Clinton or a Bush are inevitable again, and these people know what they are doing.

Sorry… I just don’t buy it. What can not go on, will not go on. A realignment is coming to America, maybe in a year, maybe in ten years, but it is coming. And when it does come, it is going to be loud, and it is going to be bloody. Someone is going to die… it might be a cop or a government official, but I think it is going to be some average Joe, some nobody… some grocery clerk, some bricklayer, some bartender, some taxi driver, some waitress, some truck driver, some rancher in Nevada, some nobody dockworker like Crispus Attucks.

Or maybe it will be a child, shot in a gun raid or denied medical treatment by ObamaCare. Someone is going to die, and it will be the spark that brings about The Realignment Of America.

I abhor violence. I don’t want any of this, but it is inevitable, at this point. Our government is utterly lawless. Our representative republic is gone. These people no longer serve the interests of the American people, they serve their own elite interests, and the citizens of the United States have become tax cattle to be managed, milked, and controlled. And the security state they have erected is not designed to protect US, it is designed to protect THEM.

Sharpen your tusks. I simply don’t believe we are going to be able to vote our way out of the pig trap.

Vignette: Snail Trails

Posted: 5th April 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

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

Sometimes you don’t really have an opportunity to strike up a conversation with people, and sometimes it’s just as well that you didn’t. Back before I joined my new taxi company, I picked up two girls in their early twenties about an hour before bar close. They were both blonde and dressed almost identically, in tiny black skin-tight micro mini dresses and slutty high heels, and both fairly drunk. This episode happened in the span of about a ten or twelve block drive, perhaps two or three minutes.

“Evening, girls… Where are we going…?”

Girl #1 says, “We need to go to the corner of Elm Street and 10th Avenue to get my car.”

I take off, and Girl #2 says, “Let’s stay a little longer… We don’t have to go yet…”

Girl #1 says, “No! I have to go! I have to go to work in the morning!”

Girl #2 whines, “I know… I was just having a good time…”

Girl #1 says, “I have to open tomorrow! I can’t be late because you want to hang and make out with random guys and get fingerbanged at the ATM…”

Girl #2 says, “He wasn’t some random guy… I talked to him last weekend at Club Passion… He’s nice…”

Girl #1 says, “Oh my gawd, he is so douchey, and he didn’t even buy you a single drink! You bought at least three drinks for him.”

Girl #2 says, “He’s really chill… I like him…”

Girl #1 says, “Does he even have a job?”

Girl #2 says, “I don’t know… I didn’t ask…”

Girl #1 says, “He looked…” (long pause)… “Mexican,” with a measure of distaste in her voice.

Girl #2 says with a little smile in her voice, “He’s good with his hands…”

Then her phone makes the “new message” chime, and Girl #1 says, “Oh, gawd, you gave him your number?”

Girl #2 says, “He wants me to come back…”

Girl #1 says, “No! We have to go!”

I pulled up to the girls’ car and cautioned them to not drive after drinking, and told them I would be happy to see them home safely. But Girl #1 says she will be fine, she pays the fare, and gets out. Girl #2, seated behind me, throws her feet toward the passenger side door and scoots her butt across the seat to get out the same door, and as she does, her tight little microdress rolls up her body like a condom, just over her hip bones. As she puts her feet in the street, she dumps her purse into the gutter, and I hear her keys and phone and other items clattering on the asphalt. She bends over at the waist to pick up her crap, raising her pantyless ass off the seat and giving me a view of her shaved crotch and rectum, in a pose that men my age nostalgically associate with the slick, glossy pages of Swank magazine, circa 1979. She spends five or ten seconds collecting her items from the street with her asshole winking at me before standing up straight and closing the door.

I watched these two girls walk toward their car, and Girl #2 is completely unaware that her little black micro dress is rolled up around her hips. I sat there and watched her firm, muscular, rippling buttcheeks walk saucily up the street in my highbeams a solid twenty yards. Only when she gets to the car does she feel a draft in her nether regions and rolls her dress back down.

Some men might think this was a very sexy moment… How often does a man my age get to see the naked charms of a twenty-something blonde without paying a ten dollar cover?

But I swear, I said to myself out loud, “Ewww… Did you really just smear your dewey little pudenda across my back seat?

This is why I carry Lysol spray in my car.

Been Gone A While

Posted: 21st February 2014 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

I have been getting some complaints from my passengers, regular readers, and even some of my fellow hacks that I haven’t posted for a while… I apologize for that. It certainly isn’t for a lack of material, that’s for certain… sweet Jesus, I almost got arrested a couple of weeks ago after some drunken idiot broke my window. Then there was the wasted Indian girl with the Brazilian wax job and the blogworthy puker that paid me $120.00 to go one hundred yards, and then there’s the guy that that walked up to my window on Valentine’s Eve and said, “We’re only going about a mile or two, but here’s twenty dollars in advance for the bullshit you are going to have to deal with for the next seven or eight minutes… go ahead and start the meter…”, who then went to collect his dinner date that is out of her mind on Jagermeister and pills…

And that’s just the last two weeks.

Blogworthy material isn’t the problem, time is. My wife is in the real estate business, and I have been spending a lot of time and doing a lot of work on helping her with her marketing and developing a website for her business, and that is eating up pretty much all of my nites off. With thirty years of collective experience in commercial photography, web development, advertising layout, and graphic design, I am uniquely qualified to do this, and I am woefully dilatory for not having done more for her already. And my hunnee does seem to be born to do this… without being too specific, December was a very good month for her, and we banked several very nice checks, so if I can start generating more leads and clients for her, our finances with improve dramatically.

The other thing is my own vanity… if I take the time to write something, I want it to be good. I know that this shit isn’t Shakespeare, but I subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that anything worth doing is worth doing well. I have a finished story on my iPad right now, but it just feels “lacking” to me… and I don’t like the idea of just “phoning it in”. I also have a political rant on my iPad that I have been working on for weeks, but I just can’t seem to find a graceful way to end it. I will try to make time in the future to post something up with greater frequency.

Of course, I’m a little befuddled that people complain that I don’t post often enough when I’m not getting paid for this. Writing this blog is cheap therapy for me… this site isn’t monetized in any way… there aren’t banners and Google ads splattered all over it. I do this because I like writing, and I certainly have an abundance of fresh material on a nearly daily basis. And, I’ll admit, there is an element of personal vanity in it… I like the notion of being a published writer, even if I pay for it and the subject matter is disgusting and not fit for polite company. Trust me… if I were being paid fifty bucks a post, you folks would have fresh-baked debauchery and drunken buffoonery served up daily. But in the end, I guess I am flattered that people are complaining… I thank you for your interest.

So let me slap together something from last night… I picked up three couples in suits and nice dresses outside a bar, and this is obviously a group of people from a wedding… the first hint was a guy in a rumpled tuxedo and a girl wearing a wedding dress and a red Kansas City Chiefs hoodie over it. I shoulda taken a photo of that… nice look… an absolute (or Absolut) drunken fashion plate. They weren’t zombies, but they were pretty fucked up. We are taking the bride and groom to the Hilton Hotel for a night of nuptial passion and drunken rutting, and then dropping off the other four at a friend’s house where they are staying, as they are all from out of town and have never been in my city before. I ask for the specific address, and I am told that we are going to 2345 15 Street North, which I duly noted in my paperwork. We dropped off the bride and groom at the Hilton, and after one or two minutes of goodnites, hugs, thank-you’s, high-fives, fist-bumps, ass-grabs, and lewd drunken jokes about the wedding consummation that is nigh and impending, we are off to take the other four to the place they are staying.

In my town, Streets, Lanes, Ways, Terraces, and Avenues have very distinct and specific meanings, and North, South, East, and West demarcations are critical. 27th Avenue North is a very different neighborhood than 27th Avenue South. So as a professional taxi driver, getting correct address information is essential. If someone jumps in my car and says, “Bumper’s Pool Hall”, that’s easy, and I don’t need the address. But if someone is going to a residential neighborhood, I get the specific address before I even put the car in gear. There are two reasons for that: first, I want to make sure I give the customer the best possible service, so I plan my route to their destination in the first 30 seconds of the ride. Second, if some wasted idiot wants to go to some nebulous destination near the intersection of 30th Street North and 3rd Avenue West, you can find yourself driving around aimlessly, wasting time and gas with some shithammered bonehead that doesn’t really have a clue about where the fuck he is going. It is better to put that idiot out of your car before he becomes a problem, unless he is willing to give you an ample retainer up front.

So we are on the way, and my passengers are fun and laughing and joking with me and each other… drunk, but not obnoxious. One guy mentioned that he is in the custom cabinetry business, which I noted because I worked for about a year as the marketing and sales guy for a custom cabinet shop, so I know a little something about his business. We get to the address they gave me, and they say this doesn’t look right. I turned on the interior light and double-checked my paperwork, shined my flashlight on the mailbox, and said, “No, this is it… 2345 15th Street North… that was the address you gave me…”

They all say that this isn’t right, and they all simultaneously dig out their phones to find an email or text message that has the address of their friend’s place. As it turns out, they need to be at 2345 15th AVENUE North, not 15th Street North, so I turned the car around and headed for our new destination, but now, the happy and convivial mood in the car has suddenly changed…

We are at around $15.00 on the meter, and one of the wasted bitches says, “We need to get an adjustment on this fare… you took us out of our way, and we shouldn’t have to pay for that…”

I said, “Ma’am, I took you to the address I was given… it isn’t my fault your guy got the address wrong. I can’t adjust this fare… you gave me a specific address, and I took you there. Now, you have given me another address, and I will take you there, too. The fare is whatever the meter says it is…”

The girl mutters, “Asshole… fucking taxi drivers… we shouldn’t have to pay for this bullshit..”

I said, “Do you think I should pay with time and gas for faulty directions you folks provided?”

She is quiet for a moment, and then, she erupts… “Fuck you, asshole! I travel a lot, you know… I have seen this shit in Chicago, in Kansas City, in Las Vegas, in Cleveland… taxi drivers are fucking criminals! You intentionally take people the long way, and act like you don’t know what you are doing… you assholes are fucking criminals!”

I said, “Ma’am, I wrote down the address this gentleman gave me before we even pulled out of the bar… here it is on my paperwork…”

She icily says, “Fuck you… you are trying to rip us off… we aren’t paying for this ride.”

I replied, “Ma’am, a police report is a very poor way to end a wedding, don’t you think…?”

This bitch continues to complain and insult me for the next couple of minutes. We are getting close to their correct destination, with $20.75 on the meter. She is close to screaming at me, but her guy interjects, and calmly asks what adjustment I can make. I said, “I can’t make adjustments for passenger error. Every minute spent with you folks is a minute not spent with another passenger. In the time I have been driving you to your correct destination, I could have been serving another passenger and earning money. You mentioned that you were in the custom cabinet business… well, hiring a taxi is a custom-order business. If you build a custom cabinet based on the customer’s measurements that doesn’t fit and the customer’s drunken wife is pitching a wasted bitchfit about it, would you build the customer a replacement cabinet for free when the error was his?”

The guy looks thoughtful for a moment, and reaches for his wallet. His woman screams, “FUCK… YOUUUUU!!! DON’T YOU DARE GIVE HIM ANY MONEY, WAYNE!

The guy says, “What do you need?”

I said, “Call it twenty bucks, no tip, and just let me get back to work without having to deal with the cops. We are at your destination, and honestly, I just want her outta my car…”

The woman shrieks, “FUCK YOU, YOU MUTHERFUKKIN’ ASSHOLE FAGGOT TAXI PRICK!!!

He gives me a twenty, they get out, and his woman slams the door violently. I said, “Have a nice night…” and the woman screams, “FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE THIEF!

I stuck my head out the window and said, “I am sorry if you are displeased with my service, Ma’am… I’m certain that you aren’t such a belligerent bitch when you aren’t so shitfaced, so I would simply offer this for you to contemplate in the morning when you are sober: who do you think made the mistake? The honest and professional taxi driver that has lived in this town and driven these streets for ten years, or the wasted idiots from out of town that just left a wedding reception with an obviously open bar?”

The woman shrieked, “FUCK YOU!” and much to my surprise, took off her shoe and threw it at my head. It hit the window behind me with a loud thud, and I decided that this was an opportune moment to bid these people adieu, so I took off, leaving the woman standing on the grass screaming obscenities at me.

This is the sorta shit I deal with almost nightly…

Clayton Makes The Blog

Posted: 4th November 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Well, my friend, you certainly got your drink on for Halloween, huh? As one of my regular passengers and a reader of Taxicab Depressions, you like laughing at me and my stories about the vodka zombies I drive around, because you are the guy that always maintains some semblance of sobriety and doesn’t go too far overboard when you go out. You are the guy that makes sure all your buddies get home safe, and I would bet that you are always the guy that does the talking if the cops show up at a party. You are a good shepherd, and they are lucky to have you as a friend. Usually, it is your lovely girlfriend that is the wasted one in my car, not you… but not so, at least not for this Halloween, huh?

You know how you always laugh and tell your beautiful babe that SHE is so fucked up that she is going to end up on my blog? Well, welcome to the ranks of the zombies, Clayton. We have reviewed your audition and we like what we see, so congratulations, you have made the cast of Taxicab Depressions. The fact that you and your hunnee elected to be zombies as your Halloween costumes is really, really fitting, don’t you think? I don’t know about you, but I’m still laughing about it three days later…

I’m not sure what you remember from Halloween night, but it went like this… when you called me to pick you up at the bar, you didn’t sound wasted at all on the phone, but holy shit, dude, you looked like hell when I got there… lurching around with smeared zombie makeup all over your face. If you were not my regular passenger, I would have driven right past you. Your girl had a good buzz on, too, but nothing like you… you were just a wreck. When you stumbled into the back of my car, she asked how you got so fucked up when she had just as many beers as you did, and you slurred out that it must have been the four shots of tequila that guy bought you…

Really, dude…? This is my shocked face… =O

Then, the bombshell… 40 seconds in the car, and you announced that you thought you were going to puke. Kudos to you and much respect for caring enough about me and my car to let me know that you might explode in a giant fountain of tequila and Oktoberfest beer vomit at any moment. I asked if you needed the The Bucket Of Shame, but you said to just stop for a second. So I pulled over next to the big parking garage by the bank, you got out and tried to make yourself vomit in the hedges, but no joy. You started to get back in, but I told you to get in the front, so if the urge to puke overcame you again, you could yack out the passenger window rather than all over my carpet.

So we headed home, and it turns out that a little motion was all that you really needed… we hadn’t even gone another block when you stuck your head out the window and hurled all over the street and all down the side of my car. The people standing outside the country-western bar must have thought you were a funny sight, a zombie with smeared makeup all over his face vomiting out the window of a taxi as we drove past them at 20 MPH. I handed you some paper towels to wipe your mouth, and you apologized to me sincerely and profusely, but no worries, my friend… puking in the car costs 100 bucks, but puking out the window is not a problem. I just pulled up next to a poorly-aimed lawn sprinkler after I dropped you off, did my paperwork, and let the sprinkler wash the tequila vomit off my car. In two minutes I was good as new and back to work, ready to wrangle the next group of zombies, no muss, no fuss.

To your credit, you were the nicest, most polite, and most considerate staggering puking vodka zombie I have ever driven. That in itself makes you blogworthy. Bonus points for having excellent aim and not getting any vomit in my car. I would hold you up as an example for all zombies everywhere to emulate.

Seriously, I love you and your babe, Clayton… you are a great customer, not to mention an outstanding tipper, and I deeply appreciate your patronage. Call me anytime you need a ride home, brother… even in that hellish condition, I will get you and your babe home every time.

But don’t think I won’t razz you about it…

My New PC And Assistant Taxi Driver Annie

Posted: 22nd October 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Taxi drivers use the term “PC” to refer to a passenger that calls a driver directly when they need a ride. I don’t really know the origins of that term, but I have always assumed that it is short for personal customer or personal caller. I have noticed that drivers from the northeast like New York and Boston call them “specials”, and some drivers just call them “regulars”. But they all denote the same thing, a passenger that calls the driver directly rather than the company itself.

I was idling down the main drag downtown after 11 PM a couple nights ago when I saw a little girl, maybe five or six years old, standing on a corner. She spots me and starts jumping up and down and waving both arms over her head. I pulled into a parking spot next to her and she ran up to my window and said, “Hey, Mister Taxi Driver, can you give me a ride?”

This doesn’t feel right… what is a kindergartener doing on the sidewalk with all the usual nighttime drunks and whores? I asked her where her parents are, and she smiles broadly and says, “Toronto.”

Now alarm bells are ringing in my head… this situation is just wrong, in five or eight different ways. She doesn’t look to be in distress or anything, but what is a cute and innocent little girl from a foreign country, only a few thousand miles away doing here, on the street in front of a bar at almost midnight? Is she a runaway? Abandoned? Lost? Abducted? What the hell is this? I have already decided that I am going to load her and get her off the street, if only to get her to the police department. So I told her to get in, and she jumps up and down and yells, “Yeah!” Then she turns and runs away, and I hear her yelling excitedly, “Grandma! Grandpa! I got us a taxi! I got us a taxi!”

I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched this couple of seniors walking over from a bench about 30 or 40 feet away. I opened the door and the gentleman gave me the address of their home. “Annie” climbs in the far back and Grandma says, “No Florida vacation at Grandma’s is complete without a taxi ride…”

I said, “Oh, really? Why is that?”

Annie says, “Because taxis are COOL!”

I laughed and said, “I have been driving at taxi for three years, but ‘cool’ isn’t a word that I have ever used. But now that you mention it, I have a little girl that is just a little bit younger than you, and she loves it when I pick her up from school in my taxi. She even makes me run the meter.”

I looked at Grandpa and grinned and said, “But even though I run the meter, she never pays me…”

Grandpa chuckled and said, “Oh, but I bet she tips you well…”

I said, “Very true… she gives me great tips. She tips in hugs and kisses,” to which Grandpa smiled knowingly.

I was about to back out when Annie said, “Can I ride up front with you?”

I said, “Well, of course you can! Come on up here.”

Annie’s face lit up and she is already out of her seat, and Grandpa said that taxi drivers don’t like to have people in the front. I smiled at him and said, “Pipe down, Grandpa! Me and my Assistant Taxi Driver are trying to drive a taxi here!” and I helped Annie clamber over the center console and plopped her down in the seat next to me.

I said, “OK, the first thing we have to do is start the meter… push this button here…’

Annie looked at me wide-eyed… “Me???”

“Yes, you… you are the Assistant Taxi Driver! Let’s get this ride going! The first rule of driving a taxi is don’t waste time or gas… those are the only two things you have to sell. We need to get Grandma and Grandpa here home efficiently and expeditiously, and get on to the next passenger. So let’s go! Hit it!”

Annie scooted up to the edge of the seat, mashed the button for the meter drop, and she is beaming when she sees the meter engage. I said, “OK, next step, seat belts… so… we… can… be…”

Annie yells, “So we can be SAFE!” That’s from Dora The Explorer, for those readers without toddlers, but I somehow knew she would get the reference. Annie gets buckled in, and we are on the way.

I asked Annie what she was doing out so late, and she said that she is a big girl, and she always gets to stay up late when she visits Grandma and Grandpa. They just saw a movie, and now they are going back to Grandpa’s house. She has to get packed to fly back home to Toronto tomorrow. I asked her again why she likes taxis, and she gave me the same response… “Because taxis are COOL! I want to drive a taxi when I grow up!”

I said, “Well, I think you are really smart and should try to be a doctor or a veterinarian or a scientist or something like that, but being able to drive a taxi is actually a pretty good fallback plan. You can make good money driving a taxi. Let’s see if I can teach you the basics… you started the meter, so you are now my Assistant Taxi Driver, and you have to help me get these passengers safely home, OK?”

Annie looks positively enthralled and says, “OK,” and I glance at her grandparents, and they are grinning ear to ear.

I handed her my clipboard and said, “Here, hang onto my paperwork, and here is my flashlight. Don’t turn it on unless I ask you to, OK? That’s 160 lumens, so we need to be careful where we point that…”

Annie says, “OK” and holds my flashlight in her hand, at the ready. She is obviously taking this very seriously. She says, “Do you like driving a taxi?”

“No, not really,” I replied.

Annie said, “Why not?”

I said, “Well, most of my passengers are not as nice as you and Grandma and Grandpa.”

Annie said, “Well, if you don’t like driving a taxi, why did you buy one?”

Ahh, the innocence and lucid clarity of thought, possessed only by a child… I busted out laughing and said, “Sweetheart, I ask myself that question every single night.”

Annie says, “Well, I think taxis are cool, and I am going to be the best taxi driver in Toronto some day.”

I said, “OK, if you are going to be the best taxi driver in Toronto, the most important thing to know is that safety is the most important thing. Grandma and Grandpa back there are counting on us to get them home safely, so we have to be a better driver than everyone else. There’s a lot of really dumb people driving around out there, so we have to watch out for them so we don’t get in a crash.”

Annie looks very concerned… “Have you ever been in a crash?”

I said, “Yes, I have been in a crash… it was pretty bad. I was very lucky that I didn’t have passengers at the time, because they would have gotten hurt. A taxi driver has to stay sharp and always pay attention. You have to be able to predict what is going to happen on the road and what other people are going to do. Here’s a perfect example… see that green light up ahead? What does the green light mean?”

Annie says, “Green means we can GO!”

I said, “You are correct… BUT…” Annie looked at me intently.

“The light is green, but I have noticed that it has been green a long time. I think it will turn red before we get there. So instead of driving up to the light at full speed and having to stop really hard, we are going to ease off the gas and slow down, just a little bit… Grandma and Grandpa won’t even notice. But if the light does turn red, then we can stop gently and slowly, and not jostle our passengers.”

Sure enough, the light turns red and we slowly decelerate, and Annie is mesmerized. She says excitedly, “Grandpa! Did you see that? The taxi driver knew the light was going to turn red!”

Grandpa smiles and says, “I can tell he is a very good driver. I think we are safe with him.”

A few moments later I said, “OK, Assistant Taxi Driver, we need to change lanes and move over to the right… we are going to check all our mirrors… and look over our right shoulder… is the lane clear over there? Any cars next to us?”

Annie looks out her window and says that there are no cars over there, so I said, “OK… right turn signal on… and we safely execute the lane change. Well done, Assistant Taxi Driver Annie.”

And so it goes for the rest of the drive… we get to Grandpa’s house, and I said, “OK, we put the car in Park, so it doesn’t roll anywhere while we clear our passengers… get your seat belt unbuckled, and push this button here. That turns on the four-way flashers, so other cars will know that our passengers are getting out. Next, hit this button here to stop the meter.”

Annie dutifully follows my instructions. I asked, “What does the meter say?”

Annie says, “One one two five!”

“That’s right… or eleven dollars and twenty-five cents. Now, if you have some really nice passengers, you can give them a little discount, and believe me, they notice every time. So repeat after me…” I loudly and theatrically said, ” We have arrived, Sir. Your fare is ten dollars.”

Annie parrots me perfectly. “We have arrived, Sir! Your fare is ten dollars!”

Grandpa is chuckling and hands her a twenty. Annie hands me the bill as I pulled out my bank from my shirt pocket. I said loudly, “Any change on that, Sir?”

Again Annie mimics me… “Any change on that, Sir?”

Grandpa laughs and says, “No, you can keep the change…”

I said, “Did you see that? Grandpa’s fare was ten dollars, but he gave us twenty dollars. That extra money is called a tip, and that is how good taxi drivers make their money. Try to be friendly, treat people nice, be polite, and make sure they get home safely, and you will make good tips. And if you make good tips, you can take care of your family and make a good living.”

Annie is wide-eyed and soaking this in… I swear, she is internalizing this whole experience, and it is like a light bulb has switched on in her head. Grandma and Grandpa are grinning ear to ear and loving this little show I am putting on for Annie, and quite frankly, so am I. It was a busy night, but every moment spent with Annie is a moment not spent with the douchebags and drunks and idiots and whores and morons that are typically in my car this time of night.

I said, “OK, the next thing that is important for a taxi driver to remember is to always take care of the people that help you do your job. Everybody needs to make money, and everybody needs to get paid… the mechanics that work on your car, the girls at the gas station that give you coffee… and most importantly, your Assistant Taxi Driver…” And with that, I licked my thumb and dramatically peeled two dollars off my bank and handed them to Annie.

Annie was almost in shock. “For me???”

“Yes, for you… you did a great job as my Assistant Taxi Driver, and you deserve to get paid. Enjoy the rewards of honest work, well done. Have Grandpa take you out for some ice cream before you fly home, or better yet, have Grandpa take you to a book store and buy a book. Ice cream lasts five minutes, but what you learn from a book lasts forever. I bet he will help you out with a dollar or two if you are a little short.”

Annie is speechless, just staring at me.

“Now, one last thing… when you get a nice passenger that tips you really well, you want to drive that person every time they need a ride. You want them to call YOU personally, rather than the taxi company. Taxi drivers call those people personal customers, and the more personal customers you have, the more successful you will be. I would be very pleased if you would be MY personal customer, so take my business card, and call me the next time you visit Grandma and Grandpa. I would be very happy to drive with my Assistant Taxi Driver again.” And with that, I handed her three or four of my business cards.

Annie is beaming. She says excitedly, “Look, Grandpa! I have taxi cards!” I honestly think she was more excited about the cards than the two dollars.

“Now, when Grandpa takes you to the airport, does he drive you in his car?” Annie nods… I said, “Well, maybe next time he might want to take a taxi instead of driving. So give him a card, so he has my phone number, too. A good taxi driver always works on building his business and getting more personal customers.”

Annie gives a card to Grandpa, and to Grandma as well. I told Annie that her final duty was to see Grandma and Grandpa safely into the house, and that I would light the way up to the door with my powerful flashlight. Annie escorted her grandparents up to the door, and waved at me vigorously and excitedly from the porch as I rolled away, her face still split with a gigantic smile.

Man, that was nice… It is so rare that I have such a pleasurable and enjoyable passenger. I was actually emotionally and psychologically buoyed by driving Annie and her grandparents, and went back to work in a much better mood.

But back to grim reality… my next passengers were three drunks in their twenties, going to some yuppie apartments not far from downtown. I made one small mistake when I bought my van; the windows are tinted so dark that someone on the street can not see into my car to see if I have passengers. Sometimes I turn on the interior light so they can see my passengers, so they don’t think I am just driving past them.

But one thing I do like about my van is that the doors lock automatically when my speed exceeds ten or fifteen MPH, so no one can get in my car unless I let them in. I was about five blocks from the apartment building, sitting at a traffic light, when a vodka zombie on the corner started waving at me and lurching toward the passenger side of my car. He is yanking on the door handle as I flipped on the interior light to show him my passengers, and I rolled down the window about halfway and yelled, “Hey, dude, I got some people already…”

For reasons that still escape me, one of the drunken idiots in the back unlocked and opened the door and said, “Yeah, man… this our taxi… fuck off…”

I said, “Hey! What the hell are you doing? Close the fucking door!”

The zombie drew his fist back, and punched my dumbass passenger square in the face, a good, solid jab that snapped his head sideways… I’m really surprised it didn’t knock him out. The zombie ran off, and I hit the power door button, closed the door, and drove the drunks the last few blocks to their apartment building, while they razzed and jeered their friend about getting punched in the face by a random drunk standing on a streetcorner. But I want these liquored-up dipshits out of my car immediately… if they want to make a wasted police report about a hit-and-run zombie attack, they can do it without me. I put them out, and headed back towards downtown.

I wish Annie was my worst passenger ever… I wish they were ALL better than her.

But that just isn’t how this job goes…

If This Job Had A Soundtrack

Posted: 1st October 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized

I heard this for the first time the other night, blasting out of the speakers in front of a tittie bar. Not exactly promoting wholesome family values or empowerment for women, but I have to admit that I like this tune. If this job had a soundtrack, this little ditty would definitely be on it…

You Dairy Queen Muthafuckahs Ain’t Shit, Bitchezzz!

Posted: 11th September 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

As I have mentioned before here and here and here, people lose the most astonishing things in taxis. Phones, wallets, sunglasses, knives, cocaine, joints, beer, condoms, shoes, lip gloss, and even medicated vaginal wipes… But last weekend, I had a passenger forget the most surprising item ever.

I rounded a corner right after bar close downtown, and I saw a group of vodka zombies on the grass in front of a hotel. There were at least eight or ten of them, and four or five of them see me and start waving their arms over their heads like castaways spotting the first ship they have seen in years. Several of them start lurching toward my car, all yelling about taking them home and grasping at my locked door handles.

Dealing with zombies is the worst part of my job… I just hate these wasted idiots. Effective communication is all but impossible, they don’t listen, they yell constantly, they are rude, abusive, and belligerent, they are just generally unpleasant and hard to deal with. But sometimes a group of zombies will have a leader, and the ability to spot that leader quickly is an invaluable skill for a taxi driver. If you can get that leader on your side and get him working with you, he can help corral and control these retards until you can get them safely home.

Several of the zombies are clawing at my door handles, and I yelled, “Hey, guys, slow down… How many people do we have? I can only carry six. I can get a second taxi here in two or three minutes if we need it.”

A few of the zombies start pointing at each other and start trying to get a head count, but none of these wasted nitwits possess the counting skills of my three year old in their current condition. A very tiny, very cute, and very trashed blonde woman about 30 years old standing on the grass screams, “Give us a ride! I own a Tastee-Freez, bitch!

I wasn’t sure how that was relevant or germane to this interaction, but I turned my attention back to the guys in the street. One guy standing by my window looks a little less shithammered than the rest, and I tell him that it’s really simple… I can’t have more asses than seat belts, and he says, “No, I get it… you can’t overload your car.”

I was surprised… that was really easy. Usually, making wasted people understand this concept is almost impossible. Oftentimes it is easier to just drive away from a group that is too big than to try to explain this to them. The guy looks at his crew all yelling and laughing and staggering around in the street, and the blonde bellows, “Tastee-Freez, you pussies! Reckanize, bitchezzz!“, and stumbles backwards and falls flat on her ass.

The guy shakes his head and says softly, “What a clusterfuck…” and I had a feeling that this guy might be a leader. He starts asking his friends if this guy can crash on that guy’s couch, and can we send that guy home with that couple, and he formulates a plan to get everyone a ride out of here. Just then, another taxi rounded the corner, and the leader put three or four of his compatriots in that taxi, and herds the other five into my car.

“Kyle” jumps in the front seat and tells me we need to go to an address about two miles from my house, and I live about fifteen miles from here. This is what we call “getting paid to go home”, or getting your last fare of the night that serendipidously takes you almost home or back to the place you drop off your car, and this rarely happens for me. Most nights, I have a 30 or 45 minute drive home, depending on where my last passenger went, so I was glad I endured all that drunken buffoonery to get this $45 ride that will take me almost home.

The ride starts out loud, with lots of laughing and yelling… One guy screamed something about Tastee-Freez and everyone laughed, and the blonde yelled, “Damn right! Tastee-Fucking-Freez, bitchezzz!” I guessed this is some inside joke that I’m not in on. But after a few minutes, everyone kinda nods out, and it is a quiet ride to our destination. I chatted quietly with Kyle in the front seat, and it turns out that he is a firefighter, which explains why that even when drunk, he instantly grasped the significance of not overloading the car… he is in the public safety field.

So we get to their destination, and Kyle takes up a collection from his gang to pay the fare, and he hands me a pile of bills that adds up to 55 or 60 bucks. One of the guys standing outside the car says, “What are you going to do, Kyle? How are you getting home?”

Kyle says, “Well, I guess I will call a taxi and see if I can get back home.”

I said, “Dude, you just got out of a taxi… where do you need to go?”

Kyle said, “I thought you said you were going home after this ride…”

I said, “Well, not when I still have a passenger in my presence… where do you live?”

Kyle says he lives several towns away in Heron Lake, a gated golf course community that is at least a $50 ride. I told him to get back in the car, and we head out. So while I didn’t end up getting paid to go home, I was pretty pleased that my last passengers of the night were going to total over 100 bucks, all on their own. Yeah, I’ll be working a little late, but Daddy is bringing home the bacon tonight…

So Kyle and I are talking on the drive, and I said, “So, I get this all the time… Tell me your best firefighter story…”

Kyle tells me this story about when he first started the job, they got a call to a house where the neighbors reported a foul odor and had not seen their neighbor in a while… newspapers piled up on the doorstep, flies covering the insides of the windows, and I think I know where this story is going. Kyle says his team looked at him and said, “OK, Rookie, this one is all yours…” and his team pushed him through a window they pried open. The guy inside was two or three weeks dead in his Lazy-Boy, clutching his chest, he’s bloated up like a manatee and he’s blue and green and black and purple and yellow, every color but skin tone, and part of his leg is gnawed off. His little mongrel dog is dead by the back door of dehydration and starvation after apparently drinking all the water in the toilets and chewing on Dad’s leg until he got too rotten. The AC was off, it was like 95 degrees in there, flies and maggots everywhere, and the air was thick with the stench of death and dogshit. He said he unlocked the front door and let the cops in to conduct their investigation, then went outside and puked.

I said, “Yeah, my stomach is twitching a little, too…”

Kyle went on to say that he has seen some terrible shit in this job, people that he knew died horribly, people burned to death in houses and cars, but he told me you just have to tune it out and do the job. If you can’t tune it out, you can’t save others. But the flipside of that coin is that you can indeed save people’s lives, with some surprising regularity. He told me about going into a burning house where a woman and her teenage son were overcome with smoke and fumes from burning carpet and couches, and he dragged them out to safety… they might have had 60 more seconds to live. Now this woman comes by the fire station at least once a month with homemade cakes and pies and cookies, for more than two years, just to thank them for saving her and her son.

I said, “That’s awesome… what an incredible fringe benefit. I tell people all the time that I’m not a cop or a firefighter or a paramedic, but by God, I save lives every damned night. Look at your crew we just dropped off… can you imagine any of those guys driving? I rarely even get a thank you, let alone a “thank you for keeping me from dying in a fiery head-on collision” card… just not a big seller at the Hallmark store.”

So I get Kyle home, he pays his fare, and he tips me twenty bucks. I asked him if he goes downtown where I found him often, and he says not too often… perhaps once every two or three months. I gave him my card and told him that the next time he goes downtown, I would be pleased if he called me for a ride home. He stuck my card in his wallet and walked up to the door as I pulled away and headed for home.

I had gone perhaps a mile when my phone rang, and Kyle is on the phone, and he sounds trashed and frantic. He says, “Hey man, you gotta come back right now! How far away are you?”

I said, “I’m only a mile away… what’s wrong? Did you forget something?”

He says, “Yes! Please come right back!”

So I turned around and headed back. I turned on the interior light and shone my flashlight around the floor and the seat, but I didn’t see anything he dropped. Kyle was waiting in his driveway for me, and when I pulled in, he opened the rear door rather than the front. I spun around and said, “What did you forget?”

Curled up in the far back seat of my van was the cute, petite blonde that was bellowing about Tastee-Freez, completely passed out directly behind me in the third row seat where I could not see her. In the entire 30 minute drive with Kyle, I had no idea she was back there. If she had woken up and said something during the drive, she would have completely freaked me out, because I thought we dropped her with the rest of her party, and that I was alone in the car with Kyle. Had she woken up and said, “Hey!” while he was talking about maggots and rot and purple dead guys with their foot chewed off, I think the odds are very high that I would have shit my pants and crashed my car in the next four seconds.

Or alternately, what if Kyle had passed out on his couch and I had driven home, parked my car in my driveway, had a few beers and gone to bed, and three hours later, there is a hungover blonde screaming and beating on my door with a dead cell phone, who woke up only when the temperature reached 99 degrees, locked in my taxi, and demanding to know where the fuck she is?

I started laughing and said, “Dude, people forget all sorts of shit in taxis, but a cute blonde is a first for me… I don’t think my wife will let me keep her…”

Kyle says, “Don’t say anything, for God’s sake…” and he starts laughing too.

So I got out and helped Kyle get her out of my car. I held her arm and gently helped her out and said, “C’mon, little Miss Tastee-Freez… We are home…”

And the blonde, eyes still closed, yelled, “You Dairy Queen muthafuckahs ain’t shit, bitchezzz!

I still haven’t figured out what all that Tastee-Freez bullshit was about…

Shit Should Be Better

Posted: 6th September 2013 by Taxi Hack in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

I was sitting outside a bar on a slow weeknight last week, when I saw a heavy-set black woman walking down the sidewalk toward me. She was wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, carrying a hardback book in one hand and what looks like two plastic grocery bags of clothing in the other. She looks directly at me and changes her trajectory and starts walking directly toward my car. She smiles and says, “Hey, do you remember me?”

I did not remember her at first… she says, “I’m Regina… You drove me down to the Quikie-Mart at Pineapple and 24th Street two weeks ago… we talked about Obama, remember?”

I remembered her, now that she reminded me. I seemed to recall that she was dressed a little better the last time I saw her… I think I might have gotten her after a big reggae show. She came up to my car a couple weeks back and wanted to go to a convenience store on the edge of the hood. It was only a seven or eight dollar ride, but when someone wants to go to the edge of the hood, you want to make sure they have money. A good way to do that is to cheerfully ask, “Is this going to be cash or charge?” How they answer that question can clue you in as to whether or not this might be a problem passenger. Crackheads and scammers will usually stammer and dither and have a story to tell when confronted with that question, whereas people with money tend to answer you confidently and directly.

She asked if it would be more than twelve or fifteen dollars, and I said that it would be less than ten, and she indicated we were all good, so I took off. The radio was on low volume in the background, and the news story on the radio mentioned a recent poll putting Obama’s approval rating at 44%. I said, “44 percent approval… That’s not good. Are you an Obama supporter? Did you vote for Obama?”

Regina said, “I didn’t vote last time, but I did vote for Obama the first time.”

I said, “Well, what is your approval rating? How do you think he is doing?”

Regina said, ” I don’t know… shit should be better, right? I mean, I see all these people on the TV saying that the economy is getting better, but it ain’t any better where I live. Ain’t nobody got a job… Lord knows I can’t find a job. I worked for a while at a linen service, washing tablecloths and towels for restaurants and hotels and such, but they laid me off, and several other people got laid off too, almost two years ago, and ain’t nobody hiring. But my bills keep going up, food keeps going up, it’s really hard… shit should be better.”

I pulled into the parking lot of the convenience store and asked her if she wanted me to wait for her, but she said she only lives a few blocks away and this will be fine. She paid her fare, tipped me a buck or two, and I pulled away.

But back to tonite, Regina says, “I wanted to ask you for a favor… can you take me to the corner of Palm Avenue and 10th Street?”

I said, “Sure I can… What is over there?”

She says, “There is a domestic violence safe house over there… I walked from 26th Street, but I am just so tired…”

Now that she is up close, I can see that one of her eyes is puffy and swollen. I said, “And you don’t have any money?”, and she told me that she just left with some clothes.

I’m not an uncharitable person, but I don’t do a lot of charity work while I am on the job. I can count the number of free rides I have given people on one hand. This is my occupation… this is how I pay the bills, this is how I put groceries on the table and keep my daughter in daycare and Flintstones vitamins and Cheerios and Barbie panties and Hello Kitty attire. Every minute spent dicking around with someone that has no money is a minute not spent with someone who does. So if I give someone a free ride, they must not only need it, but they must also deserve it, too.

But as I have often said, just like my Dad, I am the biggest mark for strays, runaways, and damsels in distress. This ride would be like a four or five dollar fare, so I told Regina to get in, and I took her to the corner she mentioned. I asked her what happened, and she says sometimes when her Boo drinks, he gets angry and abusive… she attributed it to the fact that he can’t get work, just odd jobs here and there, trimming trees and occasional day laborer work. She said that a man’s got his pride, and she thought his pride was wounded, and that is why he lashes out when he is drinking.

As I pulled up to the corner, I told Regina that I was happy to take her to the door and watch her get safely inside, but she said that she is not supposed to give the exact location, for the security of the women and kids staying there. So I wished her well, and told her that I hoped things get better for her and her man. She thanked me and got out, and I watched her walk up the sidewalk into the darkness, carrying her book and her Publix grocery bags of clothes.

I did my paperwork, put the car in gear, and as I headed back downtown, I said to myself out loud, “You are correct, Regina… shit should be better…”