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Drive a taxi. It's fun. Really.
June 07, 2003
So I finally left my taxi garage after 8+ years of rather feckless pretension to making a straight-world go of it. It's basically marginal hours for marginal cash from here on out. Unless, of course, I get tired of that, and want to return to the garage. Yes, my taxi-man roomie has bought a NEW TAXI. The negotiated price I'm paying him is minimal, for I am/will be working strange hours: 10pm to 6am.
Everything's cool, until the idea of inevitable disaster invades, whether it's a shock wave of screaming pulverized metal, or a particularly effective verbal assault by an evil person (yes, they exist, and live in NYC, too). It is especially important to use any means available to escape this paranoia. It comes like a bitter tide, drowning everything in futility.
Hum, sing, play the radio. Think happy thoughts. Kittens! Smooth roads! Hell, empty streets. I like it quiet.
So far, (in this new taxi) nobody's offered me much resistance to my taxi-driving excellence. Rationality from my customers is as important as a decent tip. No, more important.
This is a point I can't stress too much: Evil people bent on tearing your ass up over some imagined transgression end up poisoning the well, so to speak. Those folks, as rare as they are, that abuse the customer/driver dynamic will, over time, erode the driver's ability to approach each new customer neutrally. I had to learn to be paranoid, to put it plainly. I am openly blaming a few miserable-excuses-for-human-beings for my overly conservative approach to the job. Nowadays I leave as few edges (& such) as possible for anybody to hook onto.
But then, I am thin-skinned. Wrong job, I guess.
For now, though, I'll try to meditate on the formalization of the concept of taxi-driving as a suicide solution. That'll help me leave the job, because I want to live. I only realized recently that I wrecked a lot of shit under the assumption that I'd wouldn't survive to age 30. Well, I'm 31 now. I want to live, there isn't any other way to survive anymore.
Everything's cool, until the idea of inevitable disaster invades, whether it's a shock wave of screaming pulverized metal, or a particularly effective verbal assault by an evil person (yes, they exist, and live in NYC, too). It is especially important to use any means available to escape this paranoia. It comes like a bitter tide, drowning everything in futility.
Hum, sing, play the radio. Think happy thoughts. Kittens! Smooth roads! Hell, empty streets. I like it quiet.
So far, (in this new taxi) nobody's offered me much resistance to my taxi-driving excellence. Rationality from my customers is as important as a decent tip. No, more important.
This is a point I can't stress too much: Evil people bent on tearing your ass up over some imagined transgression end up poisoning the well, so to speak. Those folks, as rare as they are, that abuse the customer/driver dynamic will, over time, erode the driver's ability to approach each new customer neutrally. I had to learn to be paranoid, to put it plainly. I am openly blaming a few miserable-excuses-for-human-beings for my overly conservative approach to the job. Nowadays I leave as few edges (& such) as possible for anybody to hook onto.
But then, I am thin-skinned. Wrong job, I guess.
For now, though, I'll try to meditate on the formalization of the concept of taxi-driving as a suicide solution. That'll help me leave the job, because I want to live. I only realized recently that I wrecked a lot of shit under the assumption that I'd wouldn't survive to age 30. Well, I'm 31 now. I want to live, there isn't any other way to survive anymore.
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