jackshoegazer: (Cab Driver)
Good afternoon dear Reader,

He was confused or merely indecisive, but he couldn't decide whether the stale winter air escaped through the windows in a stampede or if the new spring wind charged through the windows like a raging army come to slaughter the dark and deformed monsters of stagnation.  Either way, the breeze simultaneously held the breath of new life and growth and the mulch stink of death and it made him sleepy and reminiscent, or merely ponderous.  As I said, he was confused, or merely indecisive.

No, I don't always write about myself in the third person, but here it felt necessary.  Or perhaps I just wanted to.  Like I said, I'm confused, or merely indecisive.

Being a cabbie is like being a limo driver, only the car is smaller and the clientele is usually of a lower class.  However, I am gaining the belief they are much more interesting. 

This week I met a girl with no arms, who signed her credit card slip with her feet and her handfootwriting was better than most people's hand-penmanship. 

I met an aging hippie who used to travel the country helping organize unions for striking workers.  He told me if I ever chose to get into journalism, his good friend is the editor of a newspaper here and could get me an in.

The man I picked up from the AIDS Support Network used to be a millionaire, teach political science at Brown, had a stroke, went bankrupt and now lives in a one-room apartment and watches TV, living off ramen and hot dogs.  He says it's a better life and he loves it.

There was also the older black man who told me he thinks the white judges and politicians in this country are all secret KKK members, that slavery never really ended, that the whites have been terrorizing the blacks here much longer than our War on Terror has been focused on Islam, and that a black man will never be president because a white supremacist will assassinate them first.

He was great fun to talk to.  Seriously.  We got into a good mutual rant about how impossible it is to live on minimum wage and how the idea of a service economy is nothing but indentured servitude all over again.

Yesterday I had to take a woman back to her hotel so she could get her things and pick up her car, just so she could go right back to the hospital, because her husband had a heart attack that morning.  She was nervous and skittish.  She didn't say much at all.

That's enough cab stories, don't you think?  I get a nice cross-section of human life every day.  It's like living a thousand lives per week, but only for a moment each.  Like Quantum Leap on methamphetamines, only I don't have to right historical wrongs.  Just listen to their stories, like the neighborhood bartender.

Soon, I will write to you about walking through crowds, the first days of spring, social anxiety, psychic shells, Jack's hoe-gazing, my immersion into liberal radio programs, jazz on Satudays, and what I've made for dinner recently.  Or not.  After all, I am confused, or merely indecisive.

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jackshoegazer

February 2012

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