INTRO:
I decided to become a taxi driver for many reasons. I needed a change of pace, I thought the movie was bad ass and I wanted to make my nights more productive. More important than these secondary reasons, I primarily wanted to answer this question: Who takes a cab in Lincoln at night? The answer is everyone. There are very few segments of the Lincoln community that have not sat in my car. I've had black, latinos, gays, bums, business men, sorority girls, and even other cab driver. But the most recurring and thought provoking archetype to ride in the Mercy Bender is the single mom. I would safely say that every phase of the typical lower class single mom has been in my cab in the last three weeks. I am going to paint a composite picture for you here. This will be very long.

It's two in the morning and she got in the cab while her grandmother slept. Her name is Karen, but that's not important. It could be Sarah or Mary or Amy or Jessica or any other. She's fifteen wearing a tube top that she keeps readjusting awkwardly. She sneaking out to drink with her friends. "Do you have a lot of intoxicated minors in here?" she asks with a kind of stiffness indicating she's just parroting someone else. "Does it matter?" I say. "Do your parents know you're sneaking out?" She informs me she does this sort of thing all the time. Her grandma is oblivious and she hasn't seen her parents in years. She hasn't finished puberty. There's some baby fat still visible and she carries herself like she thinks an adult would. She seems to me like the type of girl who triumphantly throws her Barbies away as a sign of victory over childhood, but later the same night goes back and removes one to play with when nobody is around. I told her I'm an English student. She expresses admiration when she tells me that "words are, like, my strong suit." She made a cliche worse. It doesn't matter. I drop her off, punch the voucher and tell he to watch out for those boys. I drive away.

Flash forward a few hours, a few years. It's a different girl but the same life. She's very petite yet comically overdue with her first child. The bulging stomach weighed her down this summer than a man could ever know. And I'm taking her to the city mission. Her baby's daddy was supposed to be doing what I am now but he passed out on the lawn. Technically she wasn't even supposed to go there.

Now I'm waiting outside of an Emergency Room. Her friend comes out, completely drained. "I can't wait to get high," she says. I ask politely why they're here. She told me there was a girl inside who was too scared to get a pregnancy test alone so she went along. Her friend marches down the wheelchair ramp wringing her hands. She gets in the cab and looks straight ahead. "I can't wait to get high."

Another night, another child. This time her hair is as frazzled as her nerves. She walks to my cab with two sons, one who is screaming for attention he wants. The other limp in her arms, pressing his right ear until his tiny hand turns purple. Inside the cab she holds the child with the ear infection across her lap like a pieta. We're off to the hospital at three in the morning and she hopes they get back at six so she can take them to the sitter before work.


This is a family circus and she's the ringmaster. In the back her three children want, demand, and require. Faster, driver. No stopping, we'll miss the train. I need to potty. She left town but came back a few days ago to testify in a trial against her first child's father. Now AmTrack, which only runs from 11 at night until six in the morning, needs her to round up her clan and stand for an hour until the 4:30 to California begins its journey.

The [Name Omitted] is an establishment dedicated to helping abused spouses and partners get back on their feet. The windows are barred and nobody can enter the property without it being documented. This is her final destination tonight. First she need to go to get medicine for her seizures. The last time she had one she "fell" and ended up in the hospital for three days. He could be back, maybe she did fall. I'm can't say for sure. All I know is the black eye inspires some understandable speculation. Her arms have hash marks of cuts. Track marks abound. The bags under her eyes and split-ended hair give her a distinctly disheveled look. I am moved and allow her to smoke in my cab for free. I pretend to admire her Zippo. I act like Limited Edition means anything. For my sympathy she gives me the only thing she can. She just met her oldest boy for the first time in fifteen years. I should give her my number and I can hang out with him. "You're about the same age," she says and stamps out her smoke. I close the door and take her as close to home as she'll ever get.


CONCLUSION:
I really don't have anything else to say. I can't take a political or religious stance on the matter and I can't tell you what to think about what I've written. Choice and circumstance are the only factors in determining how a person ends up and I'm sure each of the above cases features a healthy dose of both. The only thing I can say is a paraphrase: you are free to speculate about the causes, solutions and perceptions of the single mother as you wish.

The Rain

The rain! The rain! Thank god for the rain!

Sweet salvation from this summer stuck-to-the-seat slavery. Each ounce is an amazing ovation to origin. Each an ocean of evolutionary expectation. Thank god for the rain.

Not the rein or reighn, the rain. The rain I will sing in. The rain I will dance in. The rain I will will sing and dance in it washes the scum off the streets.

I've Come to Dislike Sleep...

Been up for the majority of the past three days. I'm not on anything, I haven't even puffed the magic dragon in a month. My job changed my sleep cycle and my midweek-weekend warped my sense of time.

I can't persue this job much longer. I intend to quit within the next few weeks, as soon as I catch up on some bills. Hmmm...ketchup on some bills. I dunno. Nevermind. Yes.

Drew Carey is Bob Barker, Bob Barker is Pat Sajack. Pat Sajack is a disgrace to the species. A broken black conch shell on the beach of humanity. The Milwakee's Best of homo sapiens. Reds and greens and yellows and purples. Where the hell does a mouse hole lead?

Yeah, bastards. Bastards, familiar bastards. Another special on soft news, another neglected and hidden. Channel 09, 08, 07, 05. A clever little countdown on the same thread of thought. Piercing the cloth of ambivilance and ambiguity.

So this is my thoughts on paper. How can this represent what is a man? How odd is the mystery of language. The faint shadow of language. These vibrations and air become O's and E's and R's by accident. And yet this is all I am. I was nothing before I spoke. I'll be nothing after.

These thoughts, things are thistles. Points trying to grow between the agate of information contained in the monopolized revelation of speech.

Animals think. Sponges reconize things. Nothing but us can see it. That language is the ultimate.

A man with no ambition is a piece of shit. A man with no language is an animal.

Praise Hymn! Praise Spur! Words are all you have in life and all you ever will.
I'm parked to the south, a simple son of man.

My friend Cone Anne taught me something. Every word is a choice. You few who do read this must know this. I can teach you nothing else for I know nothing else.

There's no statement you can endorse without an absurdist follow up question.

I love lamp.-- How hard?
You drink too much--of what?
They smell like feet-- What do their feet smell like?
We are broken. Which shop will repair you?

I thought of a joke today. I wanted to write it down before exhaustion chokes me out. Here it is, steal if you must, (it's really good):

I am making a student film to show my children what I did in college and why I can't afford their braces.

So this is the short and long of it, the up and down of it, the left and right of it. I should sleep like a human to transend humanity and sleep with a human to return to it. This is my thoughts as I prepare to die for a while. I should awake
with
the
squirrels
and
grasshoppers.

Good morning, which is cab drive for good night.

Up All Night

Why do I have such empathy for businesses after they close?

I don't mean the metaphysical business but the actual concrete building after everyone has gone home and all the lights are turned off.

I looked at a webcam of the City Union today. The inside empty of all life. The few visible tables and chairs unmanipulated and forgotten. No human eyes have seen these for hours and none will for a few more.

This applies to every building that closes. I walked by work a few nights ago. The arcade machine playing the same high scores screen, the bust of Ceasar looking blankly into the windiw, the soda fountain resting upon the counter without any kind of interaction.

I felt pity for these things. Not to the core of my being but on a noticable level. These objects need people. These pbjects were designed for people. Yet, for now, I covet them. They are mine, or at least mine as much as anyone elses.

Of all the objects I try to give emotions, none can be more forlorn than the after-hours Open sign. Whenever I see one of these, I know the most likely reason is when the time to go home finally arrived some employee or employer was so primed to go home that every other light in the store was turned off except this one.

So it hangs in the window, doing the only thing it was designed to do. Casting it's false message to anybody who drank too much coffee or smoked too much meth or loved someone too much.

This is the world I live in and love. I like that this town sleeps. I like being a silent scientist of the anomolies of the night. Recording every off beat and off line. No two nights or hearts are the same. And it all becomes a little clearer in the dark.

The Simpson