A few years ago I barely made a living as a taxi driver in Huntington Beach California, and I decided to blog about it at the time. The blog is long gone, but I’ve resurrected a handful of the posts that I’m republishing here in a week-long series called OC CABBIE.
Missed the beginning? Start here if you’d like.
from early 2007..
OC Cabbie – Blah Blah Blah
A writer friend emailed me concerning the previous post and said that I should aim for “less explanation and more funny.” On the same day I found out that Ace had told one of our regular passengers, “six words you’ll never hear from Dave are ‘to make a long story short.” Renowned French philosopher Voltaire even said, “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
I think they’re all on the right track, even though Voltaire put it best, which is why he is a famous dead philosopher while Ace is just a taxi driver and my friend is only barely famous and not in the least bit dead (yet.)
I’ve often been accused of over-telling a story, anecdote or account to the point where the listener loses interest and decides to shoot his or herself in the head. It’s a trait that isn’t easily shaken, because I always have a LOT to say, but I’m getting better at finding brevity and casting off the unimportant details so as not to bog down a perfectly entertaining narrative in a quagmire of confusing triviality.
I was born overly talkative. The nurses in the delivery room were charmed by me at first, as most young women are, but then they started giving each other “the glance” that says, “Okay, THIS guy is a little annoying” before they started making excuses about having to be somewhere else. As they shed their surgical masks and gowns, they slowly drifted out, leaving me to chat away at the poor, beleaguered Doctor, who ended up snipping the cord himself before dashing off to “perform an emergency appendectomy”.. yeah, like I haven’t heard THAT ONE before.
My inclination to chatter incessantly has proven to be a detriment as a taxi driver too. Passengers who are bombarded with verbal assault, even if it’s happy, funny verbal assault, tend to want to get out of the taxi sooner than they normally would, like at stoplights and stuff. When they don’t let me take them all the way to the front door of where they’re going, but opt instead to leap from the cab as we’re zooming down the highway at 60 miles per hour, I suspect that I may have overdone it once again.
I’m trying to get better at this and in an effort to remove my best foot from my mouth and put it forward, I’ll end this post here.
You are now free to move on.
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