Monthly Archives: June 2024

Conversations From the Road – Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down

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Thirteen years ago today, my dad died. I still miss him more than ever, and I still hear his voice in my head when I need it the most. And if you think after thirteen years (it’ll be twenty-two years since my mom died come this October), my grief should have eased off, then I don’t think you understand that grief has no timetable nor should it. Because things will set it off, and sometimes you’ll see it coming, and sometimes you won’t.

I woke up this morning to read about last night’s Presidential Debate between our eighty-one-year-old President and his opponent, a complete and total fucking monster who spewed nothing but lies all night long. President Biden has a stutter so he has to take it slow and easy sometimes when talks. The other bastard just spews out whatever shit is in his mind and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. He wants to burn it all down because he lost the last election and his coup failed. President Biden ran for President because he wanted to start repairing the damage of forty years of trickle-down economics and to fight racism and restore our standing as a light and a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. I honestly don’t know how anyone can’t see this but whether or not they’ll pull their heads out of their asses is something NONE of us are responsible for dealing with.

So yes, reading all this stupid bullshit about a kind and intelligent man having to be on stage with a garbage-spewing monster hit me poorly when I saw what the date was and what happened thirteen years ago. In some ways, I’m glad my dad isn’t here to see this because trust me, I’d have to talk him down out of a giant sequoia of a tree if saw anything like last night’s debate. But I miss talking to him about things like this, and most of all, I miss being able to see and hear him tell me, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

My dad wasn’t perfect and like my mother, he would be the first person to tell you that. But he always seemed to have the right words at the right time, an extraordinary gift even if those sayings were colorful and profane at the same time. I learned my colorful and profane language at the feet of a master like him, like he learned from his father though I don’t ever remember my grandfather being so colorful or profane (dad did tell me my grandfather had mellowed out considerably by the time I’d come along).

After my mom died, my dad and I circled the wagons so to speak. We closed in on ourselves and each other. My dad had very specific wishes he wanted carried out and he trusted me to do so and he gave me the power and the authority if I needed it. And I fulfilled his wishes as I did for my mother with absolutely no regrets at all. Yet over the years, I felt like I had done something wrong, and so had my father. This was a conversation we had multiple times after my mother died- the isolation and feeling like we were too closed off when in reality we were just holding on to our sanity, and our feelings in order not to break down and shatter into a million pieces.

So yes, watching a bullying monster like Trump rage against a man trying his best to create good public policy and help people brings up a lot of old shit that I’ll always be dealing with for the rest of my life. It’s like watching someone raging at you for not living up to some bullshit ideal of being perfect, but not in a good way. It feels like someone is raging at you saying that any good you try to do is nothing but a lie and weak as shit, too. I used to be afraid of standing up to shit like that, but not anymore. Especially when I heard my dad’s voice in my head tell me, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Shortly after my mom died, my dad sort of pushed me away from him for a while. I didn’t feel like I could talk to him and maybe he needed to time to get his head on straight and work through his grief. Yet one time in a pit of despair he asked, “Why am I still here?” I managed to tell him though my throat was tight as hell, “Because I still need to hear what you have to say to me.” He never talked like that again. Instead, I felt like he tried to tell me as much as he could with the borrowed time he had left.

One big thing he always told me was that no matter how many times I got knocked on my ass, or I got knocked across the chops, was to get back up and keep going. And I was better at that than he was because right before my mom died, he physically collapsed and everything fell on my shoulders. I was the last one left standing over my mother, and then over him. This is not pride talking, but strength that I will NOT apologize for at all.

So if you’re still reading this, and you get knocked on your ass or knocked across the chops, get back up and keep going. You will piss someone off by doing that but they can go fuck themselves straight to hell where they belong. Because as I’m fond of saying, and yes, I did sort of get this from my dad, your job in life is not to pull someone’s head out of their ass for them.

My dad told me someday I’d be an elder, and I would say I have never felt ready for that kind of responsibility. But I had a good teacher like him so I’ll do my best.

And as he would say to that in his sarcastic and profane way, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

Uber Tales – My Beginning at the End of the Wild West Days

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When I first started driving for Uber in Spring 2017, it was the beginning of the end of what were called the ‘Wild West Days’ of Uber. Uber was founded in 2009 to try and ‘disrupt’ traditional taxi and black-car services in major cities. By 2017, less than ten years later, it was a worldwide juggernaut that has changed the way people and goods move around the world.

But not long after I signed on, Uber’s CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick got the boot when he was caught on video bad-mouthing an Uber driver. So in August 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia Group because CEO. And from there, Uber continued to grow, and also had to clean up a lot of damage caused by their predecessors around the world. Then of course in 2020, the pandemic hit and luckily the Uber Eats side of the business kicked in to compensate for the ride-share side. Since then, Uber has stabilized and focused on core businesses and managed growth.

When I signed on in 2017, Uber had only been in San Antonio for maybe two years and not long after I signed on, Uber got kicked out of Austin so a lot of those drivers came to San Antonio which depressed business and made me seriously wonder what in the world I’d gotten into. Luckily the city of Austin and Uber kissed and made up and life began to stabilize. But what was it like on the road in those early days?

Well, the app was crap. It glitched all the time in ways you couldn’t begin to imagine. GPS would go wonky, lose signal, tell you someone was a mile away from where they really were (especially around the airport). Then they made an update about a year in and the female voice sounded like a commandant in a Nazi prison (I actually nicknamed her ‘The Commandant’ for the few days she was live- trust me, they fixed this real fast).

Second, there was NO live support in those early years. If you had a problem, you solved it. There was NO way to reach out to anyone, real or AI back then and it was frustrating. But luckily I’m a problem-solver from my days in call-center hell so this wasn’t too big of a problem for me.

Third, in those early days you had NO idea how long a trip was going to be or what you were going to earn from it. Something came in and it was just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ so sometimes you took a wild gamble on rides. Then they started putting trip distances in but at first only up to a certain distance so a long ride only came in as ‘45+ minutes’ with NO actual milage or time given. Hence, the reason I set my personal record with this with a three-hour trip (would have been three and a half hours if I hadn’t been able to take the toll road around Austin) but I haven’t taken anything that long since then because it’s just not worth time and money.

But in the early days before I came online I heard stories of drivers knocking down a hundred-thousand plus a year in earnings and also driving for twelve-plus hours a day. Eventually, they put in a limit of twelve-hours of drive-time per day (though if you break that up by being offline for six hours your drive-time limit will reset to the full twelve hours). Now this drive-time only includes time in ‘active’ status and not if you’re parked and waiting like at the airport, for example.

So the Wild West Days were the days of glitchy apps, highly-unpredictable earnings, unlimited drive time, and no real-live support. I don’t miss these things at all because although I don’t have a need to reach out to Support often, it’s nice to know it’s there along with the Emergency button (in the early days if you were in big-trouble you had to hope you could hit 9-1-1 and get the call out). The app still glitches every so often but nowhere near as often as it did in the early days. And it’s good to have the drive-time limits because if not you’ve got trouble with tired and exhausted drivers. And as for the earnings, I like seeing trip earnings and trip duration and I’m seeing improvements there, too, because in the end, I think money has always been the biggest issue. For me, it’s just being able to do this job until something else hits and I can get off the road.

But I’m forever grateful to Uber for keeping me on the road when I couldn’t do anything else and I’ve weathered the ups and downs as well as I could. Like a lot of things in 2024, it’s looking upward. I don’t need Wild West stuff to do my job nor do I want that. I like stability and steady leadership, and also, that drivers are truly being listened to.

I think a part of me is going to miss this gig someday but right now, I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful leadership came in and stabilized things and kept it going instead of letting it languish or go under.

Behind the Story – Not a Member of the Tortured Poets Department

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The ‘Tortured Poets Department’ is reportedly a term used by a group of male singer-songwriter dudes as the name of their group chat according to media sources. It’s also reportedly where Taylor Swift got the idea to use this as the title of her most-recent album due to her previous singer-songwriter boyfriend being a part of this group of dudes. And I will say this: when I heard this all I could think of was a bunch of dudes gazing into the depths of their navels and wailing about it while trying to hide out from the world. Because supposedly, Taylor broke up with her tortured poet-singer songwriter boyfriend because she didn’t want to hide out in the woods or in the back of pub somewhere. Instead, she’s hit the road and is on track to finish her massive world tour at the end of year.

I started writing poetry when I began scribbling in notebooks when I was around ten, eleven years old (Taylor Swift was twelve when she began writing songs and taking guitar lessons). Now I never took up the guitar because I would have been a left-handed player so that would have meant a re-strung instrument and two, my eye-hand coordination sucks because typing and cooking are about the only things I can do using eye-hand coordination. Unlike Taylor, I eventually put my poetry aside and got into scriptwriting, then novel-writing, and now I blog, write short stories, short novels, full-length novels, long-form essays and articles, and poetry.

Around 2018 if I remember correctly, I began to write and post my poetry. And one ginormous dick-headed asshole in my Facebook writers group decided that he was going to shit all over my poetry simply because he could. He was a self-righteous arrogant pin-prick who took his fragile male ego out on me, then probably hated the fact that I took my poems down and stopped writing so he had to move on and torment someone else. Now if he or anyone tried to do that to me first, I’d shrug them off and continue to write and post as much I wanted to and if they did get up in my face, I’d tell them to ‘fuck off’ then block them in every way possible.

Back then, I wasn’t in a place to stand up for myself and be proud of my work. At that time, my silence was shattering so hard and so loudly I could barely think sometimes. I felt so overwhelmed and exhausted and poetry for me at that time was like a light in a very dark tunnel. So when this fucking asshole came at me, it hurt. It made me feel shame and guilt for wanting to find a light and go towards it. His bullshit-snide cruel comments made me feel so stupid, and worst of all, like I was doing something wrong. But he was an exception, and when I stopped posting my poems people asked why and with shame and guilt I replied that I felt stupid and felt like maybe other people were somehow offended by what I was doing and I needed to stop. Yes, I was this fucked up back then but when you’re in a vulnerable place like I was, this is some of the shit you can feel when someone comes after simply because they can.

Like Taylor Swift, I hid out for a long time, taking tentative and soft steps and listening to the quiet. That quiet time can heal and it is needed. But like Taylor Swift, I feel like coming out into the world, hitting the road and seeing what’s out there. And like Taylor, I’m putting my work out there and if you like it, great. If you don’t, no worries. But if you get in my face about it, I will tell you to ‘fuck off’ and block you if I have to.

Because there is NO shame or guilt needed in being a creative person. There is NO need to hide out and torture yourself simply because someone thinks you’re a sad-sack loser, or totally misunderstood. If being quiet and out of the spotlight is your thing, then cool. But for me, I’m not feeling that way anymore.

I will not feel shame or guilt over doing something that isn’t wrong, or causing harm such as writing and posting poetry. And I don’t give one single fucking shit if someone says that they didn’t ‘mean’ to try and shut me down because if you’re going to be a mean and cruel asshole, own your fucking shit. Because trust me, I mean every word I say here good and ugly. People have a right to say whatever the fuck they want to, just as people have the right to respond to it in anyway they want to, up to and including ‘fuck off’.

My father used to say, “You don’t have to sit around feeling sad and sorry for yourself all the time. You have the right to be happy.” I’ll add that you don’t have to torture yourself thinking that if you do it then other people won’t because trust me, that won’t stop anyone from coming at you with their mean-ass bullshit if they want to. Don’t turn your pain and anger inside-out mean as my father also used to say and not expect people to push back on that, sometimes hard enough to knock on your ass. Everyone has a breaking point as another old saying goes, and I’ve hit mine repeatedly over the last few years though I refer to it as ‘breaking radio silence’.

I’ve caught poetry as the old Monty Python routine goes. And I’m not letting it go.

Stand or Fall – Overthinking Things Vs. Not Thinking Anything Through At All

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In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (here’s a audiovisual presentation by John Oliver you can watch if you don’t know what Project 2025 is to begin with), a lot of it involves dismantling various government agencies like Department of Education and Department of Justice along with public health initiatives and other government programs and replacing them with nothing, evil corporate overlords or worst of all, under a single-ruler dictatorship.

To put it bluntly here, the bastards who have come up with this Project 2025 shit, aka Mein Kompf 2.0, haven’t thought anything through. Because fascists and corporate overlords are in reality, dumber than dogshit. Yet they think they’re smartest people in the room simply because if they don’t like something or they don’t understand how it works, they just shit-can it and round up anyone who doesn’t agree with them and well… we know what the Nazis did and I think these bastards want to do the same thing. And all because they don’t want to share anything with anyone not exactly like them. They think the world is fucked up because they’re being pushed out and people are calling them out on their bullshit and not enough people are going along with their shit.

I spent seventeen years in what I call corporate call-center hell and I’ve always said the worst part was not getting yelled at over the phones every day (that was just part of the job description), it was being told how to do my job by people who didn’t do it on a daily basis like I did, and never had done it, or had only done it for a fraction of the time I did it. Yet these people refused to provide any real resources to help us on the phones and provide the service they wanted us to. We made things work behind the scenes in so many convoluted ways I’m surprised we all didn’t crack up though most of us have walked away from that line of work and haven’t looked back. The worst part was having any request, no matter how small, denied not due to any valid reason, but because it would make management look stupid and their egos were the most fragile thing they fought so hard to protect.

It takes a lot of people to build a product, to move it, fix it, and service it. Right-wing nuts and corporate management idiots don’t understand this at all. I honestly don’t see what purpose they have if they don’t contribute to producing the best products and services instead of just servicing their own egos and lining their bank accounts. These are the people who buy a company, butcher it, then sell off the remnants of the carcass while they walk away with bulging pockets full of dirty money to do it all over again. And yet they want to run the country like this?

Hell fucking no.

At this point, if you’re reading this and wanting to slap your hands over your ears or cover your eyes while you make excuses for this, I want you to take your hands off your ears or your eyes, and ask yourself why. Ask yourself why you’re trying to minimize, excuse, or just flat-out deny this won’t become a reality unless we keep these motherfuckers from ever being voted into elected office, or god forbid, trying to attempt another coup all over again like January 6, 2021.

“When someone shows you what they’re truly like, believe them.” – Maya Angelou

I will add to that and say that if someone shows you they will NOT think anything through at all, just slash-and-burn shit rather than stand back and let people do their jobs, why would you let them destroy more shit than they already have? Do you honestly think you’ll benefit from this slash-and-burn shit? Do you honestly think you’ll benefit from trickle-down economics and right-wing fascist dictatorships? Do you honestly think you’ll ever become a part of the oligarchy, the one-percent? Because if you believe then I’ve got real-estate on the Moon to sell you. And if you believe that because you don’t want feminists, black and brown people, immigrants, or gay/lesbian/transgender people to have anything all in life, I want you to ask yourself why you’re buying into that? I want you to ask why you have to live your life with hate simply because you’ve bought into the outrage machine even though you won’t benefit from it since you’re not a part of the one-percent?

One answer to the questions I asked in the previous paragraph is that you might realize you haven’t thought things through very much, and not realize just how complex our world is and what it takes to get shit done. In my former life in corporate call-center hell, one thing that kept people in that world was an ability to think not just on your feet, but in very complex ways sometimes. It was seeing a lot of moving parts and figuring out where the breakdown was. And yes, it did involve working with people who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, aka management. I don’t want people who can’t think for shit to run things.

And if you want to call me an overthinking, stuck-up, know-it-all bitch because I think too damn much and see too damn much, go for it. But how about you take a couple of painkillers and try to think instead of coming at me or people who have done the work in the past, people who can multi-task and keep our shit together when everyone else was losing theirs or sitting on their asses doing nothing.

Because if you don’t do your own thinking, no matter how hard it is, someone else will do it for you. And you might not like what they have in mind for you at all.

Choose or Lose.

Conversations From the Road – Coming Out of Hiding (or trying to, anyway)

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Poem – Coming Out of Hiding

Today is another two-for-one day here on the blog: the word ‘hiding’ came into my mind this past week and of course I thought about it and came up with some stuff here, too in addition to my poem.

All too often, I’ve felt like I’ve run and hid myself away from the world. I know I did that a lot to escape from bullying, alienation, insensitivity, cruelty, and being frozen out. In those hidden places I used to retreat into books, music, movies, tv shows, and fiction writing. But over the last few years, when I’ve retreated into those hidden places, there was nothing waiting for me there but my thoughts and feelings.

I know I spent a lot of time, probably too much time with books, music, movies, tv shows, and writing fiction. But when I started using writing to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head to where I could see them with my own eyes, I began to lose touch with the other things (books/music/movies/tv shows/writing fiction). I feel like I can’t really settle down and get into things as deeply as I could before. I feel like my mind keeps telling me to focus on my own thoughts and feelings and not to run away from them.

But I’m not running anymore. But it seems I can’t hide anymore either. So what I think I have to do now is create a new way of doing things. Because right now my mind is telling me if I try to get back into books and stuff, that I’m abandoning my recovery. I know that’s bullshit but my brain is fucked up in a lot of ways and it takes time, a lot of time in some cases, to change the way I think and feel about something. Because I have to tell myself a hundred times NO ONE will come at me for getting into books and stuff, and if by some stupid chance someone does, fuck them.

I know in the past I ran and hid because of overload, an overload of thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t let out in any way. I had no real outlet for this as I’ve always tried not to spew out all that I want to say because I’m like a spigot that gets stuck in the ‘on’ position when I start to talk. Hence the reason I give myself two pages typed double-space Times New Roman fourteen-point font here to write and no more to do this.

But now I realize this is yet another issue I have to face in my personal recovery: I can’t go back to the way I was. I’ve known this for a long time because as I’ve said before, once you start asking questions you might not like the answers you find, and sooner or later you have to deal with them. There is a voice inside me that says I’ve dealt with so many of my answers and now I just need to organize all of them into my book projects.

Yet anxiety and fear still rear their ugly heads along with my fucked-up ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) brain that makes focusing a challenge.

So what do I do?

Take it one step at a time.

Identify the problem.

Ask the questions.

Work through the answers

Tell the asshole-voice in my brain to fuck off.

And start to deal with the possibility I won’t be able to retreat back into my blanket fort and just block it all out like I used to do. That I will have to get it out of my system once and for all then hopefully, see a better way forward.

But I’m mourning the loss of that retreat, and it’s not an easy loss to deal with. The old saying of ‘you can’t go home again’ is real and for me it means I can’t be the person I was, and I can’t run and hide anymore.

I have a lot of catching up to do, though. I’ve denied myself so much because of the thoughts and feelings that my mind keeps shoving to the forefront for me to deal with. I have to tell myself not always being with those thoughts and feelings is okay and that NO ONE will have a problem with it, or if someone does they can just fuck off.

Because what I’m looking for are those stolen moments of getting away from the pain, from the icy anger, the screaming matches I had to listen to, the awful words that could never be taken back. I need to learn how to let myself get into things again without letting something pull me out.

Most of all, I need to learn that it wasn’t wrong to run and hide, and immerse myself in my imagination and things instead of talking shit out. Because in the past I couldn’t talk shit out like I can now. But just because I can talk shit out here in my writing doesn’t mean I can’t get back into my imagination, into things that make me happy, indulge my curiosity, and make my heart soar.

Poem – Coming Out of Hiding

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Poem – Coming Out of Hiding – pdfDownload

Poem – The Depths of My Emotions

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Cozumel by Michelle Raponi via Pixababy

Today is a two-for-one special here on my blog but early this morning, around five a.m. (yes, I was up that early to do my first two reservations this morning), I was sitting in the airport waiting lot between those two reservations when this thought came to me:

I am more connected to my emotions and I’m glad for it. In turn, I began to think that would make a good poem. But just as I was about to reach for my notebook and pen (I keep those in my bag at all times), my phone dinged my Uber app told me to start driving to pick up my next reservation (which went very well, and I got a $20 tip from my very lovely passengers).

So, when I got home this morning after I did what I had to do (the previous blog entry was written actually written yesterday), I sat down at the laptop and caught poetry yet again. Hope you like it.

Poem – The Depths of Emotion – pdfDownload

Breaking Radio Silence – The Call of the Road

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When I first began to think of living and working on the road, I was thinking that if I wanted to do that in order to run from something instead of dealing with it, then it wouldn’t be a good reason to hit the road. But back then, I read three books by three women who hit the road that made me think about why I was feeling the call of the road: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ by Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed, and ‘Tracks’ by Robyn Davidson.

In ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, author Eilzabeth Gilbert hits the road after a long and difficult divorce and first goes to Italy (the ‘Eat’ part of the book) where she learns to start accepting herself for who she is and start letting go of bullshit expectations about how to look and that it’s okay for a woman not to want to settle down and live and die in the suburbs (a big issue in her divorce). Then from there she journeys to India (the ‘Pray’ part of the book) where she has a ‘dark night of the soul’ which is when I think you reach the deepest part of yourself and live to tell the tale. Then finally, she lands in Bali and meets her next husband (the ‘Love’ part of the book) and finds a happily-ever-after (for a while as she divorces again though that divorce from what I’ve read was much more friendly than her first divorce). I think she hit the road and dealt with some serious shit but not in a way that was running from it, but in a way that gave her the space to deal with it.

In the book, ‘Wild’, author Cheryl Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon. After her mother’s death when Cheryl was in her early twenties followed by a difficult marriage and a drug addiction, she comes up with the idea to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. At times, she’s under-prepared and faced with challenges all along the way. But she’s all alone on that trail with her thoughts and feelings and that’s what she needed to deal with them. She proves to herself she can survive and make it in the world despite being knocked on her ass. I don’t think she was running from her feelings and trying not to deal with them, but instead, she was looking for a space to deal with them without distractions from life and other people. Trust me, this has had great appeal to me though I’m not into roughing it or sleeping on the ground as I like some creature comforts.

Finally, the book ‘Tracks’ by Robyn Davidson is about her solo walk in 1977 from the middle of Australia to the Indian Ocean with her dog and four camels. Documented by National Geographic magazine (who funded the trip) and later made into a really great movie, it’s the story of a young woman not only challenging herself and expectations of women at that time, but of facing her own fears and finding her voice. Again, not running from, but walking to. Because after that book, Robyn Davidson has become a best-selling travel writer now in her 70’s. Expectations for her back then were to settle down, marry, and basically keep her mouth shut. Because in her book she’s brutally honest about Australian society, especially in its’ god-awful treatment of Aboriginal people. And in her other books, she’s become a astute observer of people and the worlds they live in.

When I began to think about hitting the road almost ten years ago, I asked myself if I was just running from things I didn’t want to deal with. I don’t think it’s running away and just clamping your hands over your ears, or getting caught up in good food, or on a hiking trail, or trekking across a burning desert that makes you run. But in my own way, I have been on the road. Granted, I stayed in one place, the city of San Antonio, Texas and the surrounding areas but I’ve been on the road almost every day in the last seven years. And in time, my mind opened up and yes, I have dealt with and thought about a lot of things on my Uber runs. I also made a trip to and from Alabama on my own and in spring 2018 and on the road to and from there, I truly realized why the road called to me. In a way, I wished I had put more into making my dream come true back then but I didn’t have the financial means, and most of all, I couldn’t have done anything in the emotional avalanche that followed that trip in 2018.

Now when I look at the road ahead, I know I’m looking to get on it to find a space to deal with things. I’ve done that over the last eight years and now I’m at the stage where I’m writing it all down once and for all. So when I hit the road, I will be at peace like I am now, healing and recovering, and open to new sights and sounds, people and places. I don’t need the road or the trails to deal with grief, pain, or anyone’s bullshit expectations of me. Most of all, I have absolutely nothing to prove to anyone or to myself. I want to hit the road because I want to be on the move, to have my mind free to think and feel. There are stories to tell from the road and maybe I’ll settle down somewhere at some point in time. I’m open to anything and most importantly I’ll say this again, I have nothing to prove to anyone or myself, and I sure as hell won’t live to someone else’s bullshit expectations of me.

Because in a way, my book ‘Breaking Radio Silence’ has been like a journey through the wilderness, learning how to heal through from the ‘dark night of the soul’, and reaching the clear blue waters at the end of this journey. Hitting the road is not running on empty like Jackson Browne sang- it’s more like The Chicks sang about ‘Taking the Long Way’.

Writing Article – So Much More Than Just a ‘Love Interest’

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This is a bit of longer piece – a little over 2400 words in a Word document (about five pages single-spaced block paragraph format) but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I use movies to illustrate my points because they’re much more common references and also if you haven’t seen them they’re probably on some streaming service.

So here goes my article, and a bit of a rant, about the term ‘love interest’ and how to not write it.

So Much More Than a Love Interest – Article pdf fileDownload

Uber Tales: On the Road Before and After COVID-19

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Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to put into words what it was like for me on the road before and after COVID-19. Prior to COVID-19 people it felt like people were pretty happy-go-lucky at times and the crazy conspiracy theory assholes were fewer and farther in between. But I also knew back then a lot of people were close to burnout, like the businesspeople I had who were traveling two to three weeks out of every month and barely seeing their families. I felt like sometimes people may have been trying too hard to maintain a certain appearance, to go out and party when maybe they didn’t feel like it, or woke up hungover and in bed with someone whose name they couldn’t remember.

I started driving for Uber in 2017 and not long after that I saw the first groups of immigrants dropped off in the middle of downtown San Antonio with nowhere to go. I saw the building across from Travis Park United Methodist Church opened up by the city and people coming down to help these poor refuges with food and clothing, legal and translation services, and even toys for the kids. I remember the Mayor of San Antoino telling the motherfucker in the White House (yes, I hate Donald Trump and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about that) that if he had a problem with what the city and all the volunteers were doing then he could come down and say that himself (which he didn’t because Trump is a fucking coward along his with band of thugs).

In the first three years on the job, I went over every part of San Antoino, from its’ wealthiest enclaves to its’ poorest ones. In those poor areas I saw people just trying to get through the day, walking to bus stops with kids in tow, walking along streets with boarded-up storefronts, and crumbling buildings and houses. I saw homeless encampments and people sleeping on the streets, and shelters at or over capacity. I saw crowds of tourists, convention goers, and people battling traffic on the roads and highways. I learned just how diverse this city really is, and yes, how disparate the incomes are in this city, too.

On New Year’s Eve 2019 into 2020, the city partied like there was no tomorrow. I was on I-10 going out of downtown at midnight and saw not only the fireworks from the city party downtown, but from all over the city, too. Three months later, the party was over and the city became an empty, hollowed-out shell of itself. I’ll never forget driving up Alamo street downtown shortly after lockdown when all the hotels shut down and the streets were truly empty. It was almost like a horror movie though as I drove by the Alamo that lovely Spring afternoon, a group of bicyclists rode past me waving and their bells. I waved back and smiled a little, glad to see people trying to make the best of a horrible situation.

But I also remember the morgue trucks outside the hospitals, the billowing white tents outside those hospitals, the two nurses I had in the car one day who had come in to help and were talking about everything but their jobs. I remember so many conversations with people who had loved ones deathly-ill in the hospitals, all those who lost someone close to them, and seeing the hundreds of new graves in all the cemeteries around the city. I remember being told I was a hero for staying on the job along with all the other ‘essential’ workers, yet I also remember how people were such assholes about masks and social distancing. Luckily, I only had a couple of passengers give me static about wearing a mask in the car (though they complied with me real fast when I told them I could cancel the ride without getting dinged for it). And luckily no one ever gave me shit for wearing a mask in the car as long as I did (three years).

Prior to COVID, whenever I used to talk about my dream of living on the road in a converted shuttle bus, a lot of the reaction was like I was nuts. After COVID, so many people tell me they’re thinking of doing the same thing- just chucking it all and hitting the road and being done with everyone else’s stupid bullshit. But there will be a part of me that might miss being on the streets every day and having conversations with people like I do.

There are still people out there who are trying to keep up appearances, to be a certain way and also, a fair number that have their personality-type set to ‘asshole’. These are the jerkwads that probably ride my bumper and use their cellphone while driving, but also the ones that treat service workers like shit (luckily, it’s been a long time since I’ve had an absolute jerkwad in the car with me). But there are more people today who are kinder, and more focused on what truly matters in this world, which is taking care of others, being kind, and not buying into anyone’s mean-ass bullshit or dumb-ass appearances.

So what is the biggest difference before and after COVID on the road?

That more people every day realize how short life is and to make the most of what you got, and live a good life and not worry about what other people might think about that.

And try to make the dream of hitting the road and leaving it all behind come true.