It's okay, you're better than I am.

I have this way of making people think I'm judging them. Some people just plain resent it, some ignore it, some feel the need to 'defend' themselves in the face of it, to try to impress or to throw mud in my eye. I'll admit that yeah, most of the time I'm judging people in one way or another. But not in the way you think. More on that in a minute.

I observe people all the time, and I'm constantly sizing them up. Psychologists probably have a word for that, and it's probably not considered healthy. Oh well.

But honestly, folks: if you're a friend of mine, any kind of friend, then I'm not judging you or sizing you up. As a friend of mine once said of me, I pay very close attention to people I talk to. I listen. I watch. I love listening and watching, and I love remembering what I hear from you and bringing it back into the conversation. I love remembering what your face or hands looked like when you said whatever interesting thing you said. People just fascinate me. So I'm studying you, but I'm not judging you, honestly. Maybe that makes me too 'intense' for most people's druthers, but the alternative seems like negligence to me. Granted, I can turn it off, and I do when it's absolutely necessary. But where's the fun in that?

And now back to the observing and judging. I use judging in a broad sense. I'm not sizing people up as good or evil, worthy or damned. I'm trying to figure them out, to recognize their patterns. (For the wigbers: as I've mentioned, I sometimes think of myself as a kind of meatspace Colin Laney.) If you're a friend, I'm past that point with you. But if you're a stranger on the street, or a guy I'll only meet once in a conference, then yeah, you're material for me. You're an animal in a zoo, and I'm loving checking you out. I love to watch how people lie, how they deal with other people, what makes them happy or uncomfortable, the whole package. It comes out in my writing. Spinning out those little interpersonal dynamics, including how people talk to each other (dialogue), is really my only strength as a writer, if I have any strengths. Well, that and a healthy appreciation of absurdity, maybe. And, well, perhaps, the, quite conspicuous mind you, overuse of, yes, commas.

So if you meet me in a friendly situation and I'm staring intently at you, don't worry. You don't have a booger on your face. Probably. And I'm not judging you. I'm giving you the respect that you deserve, and I'm plundering your soul for material.

What could be wrong with that?

How can taxi drivers suck so much?

Back home again from a business trip, and once again, I failed to encounter a single cab driver who knew anything at all. I know that cab drivers have always sucked in one way or another. In many big cities, it's always been normal for them to be surly, or to try to cheat you. But it's not surliness that I get so often these days (except in D.C., which has very hostile cabbies).

It's mind-blowing ignorance. They don't know how to get anywhere. It's not an ethnic thing, and it's not a language thing. It cuts across all ethnicities of cabbies these days. None of them know a damned thing about the streets they drive on for a living.

This is a broad generalization, of course. I have had one cabbie in the past six years or so who actually knew where he was going. A Somali gentleman in Seattle, who never stopped for lights or signs and spent the whole ride cheerfully telling me how America ruined Somalia. I withheld my opinion that while America may have changed the nature of Somalia's shittiness, the information I've seen indicates that it was already a shithole a long time before we got there. After all, I didn't want to get Blackhawk Downed on my way to my hotel. But I digress.

I've had jobs in which driving constituted maybe a good 20% of my duties. And I learned the hell out of the streets on my turf, even though I'm not generally any good at that kind of thing. It was just practice, daily use. How can you drive a cab and not eventually learn something about the roads in your city? These guys should be fucking wizards on the road.

I don't get it.

To Boldly Go Where All You Fuckers Have Been Going For Years Now

That's right. After years of resisting the blog phenom, I have finally started a blog. Why? So I can kick it off with a title that includes 'You Fuckers.' Okay, really it was done so I could post a knee-jerk obnoxious comment to a buddy's blog. So said buddy will probably be the first to see this.

As for the rest of you: Honestly, why are you wasting your time here?