Your Drunk, off your face on a locally grown drug, or you just fancy talking complete bollox to a stranger. You have ten minutes or so to empress me or make me utter a few Ooo's or ahh's, here are some of the top ten bits of utter bollox I've heard so far
Gay man told me his Nan was Gloria Swanson the 1930's Hollywood superstar
Bloke told me he invented crack
Woman said she slept with a horse
Eighteen year old boy told me he was 63 and kept calling me sonny
Bloke told me he went up into space in the fifties but is sworn to tell no one
Man told me he is a spy
Bloke told me he was buying a Bugatti Veyron and didn't have enough to pay me
Man said he has slept with 10,000 women, he also had no teeth in his deluded head
Woman said she can jump over buildings and she'd show me but she had the wrong shoes on
Man told me he killed a sabre toothed tiger in potters bar in 1977
Some may be true, probably not though, I took Keane home once, didn't believe them either...
@mr_taxi_man's extra bits
The World of Driving a Cab by The Seaside. You're Thinking,"How quaint!" Right?
Wednesday, 9 March 2016
When Doubt Creeps in
Cursor. Click. Cursor.
Look. Stare.
Look down. Click.
Fingers hover. Wait. Wait.
Waiting… Click. Cursor. Click.
Look away. Fed up.
Watch Bowie news...
Distraction excuse.
Comforting.
Later…
Look down. Click.
Feeling guilt. Hopeless.
Really hopeless.
Click click.
Stop.
Click.
Another day.
Perhaps…
Click.
Monday, 8 September 2014
Fuck This, Go Rob a Bank
What is this now? Another middle aged gripe? Another feckless moan at the futility of it all. Maybe its the realisation we all get to when you reach that point in life when surely, it all HAS a point right? Of course your work life is not the point OF life, but work life balance should surely swing in your favour as one gets older, I have made sensible decisions, done ok here and there, bereavements are the norm in any family of course and maybe I have had a little more than my fair share of those.
But fuck this, the only people I see doing well are the ruthless and the cleverest that can bend a rule or legally interpret something that allows them to skim the surface of criminality.
My own anarchic soul that's allowed itself to be chained to my sensibilities is screaming through the noise of societal indoctrinated respectability shouting...
'FUCK THIS, GO AND ROB A BANK'
Fuck this, go rob a bank.
Forty years of graft behind me.
Still have the nothing.
Spent the money on keeping up with the price of life.
Going up faster than I can pay for it.
The odds stacked against most of me.
They need me to be behind.
Creates demand.
Look down, see what you find.
See a dog when it is thrown scraps.
Its head down sniffing out the goodies.
That is I.
Head down sniffing out the goodies.
Conforming is easier.
The man pats you gently.
Gives you a little for it.
The many-armed godhead has its hands in all your pockets.
Fuck this, go rob a bank.
Chance is the new opportunity.
Opportunity for chance everywhere.
Fuck this, go rob a bank.
Have a year off, do as you please.
Out of the gaze of the man
For a while at least.
Labels:
banks,
middle age,
Robbing
Friday, 21 February 2014
Faded to grey
I do not write.
Not nearly enough.
Too busy, too many
things to do.
I have let it go, lost
the thing I had that made me write.
Haven’t the disciplines,
the determination to push it through.
I have been courted by
big publishing houses.
Literary agents rub their
chins and email me for more.
I’m popular then not.
Minimum wage forcing my
hand, £5.50 per hour for this grown man to protect.
No prospects beyond the
next wage packet.
I am paid five days
late. Often.
Don’t make the
threshold to pay tax to the man.
He has no need of my
trifling small pennies.
Late nights that become
day.
Remnants of cancer ping
with pain.
It wants to join me in
my mire.
Year in. year out.
Perhaps too comfortable
in my weaned poverty.
Comfort in the decrepit
familiarity.
Need the misery of
never enough.
Memories of mum begging
down the lane.
Need the pain of no
gain.
Always work hard, callous
your skin hard.
Reward never came. Capitalist
fodder for life.
I dragged riches for
others from the sludge.
My dotage, damn it, my dotage
is near.
One last push, one last
big breath in.
Who wins. Literary or
my labour?
Cancel the Sun life monthly
funeral payments. Five pounds saved.
Greys of a hard knock life.
Thinned grey papery
skin and hair.
Faded to grey.
Labels:
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Thursday, 17 October 2013
David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and the Varnish of Death
It is the early seventies, I should be at school. Getting work was easy then, you had a couple of weeks before they wondered where
your paperwork was…
It is nearly the
end of my shift and it has been a long stressy day. I was told off by the bloke
on the guillotine earlier, almost had my hands off at the wrists apparently. He
is a grumpy bastard, never smiles and has no time for youngsters like me, keeps
moaning about my long hair, he thinks I should wear a hair net because my hair
is always in my face. Fucking old git.
“A bit of overtime?” The balding Irish foreman
taps me on the back asks. He matches the ink colours from one print run to the
next, by eye and texture; I cannot even begin to know how he does that. I like him; he is a cheerful version of my
dad.
My mum expects me home around 6pm, we don’t
have a home phone and since me mum called the lady upstairs a feckin’ witch she
won’t let us use her phone anymore. I’m still scared enough of her to make sure
she knows where I am and what I’m doing. I need to get home, let her know I
will be working all night. Explaining to the boss what I need to do to get the
overtime gets a few laughs in the office. I run home, it’s maybe three or four
miles, when you are young, you can run fast, like being chased by the old bill
fast.
I’m soon back at work for the already
too long shift, I have bag of crispy bits from the chip shop and a bounty, I feel
dead posh when I eat a bounty. There are two of us in this big old Victorian
print works, Justin and me. Justin is a long haired bespectacled tripped out
hippy, a fat John Lennon springs to mind and he’s about ten years older than
me, always has a rolled lit fag in his mouth. The long Svecia screen-printing
machine is ready to go when I arrive, Justin is sitting atop it cross-legged,
smoking and reading the NME. Tonight we are finishing a Charlie Rich LP, it is
having a gloss put on, also doing a David Bowie album called ‘Diamond Dogs’, it’s
having its final colour done, don’t know what happened earlier but by the
loading dock near the bogs there is a skip and it’s brimming with this album.
Someone somewhere fucked up. Also by the bogs there is a full size David Bowie stand
up cut out figure from the Aladdin Sane album, it has been defiled with goofy
teeth and large genitals, the foreman’s name is prominent and little notes have
been scribbled all over it.
Everyone has clocked out and there is just me
and Justin left, we spend about an hour of preparation and I am lining up
pallet loads of the unfinished album covers ready to go in the machines. David Bowie is first, it is done quickly
and I pull the loaded pallets one by one out of the auto stacker thingy at the
rear of the machine, the next load goes in. We notice how cold it is with the
extractors on and Justin turns them off, we shut the big iron framed Victorian windows,
this old building is fucking freezing. Bowie’s album is done and I deliberately
position the full pallets around the guillotine so the miserable bastard cannot
get to it in the morning.
The varnishing
of Charlie Rich’s LP ‘Behind Closed Doors’ is next, its one in the morning and
still fucking cold and I’m now wearing the miserable guillotine gits bobble
hat. I’m helping spread the varnish onto the silk screen from large tins, my
head is already spinning and I’m reminded of my Zoff plaster remover sniffing
phase way back when a couple of weeks ago.
I was woken by
the Irish foreman giving me the kiss of life. He smelt of old spice and tasted of
old Holborn tobacco. Apparently, I was not breathing, three or four hours have disappeared from my memory and once it was established I
was ‘alright’ the miserable guillotine bloke wrenched his bobble hat from my
head and called me a stupid little cunt. Justin was barely conscious and was being
given a fag and a right good talking to for turning the extractors off by the
boss. A cup of tea and a headache later I was on my way home, had to make my
own way home mind and fell asleep on the steps of the church half way down
Cable Street, probably still semi-conscious from oxygen deprivation, got home
in the afternoon and me mum told me off. I dared not tell her what happened;
she would have been up there punching heads. I left soon after that, got a job in
a Jewish wholesaler above the undercover in Petticoat Lane allocating and
packing woman’s dresses. I can still do a mean knot and have searched for David
Bowie’s Diamond Dogs vinyl LP cover printed by Augustus Martin for years, not
found one. Yet.
I wished I’d had thanked you grumpy guillotine
operator, I can’t remember your name, I now know you did your best to take me
under your wing to train me, I wasn’t and never paid any attention, I was
within an eighth of an inch of losing both hands, you nearly broke your hand
slamming the stop button. I cried in the toilets shortly after because I knew
that was an unwanted reality that came too close. I don’t even think you were ever
that grumpy. I have paid close attention to everything I do ever since; it’s
just one day, but one that is still silk-screened into my aged, know-better mind.
Labels:
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1973,
album covers,
charlie rich,
david bowie,
diamond dogs,
Mr taxi man,
print,
retro,
silkscreening,
svechia,
vinyl
Monday, 23 September 2013
Gem.
Immediately Gem is
engaging, breathlessly sparkly and making good eye contact which is strange for
me as most if not all people talk via the windscreen. You’re happy! I say with
a big smile, ‘No’ she replies and sighs. ‘I’m trying to get my daughter back,
she is four next month and they won’t let me see her’ My first surprise is that
she was old enough to even have children, she being so small, I would have
guessed her age at 14ish maybe a bit older. She is 23. ‘It’s my ex-boyfriend
he hurt her while I was at work’ I took her to the doctors, not knowing… Her
face is wet. ’I will get her back. He hurt her. He hurt her… I have stopped the
cab for a while now, just listening.
Do I have a judgement? Do
I dare? I believed her, a combination of harsh association with a vicious child
man/boyfriend that stubbed cigarettes out on a child. He disappeared, left her
with the burden of loss. Her family has left her with that burden too. She does
not have boyfriends anymore and is at college. Her incredible fortitude and positive
outlook looked unshakable, not a victim, not a ‘poor me.’
That was eight years
ago.
Very recently, I saw
her. A small young woman with another small young woman both exactly the same
size coming out of Boots in St Leonards, was it her daughter that was with her?
It was. How sure am I? I know how mums
are with their children. She was simply being a mum and my face was wet that’s how
I know.
Labels:
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burden,
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Hastings,
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mental health,
Mr taxi man,
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