Taxi Driven

Tales from a day in the big city

Morning was early.  Kindness, plentiful.
Sadness was ever-present.  Challenges, manifest.
The morning journey down coached me in fortitude. 
 The refreshment break - ham & cheese - hardly peppering me with joy, of any sort.
But the sun refused to darken; my mood refused despair.
The Palace, now a curious convention of pleasure, and familiarity.
The Park, now a pleasant break from fume & horn, and other - rather - accumulative risk.
And so I lose myself - less & less each time I come. 
GPS standing for "guided prat system", didn't you know?
"HI" says the Holiday Inn.  "Friends" says the Facebook poster.  And meanwhile, power - and MAniiiii, its faithful companion - eagerly present their wares.
I wander past wellcomes various; I pause under the shadow of quakerly partnerings; I stutter unusually as I doubleback for virgin train ticket.  
Or maybe the stuttering, these days, ain't so strange.  Maybe it's quite normal to feel out of place.  Maybe these places must belong to non-humans.  Maybe non-humans is the race we now run.
I stutter, but also struggle, to understand MAniiiii.  I stutter, but also struggle, to figure out why.  To figure out why its very presence - its whiff, its odour of all-presuming assumptions; its underlying catcalls of crazy half-truths - should send shivers of disgrace, disgust, disability & fear ... down a spine I can no longer proudly call mine.
And I wonder if I am no longer fit for the secular.  I wonder if the secular has hurt me in some dreadful way.  I wonder if the secular has hurt me so much - in this dreadful I speak of, suspect and must reject - that in the absence of chances I might have had for redemption, there is little left for me to expect - 
except, mebbe, the achievements of others I treasure and love; achievements I can never bring myself to doubt.
Neither can I yearn, any more, for my own place.  The only space I find is a vacuum in which I speak gloriously to no one; read gloriously of nothing; act gloriously out of inglorious isolation.
And yet hope is a strange bedfellow.  A strange comfort indeed.  Whilst it is the last thing we may lose, it is the first we may re-encounter.  
And so whilst there is a breath in my body, I shall NOT give in.  
Oh that disconcerting ability of MAniiiii's ... to turn our heads sexily, as we touch red lips of perfect engagement - only to stumble across equally severe souls of effervescent no-show.
But no, no, no.  
No.  I shall NOT allow the sadnesses of violent inexactitude to overcome our desire for simple, human-sized, nature-tended qualities ...
of cool assertion; 
of careful being; of lovable error; of noble intention; 
of inexact implementations that fail to hit expectation;
 of tear-trending sorrows ...
of everything which makes us wrong which - so precisely - is this thing which makes us just right.


A train home, then; a missed bus back; a wait, a chat or two, a taxi-driven rush; a recovery of a piebald semblance of occasional sanity, too.  
And then - all of a sudden - a desire to fight MAniiiii renews itself with grace: 
not in its being exactly, though.
MAniiiii is something we can all learn to put to good use; even as its excess confuses angrily.
MAniiiii is something we MUST all learn to put to good use; even as its presence still tries to drag us remorselessly like dead cattle, on rope of our own curiously excited hanging.
Rather - I would say - in its misuse ... or, dare I say, its abuse? 
It's here we must deal with MAniiiii so much better.
Too much leads to power; power leads to abuse; abuse leads to hurt; hurt - ultimately - leads to the incapacity of self to exhibit what self once could have been so wondrously.
To save the planet, we need simply to become extinct.
To save humanity, we need to redefine MAniiiii.
Only then will we redefine you & me, for the final future good of mine & yours - and those to come.
"Oh, and keep the change mate, won't you?!"