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I've had cabs all over my mind this evening. I took one home from the airport, and felt myself both exhilarated and disgusted by the thought of going back to work in a couple of days. I'm convinced very firmly of two things at this point: that I need to buy a cab, and that I should be in another city pursuing an ambition a couple of years from now (these two impulses are not as irreconcilable or contradictory as they may seem).

When I got home, there was a delightful holiday present waiting for me from some friends, with the request that I "get back to writing [my] blog." Then I finally got around to checking my email, and received these comments, which initially made me angry until I realized how patently absurd they were. The blog has offered compelling visual evidence that I'm a white guy, and I'd offer the very fact that several people seem to have assumed I was black (and numerous pieces of indirect evidence contained in posts) as a relatively good basis for assuming that I have no deep-seated race hates for members of any particular ethnic group. There's also good evidence that I'm even chill with the handicapped and people who aren't heterosexual, I don't think I've ever discussed religion here.

Young? Guilty. Obsessed with my crotch? Equally guilty (who isn't?). The discussions of violence against women, not hitting on customers, and lack of a steady relationship would seem to suggest a general lack of sexism, oppressive machismo, or sexual objectification.

I'm not taking the time to defend myself from someone who serves largely to confirm another running theme (that while some of my co-workers are awesome, some others are absolute morons) because I think they merit rebuttal - they obviously don't. What's interesting to me is that my first reaction was "that's it, I'm not allowing any more anonymous comments."

Which is silly, of course, as I've intentionally kept myself anonymous to everyone save my friends and family (though if this woman refers my superintendents here with a complaint about the racist young nigger who listens to the hippity-hop in his cab, they'd probably be able to deduce who I was in about five minutes, provided they didn't also think I was black). I started this blog as a means of venting/exulting/meditating about my job in a way that people can access if they want to, and thus save my loved ones from having to hear me do these things too much in our face-to-face interactions.

What makes this space interesting to me now, though, is that people who have no idea who I am will occasionally stumble upon it, and build in their heads this character of a young cab-driver in Portland who may or may not be black, kind, generous, cruel, lazy, racist, lonely, uber-hip, funny, healthy, conceited, depressed, etc.

And I'd been thinking about how cool that was, and was going to check my email before I wrote an entry for R & M, and got more evidence of this phenomenon, and I thought it was very auspicious. So I'll probably be back to goofing around with this thing more often, but I'll warn you that this blog will likely be leaning more toward steam-of-conscious ramblings about work and the blog, and less toward recounting particular incidents that took place. It'll all be very meta-.

(That's fancy talk for "boring")