Vulgarity

I hauled my sick ass out of bed long enough to go downtown and renew my taxi driver's permit. I'm now in possession of a really disturbing wheeze/cough, a receipt for $60, and a license to drive a cab through 2007. Let the good times roll.

The bureau of licensing or whatever it is happens to be in a building directly across the street from the building where I worked right before I started driving a cab (the old company's since moved). So I got to thinking about what all's changed since then.

The answer is really not all that much. I have a different schedule now. I'm marginally more lonely, but also a little bit more confident, so that's basically a wash. I'm significantly more financially secure and self-aware. I know the city and surrounding area a whole lot better than I used to. I live in a different house, with different roommates. I'm a little older.

But the biggest real difference I've been able to notice is the casual vulgarity that's crept into my life. It's not so much that my morality or attitudes have changed, but that I now exist in a world where it's somehow become normal for me to become involved in long discussions about female genitalia with Hungarian immigrants. Or for someone to casually fire up a crackrock in the backseat of a car I'm driving without asking. People start talking to me about the explicit details of their sex lives, sex wants, and sex philosophies all the time. I have frank rules about bodily functions that I quickly share with those who seem like they might need to be informed. I no longer blink at violence, and know several different ways of incapacitating someone in close combat. I know where a couple of brothels, a few after-hours joints, and a whole lot of different places to buy drugs are. Hell, I even spent about a month or so walking around with a switchblade in my pocket.

So even if my moral compass hasn't shifted, the terrain has become radically different. I've now come in close contact with some of the least savory parts of both the city and human experience. And what's interesting to me is that my non-work life has changed relatively little. I live my cloistered little life in a clean, comfortable, and decently appointed home in a part of the city that's clean, safe, and almost unbearably hip. My friends are mostly people I met at or through the small liberal arts college I went to: they're young, smart, beautiful, middle-to-upper class, and they're artists, teachers, researchers, students, etc. They're beginning fascinating, fulfilling, and glamorous lives.

And in casual conversations with them, I'll suddenly find myself starting to tell the story about the "stanky poosie", or about how I fought a man with cerebral palsy or got scammed by a meth-geek - I catch myself talking in this way, about these things, and see a weird look in the eyes of the person I'm talking to, a look that's a mixture of concern, disgust, and fascination. When I talk to friends about my job I feel like I've changed enormously, and it saddens and scares me. So I talk less, lose friends, and spend more time writing in my room.

But when I stop and examine that feeling, when I look at what exactly it is that's changed so drastically, the only thing I really see is this growing knowledge of and acquaintance with aspects of human existence that many people seem to consider disgusting or inappropriate.

So my apologies if I occasionally talk about sex, race, and the size of my cock like it's perfectly normal to do so. I'm not trying to be crude or boastful (my dick's high-average, but hardly gargantuan and only "big" if you're small... damn, I'm doing it again). It just seems to come all too naturally these days.