Taxes

Having reignited the old flame for pumping iron, we have been taking cabs around the most isolated and primitive -- except for minimum low wage finishing school of counter service -- of our civilization. Exercise facilities are usually hidden under peak-roofed metal bunkers in the back of Costco parking lots or tractor dealerships so you have to take a cab. To do this is to purchase ones self a ticket to the weird theater of the elderly, insane and obese. In a military town in Georgia we were delighted by a very large woman driver and her very slight copilot hidden under a mound of potato chip bags. Also prominently featured was the couple's bouncing baby boy, bouncing standily between the seats on the transmission. In Columbia, sc we had a driver who took us to the bar while sounding exactly like the actor Craig Robinson from the office series. Texarkana has a toothless old hack who gets autographs of travelers on the back of a small notepad. Not on the paper, but on the cardboard back. There's a big guy in davenport iowa who sound's like a girl on the phone and is the only cab in town; his rates are quite cheap in addition.

There is quite a coot in orange Texas I think who drives a cab as an alternative to working at the Texaco station, where theonly benefit you get is a free wheelchair she said. Having prospered in California as a " stay at home hippie" for much of her life, she finds drivng a cab a natural way to do as little as possible. This woman bellowed many times the word "tink" in an effort to convince her passengers that Sandy Duncan, who is from Orange, played tinkerbell in Peter Pan, which is not true. She has new teeth and is wracked with emotion when she drives past the Texas roadhouse restaurant, so much that she gave our front seat passenger a deadarm. This was on the way back from a gym that appeared to have been the site of numerous cub scout meetings pre-renovation. She couldn't find the gym exactly because they had "built all these houses and shit."