"Hey, we've got a girl cab driver! Are you the Night Cabbie?"

Ick. Night Cabbie just hit an all time self-congratulatory low. Surely WW can find someone else to write this column who will offer readers a real window into the Portland nightlife rather than spend time and space building up her own ego. I can think of few things as boring as this column has been for the last few months. Ug.

 

Mmmmmmmno. No cause for conflict here. I think I can all agree with myself, since Cedric is not here to argue with, that this NC is a short story. It has erotica, a consistent first-person present voice,beginning/middle/end; each word is spelled right, and you can hear the voices. It's a ride in a Portland cab at night. From one viewpoint, basically a carful of hot women, talking unguardedly about sharp tongues. Note how those two words haul a lot of freight effortlessly.

The average male Portland WW reader cannot lick his eyebrows, and neither can you or I, but suddenly the human tongue appears in this story somehow, as a background character and a concrete detail for sensory engagement. I would bet everything down to my loincloth and a buffalo nickel that most readers finished this story.

And you were right, Cedric. No easy targets, just a few nice clean moments of All-American porn in the back seat of Night Cabbie's spotless vehicle. It was pretty damn good for me.

I now direct your attention, Cedric old bean, to the 100-word fiction contest in WW. I have every faith in your ability to make a worthy entry, having spotted your posts everywhere like a pox of Cedricism. Grand prize is good coffee. Although the limit is one per writer, I think I'll do ten of them, just for the practice. Now is the chance for critics everywhere to write something short and brilliant. (cf. New Yorker cartoon of man reclining in bed, smoking a cigarette, facing the viewer. Caption: "Everybody's a critic!") It's also a golden opportunity to prove how easy it is to write as short as Night Cabbie does.

Here's one thing I learned about the craft from reading NC over the last seven years: You can create a quick mood with music, simply by invoking a soundtrack that is a common meme among WW readers, and set the stage from there, "as hard as a public-house sign" (Kipling). It takes between 30 seconds and one minute to read Night Cabbie, so there's not much time to tell the story.

Going to miss your words in the back of WW, Night Cabbie. Good luck.

NC's art is finding the heart of short moments in an 8-hour shift, when someone really interesting or stupidly brilliant gets in the cab. There's a spark. Adventures loom ahead or behind. Horns honk, dogs bark, fares rant, in a cab racing somewhere across the soft underbelly of Portland.

NC3 better be damn good. Like most readers, I'm used to being entertained when I flip to the back pages first... So the other morning I'm having breakfast at Noah's Bagels on Cirrus, reading WW, and a total stranger asks to have the newspaper when I go. Sure, no problem. I leave it open on Night Cabbie's page.

 

Ah...NC2 warms up with another opus of "me-me-me-me-me-meeeeeeeeee...."

Good lord woman: how many more columns will be headlined "Are You the Night Cabbie?" or the like??

Let me count the ways:

12/27/2006."Hey, you're the Night Cabbie, right?!"

8/30/2006. "Oh my god, it's my cab driver!"

3/15/2006. "Oh hey, it's you!"

11/15/2006. I'm always being asked where I'm from.

6/14/2006. "You're a pretty good driver, for a girl."

3/16/2005. Being a girl in this job is not usually an issue

6/15/2005. "You seem a rather odd sort to be a cabdriver"

5/4/2005. I'm a reasonably bright individual...

4/27/2005. "God, your hair is so beautiful-please, can I touch it?"

NC2, you're not good, but GOD you're consistent!

Lesbians back for another run, too, this week, I see.

But how will anyone get a chance to use their tongue on the irresistable Cabbarella if she won't stop licking herself so persistently?

 

Any moment now, Cedric's mom is going to chew us out again for making so much racket down here...

 

Yay, it worked! This column was run for one reason only, and that was to wind Cedric up. Two years ago, when I wrote it, I told the copy chief to pull it, because it sounded like I was just stroking myself. But I wrote him last week saying, "hey, now that I seem to have my own personal cheering section that accuses me of stroking myself no matter _what_ I write, let's publish the old "I want to do the Night Cabbie column!"

Cedric, count how many columns I've written, and then calculate the percentage that are represented by the above beginnings. And anyway, how the fuck do you think conversations _start_ anyway? "God, you're an ugly bitch," or "you must be stupid if you do this job." You may also want to ask _any_ female cab driver how often she gets many of these opening sallys, or many like them.

I also enjoy how you cheerfully ignore how "I'm a reasonably bright individual" later goes on to make fun of how stupidly phobic I am about math, that it's essentially a set-up for a punchline at my own expense. As are, in fact, many of those you cite above.

Oh, and then if _you're_ not as math-phobic as I am, go calculate the percentage of columns in which I display my own idiocy by getting lost, ripped off, or otherwise make fun of myself. Oh, wait, self-deprecating would somehow become self-aggrandizing in Cedric's Bizarro World...

Example: the "hair being beautiful" was due to my friend/passenger being on Ecstasy, and the _column_ (rather than the header) was actually about my being a fucking idiot and leaving my hazards on for so long that I needed a jump from a rival cab company.

Not that you'd know that, reading your usual critjism...