Taxi Tales:

By Louie de Palma
Reader Road Warrior

Thinking outside the box is generally perceived as something to strive for whenever one finds themselves confronted with a problem that lies within said box. A box is more a less a square or derived from squares.  A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is never a square and these shapes can come in varying sizes and depths and often it takes a triangle to decipher exactly where the parameters of the box/ square lie. My point being that sometimes  its hard to tell if your original thought is inside a box  at all and what the appropriate thought in said box is in  the first place.  In the last week alone I’ve been regaled by customers thoughts that have left me wondering what box I’ve been in, what box they’ve been in,  who has been inside and what is out?

Lets warm up to this thought exercise with one of our common scenarios. I’m driving a drunk man explain  to me how he got his first DUI.  Usually the stories are petty similar, a cut and dry case of the drivers overconfidence, sprinkled with a bit of infraction skepticism , and ending with blowing barely over the limit.  We all know that story.  This outside the box thinker though had a much different reason for driving that fateful day.  this is what he slurred to me

“ I wouldn’t have driven, except for The night before I fell on my face trying to walk and scabbed it all up and my elbow. I didn’t want to fall over again. So I drove.”

This logic may seem shoddy at first, it did to me as well, and apparently the judge. Upon further pondering however I found this abstract thinkers thoughts to be  nothing short of flawless. Based on the evidence provided walking lead to injury thus a different method of getting home had to be decided. Driving is basically sitting, the opposite of  walking, therefore completely safe.    This man is a revolutionary inspiring thinker .

Now that we ‘ve had a dose of the normal stuff lets expand our minds further with ghosts. I’ve lived my whole life under the impression that activity from the paranormal existed mainly because a spirit is disgruntled due to some sort of murder mystery.  Wrong. As it turns out  as this lady explained heighted ghost activity is created when one smudges counter clockwise rather than clockwise.  It seems so obvious now. For those of you who don’t know what smudging is let me explain. Smudging is the practice of mainly Caucasian women burning dryed bushes,  a practice that was racially appropriated from Native American culture and is used to ward off primarily bad deceased Caucasian spirits. I could not find any information on proper smudging technique except to start from the farthest room and work your way out so that a  tricksy ghost didn’t t simply slip past you and remain in a missed room.in light of this new evidence however found by the Native Ghost warding studies of my dear passenger we now know that this is not only was wrong but potentially dangerous.  For centuries perhaps not only have White ladies been improperly smudging by not going clockwise they have been summunoning ghosts rather than banishing them! For all we know Ill informed White ladies could have been inviting evil spirits into our world for decades. It’s time we stop the madness . NO longer should we allow dryed bushes to be sold willy nilly at every health food store and farmers market, its dangerous , one wrong rotation and boom evil spirits! Sage and other hazardous and ghost summoning paraphernalia should require the same strict background checks as firearms. Or leave the ghost banishing to the native peoples that know what they are doing.

Lastly I talked to a man that had an interesting spin on coyotes.  He was from New Jersey which apparently has a pesky and  large coyote population that is not only difficult to manage but not native to New Jersey. Now my older gentleman passenger on the surface seemed  to be just that, an older gentleman passenger.  However he turned out to be quite the detective. He didn’t merely just think , gee sure are a lot of coyotes he wanted to know why. So old gentleman (we’ll call him OG), called fish and game and was like

“Hey why are there so many coyotes in an unnatural environment?”

And they were like

“We didn’t put them here.”

So OG thought long and hard and came to the conclusion that the car insurance companies had planted them there knowing they would flourish and devastate the deer population. Why? Because hitting a coyote does a lot less damage to the many cars in New Jersey as opposed to hitting a deer. Fewer Deer equals fewer payouts for car collisions.  Our man OG unearthed one howling conspiracy.

These are my  favorite outside the box ideas from customers I wish I had more time to divulge other outlandish  ideas from passengers such as  blowing up forest fires with fighter jets , and peoples loose interpretation of groceries that seems to mean lottery tickets but alas I must get back to driving and discussing theories on the road. It’s a tough job but some bodies got to do it. After All if no one is reinventing  the wheel  we might all be just dragging boxes.