Cablog

Ouch!

The golden rule of driving is to never hit anyone or anything. Last night I hit another vehicle, which is far better than hitting a person, I guess. Well, at least it's worth being somewhat philosophical.

It's my first 'mistake' in over 20 years yet still it's annoying. I wasn't tired, it was early in the shift. It was heavy traffic but what's new ? In failing to anticipate a sudden change in traffic flow, I simply made a bad mistake. A $300 and three demerit-point mistake.

Actually I feel worse for the boss, who only recently had the cab repaired from another accident. Such is life as a cab operator - one is forever lodging insurance claims. Luckily neither driver was injured from the solid impact yet strangely, my airbags didn't deploy.

Even more suprising was a third vehicle up-front, with no visible damage, got involved. I looked at his vehicle then asked, 'What's up with you ?'. 'Aww....I got a bit of whiplash'. After that I refused to talk to him. Idiot. Just like me, I suppose.

Blogroll Update 13

BourbonBird is no more. Say hello to the new, improved and slightly chastened Miss Q. 

Paradise Driver is a cabbie blog by an ex-cop from San Fransisco. Wil Kyle is, 'about 45% Cherokee Indian and 45% Irish and 10% "other" (whatever came over the back fence while great-great grandpappy was out plowing the fields)'. Now based in Hawaii, Wil blogs about cab life and posts stunning images of paradise.

The Old Blue Truck was the vehicle John Polson used 40 years ago to travel around the Commonwealth with a bunch of mates. They have in recent times rejoined to travel the same roads again. John also operates The Fisherman based on the Gold Coast. It lists some great fishing adventures from around the world.

Belongum's Blog is by...Belongum, 'proudly of Bardi (NW West Australian Aboriginal) and Irish (oh look - this mob are 'Aboriginal' too) descent'. He's 'an electrician by trade, a soldier, a sailor, a youth worker, an education officer, a consultant to community groups, a (new) father, and I'm often found working out and about in the regional communities of Western Australia'. An incisive writer and welcome addition to blogging.

Veni Vidi Bolgi is operated by Phil, an 'over 50, socially liberatarian, economically illiterate, over-opinionated, cat lover'. Forgive him, he's in Queensland but ex Sydneyite.  Phil is a vehicle modeller, home brewer and lover of small fonts. Grrr..

And now for a unique blog. Outdoors Pro is, 'The inane ramblings and photography of a 40 year old Alaskan rafting, hiking and glacier guide. Plus an Oregon Pro Ski Patroller'. Check out Mark Neson's fantastic images of the Pacific North West.

Spiking

There are news reports of a large increase in drink-spiking victims presenting to hospitals. The drugs identified are primarily GBH, ketamine (horse tranquiller) and liquid ecstasy, plus epilepsy and sleeping drugs.

Occasionally at work, when I think about it, I inquire of young female passengers if they know anyone who’s had their drink spiked. I’ve made about a half dozen inquiries in the last six months. Disturbingly, passengers have all answered in the affirmative.

Last night my passenger un-hesitantly responded, ‘Yes, a friend we were out with recently was a spiking victim’. ‘Where was this ?’, I asked her. ‘King Street Wharf’, she responded, a place other passengers have previously identified. This is a popular area of trendy bars, frequented by large groups of middle-class young adults on the grog.

It’s a crowd who indulge in exotic beers, spirits and cocktails until the early hours. The King Street bars’ ambiance borders on that of dance clubs, yet still retains enough bar characteristics to be able to mix socially and meet new friends. In short, music levels allow one to hold a decent conversation, barely.

Not so that of dance clubs, where many of this crowd move to after midnight in order to dance till dawn. There the dominant vibe is the music, LOUD music, which precludes any meaningful conversation. A vibe invariably enhanced by the use of ecstasy, GBH, speed, cocaine, and/or ice. Some of the drugs used by drink-spikers.

Fortunately in the case mentioned by last night’s passenger, her group of friends stayed together and accompanied the victim home in a taxi. In fact none of these cases related to me had pursued medical treatment or lodged police reports.

Quite possibly, and I’m extrapolating here, the symptoms of drink spiking are not unlike those of recreational drugs, except for being much heavier dosages. Drugs which many people are blasé about, from regular use in dance clubs.

According to a current report more Australians are using ecstacy per head of population than any other country. This is why.

Maybe due to the spike-victim's condition, their symptoms are not considered debilitating enough to be life threatening, and so are never reported. However the amount of unreported cases is most worrying. Anecdotal evidence I’m hearing suggests most victims are being escorted home by friends, thereby avoiding official statistics.

It's apparent clubbers can comfortably handle single doses of party drugs and still retain the ability to look after themselves. However two doses in close succession, maybe the result of a drink-spike, and the effects are often devastating.

In the short space of thirty minutes, the second dose will kick-in and bang, they’re gone, to be ‘taken care of’ by the closest person at hand.

Needless to say, people must watch out for each other when partying on chemicals. And if they think someone is just nodding-off under the influence, having ‘a good time’ like, they may actually be spiking victims, who are quietly dying.

Making Promises

A fella around forty years of age wearily climbed in the cab, ordered a suburb, then switched on his phone. Immediately a series of message alerts sounded, causing him to loudly groan.

‘Trouble ?’, I asked. ‘It’s the wife’, he replied, ‘I told her I’d be home five hours ago’. ‘Don’t worry about it’, I said, ‘just tell her you love her’. ‘Nah, that doesn’t work anymore’, he explained, ‘this time it’s divorce, for sure’.

This happens all the time for some blokes. They can't honour promises made with the best intentions. ‘No worries darling’, they’ll say, ‘I’ll just stay for the one and be straight home’. Hours later, they find themselves still drinking, despite being acutely aware of an impending storm at home.

Last night a fella insisted it’s all to do with, 'secret men’s business' - a code of conduct women simply don’t understand. ‘I couldn’t leave a mate drinking by himself, could I ?’. ‘Why not ?’. ‘Well...he’s a mate !?’. Fair enough.

On Friday night a passenger bemoaned being caught once again by the dreaded shout. ‘It’s impossible to go out for just one drink, 'cause you’re obliged to shout the group. Next thing it’s midnight and the missus rings about your promise to be ‘home soon’.

Recently I suggested to one fella he could always blame me. ‘Tell her the cab had an accident and you had to help-out directing traffic, until the police arrived’. ‘What, for three hours ?’, he asked incredulously. ‘Yeah, then you had to walk back to the highway and find another cab’. ‘Won’t work’, he insisted, ‘she’ll just ask to see my Cabcharge receipts’.

On Friday, ABC radio host Richard Glover claimed if he ever decided to get a tattoo, it would consist of one word on his forearm. 'That word would be 'Sorry'. This way when I arrive home late,' he laughed, 'and fall in the door dead drunk, no other explanation would be needed'. It's surely worth a try.

Last weekend one fella insisted making promises to be home at a certain time is futile. He has an arrangement with his wife which allows him to come home at any time he wants. An arrangement she demanded he comply with whenever he went out with the boys. Namely at whatever hour he arrived home, no matter what state he was in, he has to satisfy her sexually.

He reckoned she takes great pleasure in taunting him, ‘Okay big fella, let’s see what you’ve got, she'll laugh. Let’s see you get it up’. Cruel. ‘It hard enough being pissed’, he explained, ‘without her laughing at me. And it’s not like she helps out or anything. She knows if I fail, I’ve got to do the washing for the next week !’.

I asked him, ‘So is a night out on the grog with your mates worth doing the washing for a whole week ?’. ‘No way’, he replied, ‘I make sure that I never get drunk enough to be useless in the cot. And that’s only possible if I leave the pub at a reasonable hour’.

Perfect. A win/win deal for all.

Tales of Larry

Coming home from work this morning I was caught by a short, heavy downpour. It had been raining intermittently throughout the evening but nothing like this.

Figuring I was about to be drenched running from the car into the house, I made to curse the rain, before quickly checking myself. This was nothing compared to what cyclone ravaged residents of Far North Queensland are currently experiencing. At least I had an intact house to shelter in.

Earlier in the evening I received a call from a friend in Innisfail. ‘Mate, it’s un-fucking-believable’, exclaimed Chris, a man not easily given to hyperbole. ‘It’s an absolute disaster. There’s people here sleeping in cars and tents, and it’s still raining !’.

Little wonder given Innisfail was directly in the path of Cyclone Larry, the strongest Australian cyclone in living memory. Pretty much every house is damaged with many being demolition jobs.

From the air it appears as if God cranked up the whipper-snipper and spent an hour indiscriminately slashing everything reachable. And he wasn’t using some Home Hardware, electric model either. We’re talking industrial slashing over a wide area with estimates of a billion dollars damage to homes, farmlands and infrastructure.

Chris is the mate I mentioned earlier who lives on a yacht, the Madame Wong. With a real sense of foreboding he’d quickly moved beforehand to secure the boat. Normally he’s located in Innisfail township, at a deep water mooring on the Johnstone River. Fully aware this was the last place to be once Larry arrived, he moved the Madame far up a tributary, deep in the mangroves.

There he’d lashed the boat to either side of the banks, using 200 foot of heavy-duty marine ropes fitted with spring-tensioners. Yet this barely saved him from the onslaught of 300 kph (175mph) winds. ‘Mate, the boat was airborne !’ he said. No mean feat as the steel-hulled Madame Wong weighs twenty-eight tons. Luckily damage is superficial.

A few days ago I spoke to friends in Mission Beach, an idyllic tourist village a half-hour south of Innisfail. One couple live in an area surrounded by tropical wet-lowland rainforest. ‘You know the rainforest’, my friend said, ‘well it’s gone. All that’s left are bare trunks, stripped of the canopy and foliage. We can see right through to the street now where once it was totally obstructed’. They were lucky, as the impenetrable bush afforded them some protection from the devastating winds. The only damage sustained was relatively minor, from falling timber landing on the house.

Not so lucky was another mate at South Mission Beach. His elevated home opposite Dunk Island faces the ocean and was totally exposed. Throughout the cyclone eight local families took refuge in his sunken basement games room. Typical. He's a good bloke like that, yet lost the top half of his house. And just to rub salt into the wounds he was uninsured. Cruel.

However as Chris pointed out, the most amazing aspect of Cyclone Larry was the lack of fatalities, or even serious injury. For an event rated worse than Cyclone Tracy, which claimed 70 lives, this is unbelievable and a testament to modern building codes and the ability of the locals to withstand some of the worst weather nature can mount.

Best wishes to all of them.

(image enlarges)

For Mountains

This week has been marked for me with news of an old friend's passing. In particular, today holds special significance as I recall old mates no longer around - Paul, Linda, Mark, Bill, Eugene, Pete and Ammo. Plus Mick, Red and Fido ! Please, forgive me this indulgence 

Fringe Dwellers

'These people are so stimulated, so high, so out of control....they are the most out of control, the most violent human beings I've ever seen in my life'.

Dr Gordian Fulde, Director of the Emergency Department at St Vincent's Hospital talking about hard-core icers, or crystal methamphetamine users. Australia now has twice as many ice addicts as heroin addicts.

These are the people I worry most about in the cab, the ice addicts. They can be easily identified by their wasted physiques, pallid complexions, frenetic behaviour, their attire whatever. Having a sixth sense about these desperate fringe dwellers, I avoid them like the plague. In February I posted on ice users in Crystal Hell.

Last night's ABC Four Corners program was devoted to ice addicts and it made for compelling viewing. If you don't know of this epidemic check it out, if only to be aware of how bad drug addiction has become. Ice addicts make heroin addicts look good.

Shocked

In the cab last night I heard a most disturbing remark. Early in the evening three nurses around forty years of age travelled to an inner City restaurant. They were in high spirits laughing and joking whilst discussing various colleagues and patients.

I wasn’t paying much attention being content to listen to the swimming action from the Commonwealth Games. Anyway, medical jargon is a language all it’s own and precludes outside interest or interpretation.

So when the passengers noticeably lowered their voices, indicating a sensitive topic, I was disinclined to eavesdrop. Until that is, one passenger broke the muffled chat by audibly declaring,

‘No way, listen. Everybody has killed somebody. If they believe they haven’t, then they’re kidding themselves’.

This statement shocked me, not so much by the content as it’s common knowledge hospitals kill people through negligence. But more so due to the breezy tone by which it was delivered. The message being, 'Hey, that's life'. Excuse the pun.

An hour later, two well dressed women were immersed in a similar conversation discussing ‘theatre’ and ‘locums’. I figured they were medical practitioners of some sort. ‘Are you guys nurses ?’, I asked. ‘No’, came the reply, ‘but we know a lot about them’.

After relating the comment by my earlier passenger, I asked them for an opinion. ‘Well, nothing is a surprise in hospitals', one replied. 'You just have to look at the way some nurses drink - it’s a wonder they make it to work sometimes. In fact a well known hangover cure used by nurses is a shot of oxygen’.

I suppose one shouldn’t be too shocked at such revelations given the life and death pressures nurses are subjected to. Or even when they display a blase attitude to what must often be an awful job.

Yet still, to hear such comments from health professionals is a little disconcerting. Hopefully when I next go to hospital, there’s plenty of oxygen on hand.

Smashed

Friday is my music video night on Rage. Not because I’m a music nut but purely because it’s on late and ABC TV is my choice of accompaniment as I wade thru the weekly backlog of unread news inserts - Media, IT, Motor, that sort of stuff.

First though I have to mute the insufferable Will Anderson and his tired old routine of political sniping. Hey Will, my advice to you mate is, start_drinking. Heavily.

Drinking. For the last few weeks on Rage they’ve run an incredible clip which captivates me as soon as I hear it. So mesmerising is the music and storyline I never seem to catch the artist’s name or song title.

It opens in the early evening. A young caucasian woman going home from work - it may be New York - stops at a liquor store. She’s middle class I guess and dressed as a regular looking young professional. Kind of pretty, made-up face yet nothing special.

Anyway, she proceeds to purchase two carry-bags of hard liquor and heads home to her walk-up apartment. Immediately upon entering she cracks open a can of beer, considers it briefly and downs it. Next she goes to the lounge room, sits down and flicks the top off a large bottle of vodka, or gin and starts chugaluging it. She’s on a mission.

Over the top of this a guy croons a slow groove ballad, hypnotic and ethereal with the chorus line, ‘I’ve been thinking about you baby..’.

Soon she’s on to her second bottle whilst slowly shedding items of clothing around the apartment. Next she’s sitting on the toilet chuggaluging another bottle of clear liquor before watching some television through bleary eyes, cradling a large cocktail glass. Just for a change I guess.

Staggering back to the kitchen wearing only briefs and a top, she’s greeted by a table bearing four large empty bottles. Slumping precariously onto a chair she struggles to comprehend it all, after bingeing through the lot with a calculated vengeance. Lost love is the theme with her misery now complete.

The music’s beautifully paced against the woman’s slow alcoholic destruction. The camera elicits a certain voyeuristic fascination, contrasting the apartment’s softly lit comforts with her fearless and breathtaking indulgence.

By now she’s absolutely shit-faced, barely conscious. Rising from the kitchen chair, she dresses and inexplicably goes back out into the night ! Stumbles across the road, staggers down the sidewalk, brushes off an accosting sleazebag before entering a dimly-lit park.

There she finds a bench and gingerly lays down on her back, staring off into the night sky with the stupid grin of a smashed drunk. Mission accomplished. The clip segues to her tumbling endlessly down a circular staircase with no bottom, then fades to black with Barber’s strings overlaid, or something similarly funereal.

It’s a beautifully balanced piece, with the protagonist’s role convincingly played by a professional who’s obviously done some serious character preparation on binge drinking. Scary yet enthralling.

So, I’m wondering if anyone knows this clip and can tell me who’s it by...

UPDATE : Doh ! Googling for Rage unearthed the tune. It's called Live With Me, Massive Attack's latest single. Full video or interruptus version.

UPDATE 2 : Reader Herman finds the actress, 'I wasn't acting, I was really drunk'.

Tough Gig

At 1.30 am today whilst dropping passengers in George Street opposite 3 Wise Monkeys, I was hailed by two dodgy looking characters. Usually this early on a Tuesday there are plenty of cabs, so I was relieved when the cab behind swooped around to collect them.

If there’s one place in the City I won’t pick-up late at night it’s the cinema district of George Street. With a myriad of bars, hotels, clubs, sex shops and amusement parlours the joint’s a magnet for low-budget arseholes.

However the swooping cab barely stopped, before changing his mind and roaring off. Understandable as they were big men in their early twenties, tattooed and staggering. Having no choice I stopped alongside to drop-off, only to have my passengers leave the doors open for them.

One climbed in the front and the other in the back. ‘Where to ?’, I asked nervously, half expecting somewhere way out west. ‘Navy base’, came the response in an American accent. Immediately I relaxed and headed for Woolloomooloo.

‘You fellas off a US boat ?’, I asked. ‘Yeah, from Hawaii’. They are visiting Sydney for five nights before heading to the Gulf on a six month deployment.

The front seat passenger addressed his mate, ‘So what happened man ?’. ‘What..’. ‘We never got laid’. ‘It’s Monday night, what do you expect’. ‘So, there were plenty of girls’. They’d been drinking earlier at Jacksons on George, before hitting 3 Wise Monkeys.

‘Anyway’, continued the rear passenger, ‘it’s hard with a two o’clock curfew’. ‘Doesn’t matter man’, his mate replied, ‘we had eight hours. You just didn’t fire’. ‘Bullshit’, it’s...you know man, it’s the American thing..’. ‘Yeah, I guess, but we had fun anyway’.

As we pulled up at the Naval Base I suggested they check a nightclub at Central Station, under the back-packer’s hostel. ‘It’s full of travellers’, I told them, ‘they just want some fun while they’re here’. ‘Yeah man, that’s all we want too’, replied the front seat passenger. This lifted his spirits enough to double the fare, by way of a tip.

On departing I wondered if the comment, ‘it’s the American thing’ was due to the War in Iraq or simply a cultural clash.

Maybe their navvy ranking counted against them at up-market Jacksons on George. Yet they should have fitted right-in with the 3 Wise Monkey's younger demographic. Also I doubted whether bad behaviour was a factor as I've only ever encountered exemplary US naval personnel in the cab, as were these two.

In the end I decided the comment was more likely due to them being American serviceman amongst young people, many of whom are circumspect over the War in Iraq. Quite possibly the Gulf naval patrols are equated with that war. If so, their R n’ R visit to Sydney is a tough gig in an Allied country. Though I hope I'm wrong about this.