Blood, Sweat And Chump Change
(Kirk Alex)
This book concerns the life and work of a self-pitying Los Angeles (or La La Land as he disgustedly refers to it) cab driver. Our hero?s goals are to make enough money to provide a halfway-decent roof over his head, pay his bills, have enough to eat and, hopefully meet people he may approve of. To do this he drives his cab and has been for the last couple of decades.
He is not a happy man. Most of the people he meets he thoroughly disapproves of or hates. There are three or four people in this book that our hero actually finds he approves of and these are the decent people that make his life and job worthwhile. Most of his customers, and these seem to be the only people he interacts with, are subjects for his internal misery.
His has greatest hatred for those people who only want short rides, due to the economics of the taxi business. This is one of the strands of the book which turns up again and again. If twenty or so pages go by without a tirade against people wanting short rides, we start missing it.
Our cab driver repeatedly tells us he is living near the edge of economic existence, and it appears he has become totally obsessive about it. Kirk Alex makes this one person?s thought-process, character and personality completely come alive to his reader. The other characters in this work are bit players and rarely appear for long - as they are seen purely through the mist of the main character?s hatred.
The structure of the book consists of short, and one long prose pieces, alternating with sections of verse which are the "vignettes" of the title. These "vignettes" are basically just prose put into a poetic-looking form and they read like prose. The real difference is that the stories are fact-based but the vignettes are idea-based. In a story, our hero will tell us of an incident which will be a cause for some annoyance; in the vignette he will just come out straight with the annoyance.
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- Body Politics
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