Letter to a (not so) Young Author

Nearly four years ago, in the ancestor of this space, e.g. the first "incarnation" of Night Thoughts At Noon, I talked about how, at age 52, I had decided to hang up the idea of becoming a celebrity author, seeing as how there are no more such things as celebrity authors anyway, and regard my non-blog writing as a hobby rather than an obsession:  http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/search?q=Vanity+press

It's okay to be obsessed with a dream until you reach a certain age, say, 35. If you haven't gotten your foot on to the first rung of the Starlit Stairway by the time you're 35, you should probably subject yourself to some agonizing reappraisal.

Well, since I never did dream of movie or Broadway stardom, nor of becoming a rock star (well, okay, every male in my generation, myself included, has fantasized about being a rock star, but "fantasy" and "dream" are not the same thing. A dream is a wish your heart makes. A fantasy is just a wet dream. Anyone who can't distinguish between a genuine dream and a fantasy generally ends up on Thorazine) I cut myself a few extra years' slack. After all, Henry Miller was 43 when Tropic of Cancer saw print.

Me, in my dreams. (Up to age 35, that is. After age 35, I no
dreamed of being Tom Petty; I dreamed of owning him, as
in, "Yeah, I'm Tom Petty's manager. What's he worth to you?")

But I went past 43 and kept on going. If you follow the link above, you'll see that by age 52 I had decided that while dreaming is all well and good, it was unlikely that I was ever going to be in Scribners' stable of authors.

It's not that I'm not good enough. Of course I'm good enough. So are a lot of you. But you know the cliche: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Cliche, sure. But as an author once said, "That cliches are cliches because they contain dollops of truth is as much a truth as it is a cliche."*

Since nobody reads anymore, nobody knows anything about the publishing business. But there's a showbiz cliche that applies to book publishing as surely as it applies to Broadway and Hollywood: "You can't get a job unless you have an agent, and you can't get an agent unless you've had a job."

True. And in the book publishing world, you can't get an agent unless you're already famous, or unless you come to that charlatan, that crook, that sleazeball, the agent, recommended by somebody who is already famous. If Cormac McCarthy tells his agent, "Check out this guy Kelley Dupuis, he's brilliant," I'm in with Flynn. If not, I'm down in the subway declaiming my poetry with a jar next to me for tips, and a lot of people shaking their heads in disbelief as they shuffle by.

So, at age 52 I decided, "Screw agents. Screw the Avenue of the Americas. Screw all so-called 'real' publishers."  I will no longer worry about leaving a snail-trail across some "literary agent's" driveway as I crawl up to that most-likely-only-semi-literate douchebag's front door to beg, beg, beg him for a favor. Screw him and screw his sleazy business. From now on, I write purely for the joy of it, for the delectation of myself and a few friends. And if I never get on the Oprah Winfrey Show, who cares? She always made me faintly queasy anyway. All that hugging and stagey weeping. Eek. (I know that Oprah's audience is 98% female. Do women really fall for that crap?)

Sour grapes? Yeah, maybe. But Gore Vidal pointed out a few years ago that the audience for serious literature in America amounts to perhaps 7,000 people. Out of 250 million. Seven thousand people.

Hey, everyone. Things like serious literary fiction and poetry are going (or have already gone) the way of chess. Soon they will be (poetry already is) a miniscule niche market, capturing the interest of only a handful of enthusiasts, ignored by the 250 million who only want to watch CSI and play idiotic computer games like Captain Anthrax.



Given this state of affairs, why should I worry about whether I become the next Ernest Hemingway or not? There isn't going to be another Ernest Hemingway. The age of the "celebrity novelist" is over and done with. Nobody reads books anymore, unless of course they're shorter than 225 pages and deal with either celebrity gossip, the latest insane diet, or that good old perennial book-seller, sex. Or if they're "scandalous" in the only sense that "scandalous" means anything these days, e.g. challenging traditional belief of one sort or another, like The Da Vinci Code, as spurious a pile of crap as was ever piled, and naturally, a smash hit.

I've been thinking about these things again lately. Why?  Because I have not changed my views in the last four years, and now, on the eve of my 56th birthday, after writing poetry for more than 40 years, I'm going to bring out a volume of my poems. It's in production now.

It will be first book of poems, and probably my last.

At the same time, my friend Dianne, who lives in the state of Washington, is bringing out a volume of her own poems. It is also her first.

My book will be called The Key. Dianne's is called Howling At The Dark Side Of The Moon. My POD publisher is Outskirts Press. I've worked with them before. Dianne's is Trafford.

Dianne and I have been having an e-mail discussion of issues relating to POD publishing. I felt a need to straighten her out about the distinction between POD and old-style "Vanity Press." They're not the same. Also, I felt the need to remind Dianne, if she didn't already know it, that literary agents who charge money for their "services" are even bigger crooks than those who don't. A "legitimate" agent (if there is such a thing) will NOT charge an author money for his or her services. They get their kick-back from the publisher. An agent who asks you for money up-front is basically the literary equivalent of a drug-dealer. Avoid that dirtball. He's a dirtball.

So ... here you drop in on the conversation....(my half of it, anyway)...


Dear Dianne,

Just remember, I make a distinction between POD and old-style Vanity Press. They are NOT the same. POD offers a suite of services; vanity press was just a printer. Vanity Press outlets like Vantage Press (which is where the term "vanity press" came from) would design a product for you for some exorbitant amount of money, print 100 copies of your book and then ship them to you in boxes, whereupon they would sit in your garage and get moldy.

POD is just what it says: print-on-demand. Order one copy, they print one copy. Order five, they print five.

Obviously the digital age enabled this; in the old cold-type world this wouldn't have been possible. But now, in the digital age, POD publishers provide marketing and advertising services, and even editing services, if you want to pay for that. POD does more of what a "real" publisher does than Vanity Press ever did. But of course you are the client, and if you want that extra service, you have to pay for it.

But that, too, has an up-side, and it is exactly the same up-side you get when you're "the customer" anywhere else: if Jack-in-the-Box asks "Do you want fries with with that?" You have the option of saying "No, thanks, not today."

POD is buffet-shopping for authors: take what you need, spend as much as you want, leave the rest. Use your head.

Despite the increasingly-wheezy efforts of the New York Publishers' Inbreeding Club to sneer it away at book fairs, POD is here to stay. (New York, on the other hand, could be nuked and I would consider it no big loss.)

Well, okay, there are issues. POD's obvious downside is that there's little quality control. Yes, they do have editors and they will make suggestions, but nothing is "juried," as the snotfaces in the publishing industry say. Nobody's going to say "No, we won't publish your book," unless of course it's obviously libelous, sufficiently obscene to attract attention in today's world, where nobody even acknowledges the existence of obscenity, (how obscene would that have to be?) or if it not only calls for New York to be nuked ... but shows you how it might easily be done for less than $500. These things might get even a POD publisher to turn you down.

But by and large, anyone who can cough up the money can get his or her book published, whether they can write or not. And, yes, I've seen some self-published books that were so awful they had me laughing out loud.

But I have also seen books issued by The Respectable New York Publishing House that were so idiotic they had me laughing out loud. Or expressing disgust. I once saw in a bookstore (I swear I'm not making this up) a "legitimately"- published novel whose main character was a roach. I am not talking about Gregor Samsa, whose metamorphosis was a metaphor for his miserable human life (and by the way, Kafka's Gregor was a domed beetle, according to that meticulous nit-picker Vladimir Nabokov, not a roach.) I'm talking about an honest-to-God roach, as in, "a member of a nest of roaches, whose mama was a roach." A novel about roaches. I can only assume that whatever "legitimate" publisher gave the green light to that project must have been (a) Stoned out of his mind, (b) In need of the aforementioned Thorazine or (c) The subject of a videotape shot at last year's holiday party featuring himself, two hookers and a Great Dane.

How many copies do you think this "legitimately" published, "juried" novel sold? We'll start at five, which probably covers the author's immediate family.  I'd say a bid up from there would be optimistic. I'd also guess that even his immediate family was, by and large, grossed out. Some of them might even have suggested that he join his publisher on Thorazine.

Publishing is like showbiz -- sometimes a blowjob will accomplish miracles. Remember Pia Zadora? Somebody was obviously blowing somebody to get her into the movies.

But POD's obvious upside is that people like myself, and yourself, who can write well but never managed to crash the party because we didn't know the right people, can get into print. Without begging on our knees, that's the part I like. POD levels the playing field. Once you get your product ready, it's just a question of doing what the so-called "real" publishers do for yourself, e.g. cadge reviews and spread the word. Nobody reads books anymore anyway, so it's not like you're missing the big riverboat if Harper and Row doesn't "do" your book for you -- have you noticed how many Harper and Row titles, not to mention Scribners, MacMillan, and all the rest, wind up on the "bargain" table of your local bookstore within a year? That means they've been "remaindered." They didn't sell especially well, so it's "Mark the price down, baby. Get as rid of as many as you can and pulp the rest."

Let me tell you about my favorite example of this. In 1991, Vikram Seth published his mammoth "masterpiece," A Suitable Boy. My opinion at the time was that that was a rather "lightweight" title for a towering masterpiece, but it's an author's right to choose his or her own title. (Although sometimes authors do second-think themselves on this score. Example: Catch-22.  Joseph Heller wanted to call his novel, which the Vietnam era turned into an anti-war classic, Catch-18.  But Heller's book was published in 1961, not long after the publication of Leon Uris' Mila 18. Heller's publishers persuaded him to change the "18" to a "22" so the two novels wouldn't be confused with each other.)

But getting back to A Suitable Boy. The critics in 1991 were comparing poor Vikram Seth with Goethe and Tolstoy. An honor? Well, yes, but with a big razor attached. Writers and serious readers would appreciate how appalling must have been that kind of pressure on the author. Being compared with Goethe and Tolstoy? That Seth went on to write An Equal Music and other works is testimony to an apparent, miraculous ability on Seth's part to tune out media-noise. God bless him.

But even as long ago as 1991, most TV-watching idiots (and that accounts for most of the population of the western hemisphere) couldn't have picked Goethe and Tolstoy out of a police lineup. Vikram Seth is among the last of the great dinosaurs, the final generation of literary geniuses in English. The ones nobody reads anymore. (Except the 7,000, in America anyway. And I flatter myself that I am a member of the seven thousand. I'm a fan of Vikram Seth's. Someday I hope to be able to tell him, face-to-face, how I came to read his book The Golden Gate in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1993.)

Within 18 months A Suitable Boy, this masterpiece that had the London critics creaming in their pants, was on the "bargain" table. His masterpiece was "remaindered" after a year and a half.

And so...if a genius like Vikram Seth sees his masterpiece remaindered just 18 months after the critics are hyperventilating about it, where do you suppose I found my storied novel about the roaches?

DING! Correct! The "bargain table." I'd be surprised if it lasted on the store shelves more than six and a half minutes before being remaindered. I'd be just as willing to bet that the middle-management type at Snotnose and Company, Avenue of the Americas, New York, who approved its production was sent on a vacation to rest and recuperate. Or better yet, fired for smoking dope at the control point, as we used to say in radio.

Gore Vidal was right. The great age of books is over. Cinema is now the art of the moment. So, since ain't nobody gonna read our books anyway, why should we cultivate a supple spine crawling on our knees toward the Avenue of the Americas? POD is taking over more and more market share as, ironically, the market for good books spirals ever downward. Given Gore Vidal's demographic numbers, (I don't know where he got them, but given what I see around me, they sound perfectly credible to me) who needs Scribners? Scribners was relevant in 1925. Only Dreamworks and Tri-Star are relevant today.

Henry Miller once said, "Paint as you like and die happy!" I'll go along with that. And now the war-cry is "Publish as you like and die happy!" None of us is going to get famous, or rich, by writing. Not unless by some miracle Oprah Winfrey happens to take a liking to what we've done and hugs us on TV. Ain't gonna happen.

So. Do you want to write or don't you? Write as you like, publish as you like, spread the word as you can...and die happy.

*Actually, I said this, in my book Three Flies Up (Outskirts Press, 2008.)

Showtime in Batumi

Here in Georgia, there are two things you can count on.

The first is that things that you expect to happen either happen late or don't happen at all.

The other is that things you don't expect to happen, happen all the time. If you're the sort of person who likes a well-regulated life and regular feeding-times, do yourself a favor and stay out of the Caucasus.

Case in point: last Saturday afternoon I was minding my own business.

That same morning I had been to an orientation class for new teachers of English. However, for me anyway, the orientation session became moot when my fellow teachers from Public School #117, owing to a scheduling foul-up, didn't show up. I, who speak a total of four words of Georgian, was the only teacher from #117 there. Not much of an emissary for the others. Sorry.

So, for me anyway, the class was tentatively rescheduled for Monday (tentatively is the way we do everything here in Georgia), which was okay with me, and off I went to spend the afternoon having lunch and shopping with my pal Jason, another teacher.

Late that afternoon, tired, I was walking back to my tiny Soviet-style apartment in the Tbilisi district of Varketili, when my cellphone rang. It was one of the young women from Teach and Learn with Georgia, the Georgian government agency that brought us all over here to teach.

I assumed that she was calling to reschedule my orientation class (again.)

No. She had something else in mind. Apparently, at the 11th-and-a-half hour, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili had decided to invite all of us TLG English teachers to attend the premiere of Keto and Kote, a new musical based on the three-act comic opera by Georgian composer Viktor Dolidze. Written in 1919, the opera was adapted as a film in 1948. So the story has been around for a while. It's familiar here in Georgia.

The new Batumi Opera House, where the premiere of Keto and Kote
took place on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2011.

But this new musical treatment of it coincided with the recent opening of the new opera house in Batumi, on the Black Sea. Saakashvili was planning to attend, and decided to invite of all of us. We were to be provided with transportation to and from Batumi, a luncheon on the way, and overnight accommodations.
As guests of the government.

Hey, who could turn down such an offer?

Ah, but then came the kicker. "We leave tomorrow morning," she said.

"Tomorrow MORNING?"

"Sorry, we didn't get much notice either. If you would like to go, be in front of the Radisson at 8 a.m."

I was about to drop with fatigue from the afternoon's shopping, but I said, "Yes, of course. I'll be there." I'm a guest in this country, and furthermore, working for its Education Ministry. Am I going to turn down an invitation from the president? Not likely. Besides, I'd been wanting to see Batumi.

So, I went home, showered, packed my backpack for the road, had a beer, read for a while and went to bed.

Sunday morning at 7 a.m. sharp, I was hiking toward the Varketili Metro station to get myself up to where that bus was (hopefully) waiting.

When I got there I found a lot of my fellow TLG teachers milling around. (Milling around is something we do real well. We do a lot of it.) Most were quietly chit-chatting, smoking, watching the TLG supervisors try and round everyone up for the road, assign us to buses. (There were two, plus a smaller bus of the sort known here in Georgia as a "Marshutka." This is something sort of halfway between a bus and a van. They carry maybe half-a-dozen passengers. You can hail them the way you'd hail a taxi, and they run all over the country, usually at breakneck speed, dodging cows and goats in the road. They're scary, but they're probably the fastest road transportation in all of Georgia.)

Some teachers, familiar with the tried-and-true Georgian tradition of hurry-up-and-wait, were wandering across Rustaveli Avenue to McDonald's for coffee. Now that it was after eight a.m., McDonald's was open. Yes, believe it or not, in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, nothing and I mean nothing, is ever open before 8 a.m. and that includes McDonald's. Before eight a.m. the only people doing business here are the cab drivers. I was astounded at this until someone reminded me that the Georgian work day generally doesn't start until 10 a.m. We Americans, with our puritan work ethic, are scuttling to our offices at dawn; the Georgians have a somewhat more laid-back attitude toward life and work. Tbilisi is buttoned up tight until eight a.m. every day; the only 24/7 business you'll ever find here is an occasional gas station.

The bus pulled out of Tbilisi at nine a.m. for the drive to Batumi, which normally takes about six hours. But between getting stuck behind trucks going through the mountains, our sumptuous lunch break along the road, and traffic generally, the trip took more like eight hours.

That wouldn't have been a problem, were it not for the fact that the curtain was to go up at 7:30 and they were NOT going to hold the curtain for us. After all, the president of Georgia was going to be there! It was nearly 6 p.m. by the time my particular group reached its hotel, the super-luxurious Radisson Batumi. I waited to see how our "handlers" were going to handle this.

I soon found out. Word shortly came down from hotel management that nobody was going to be allowed to check into their rooms until after the show. There just wasn't going to be time beforehand.

We were told that if we wished, we could go up to the men's and women's spas on the third floor and change clothes, but that was about all they could do for us at that point.

So I did that. In the men's spa on the third floor I found my colleague Aman, calmly and unhurriedly shaving.

"Don't we have to hurry up, Aman?" I asked him.

"Probably not," he said. "Anyway, I'm going to take a shower." He proceeded to do just that, and as I shaved and changed into my own clean clothes, we visited, sang Tom Petty songs together while he was in the shower ... Aman's my captain. I go where he goes.

He turned out to be right. After we had both shaved, and he had showered, and we had gotten into our clean clothes for the theater, we had plenty of time to make it to the bus.

The theater in Batumi is indeed brand-new, and gorgeous. I wish it had a cloakroom, though; I held my hat and jacket on my lap through the entire performance of Keto and Kote. I think President Saakashvili was indeed there; there were TV cameras all over the place, anyhow. But I don't know what he looks like, so I'll accept it on faith that he was somewhere down in the orchestra section. I was in the balcony, on the right side, precisely where I had sat at the Vienna State Opera on New Year's Day 1988 when my then-bride Chris and I saw Die Fledermaus on our wedding trip. It brought back memories.

Keto and Kote is a bit of a puzzler unless you see it in perspective. On the surface, it's a re-telling of the Romeo and Juliet legend (sort of) with a happy ending. But look a little deeper, historically: 1948 was the year of the so-called 'Zhdanovschina', when Josef Stalin's cultural henchman Tikhon Khrennikov was sending trouble in the way of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and other composers whose music had displeased Stalin. (Our bus passed nearby Stalin's home town of Gori going both ways.) This show, in its 1948 film version, was the kind of thing that the Composer's Union thought 'safe' in those days. Evidently even Stalin liked the film, and the original opera.

But that's all ancient history now. Today it's just fun, and that's obviously what this new adaptation was all about. It celebrated the Georgian spirit of revelry, dance (and yes, good Georgian wine) in a tongue-in-cheek production characterized by colorful costumes, dazzling lighting effects, and of course, lots of athletic dancing.

When we all got back to the hotel after the show, a little surprise awaited us. Lado Arteneli, the show's lead baritone, was staying at the same hotel at which we had all been put up, the Radisson. When I got back, there he was in the lobby, chit-chatting with admiring audience members and autograph-seekers. I chatted him up a bit myself, (he told me that he's going to be singing Amonasro in Aida at the Met this coming February) and, yes, I got his autograph too.

It was getting late. I called my old girlfriend Nadya up in Moscow to tell her that I was in Batumi,what I had just seen and how I had come to be there. Then, intensely fatigued after eight hours on the road followed by an evening at the theater, I declined to join my TLG friends in an excursion to a local Georgian restaurant. I sat at the bar in the Radisson, had a beer or two, ordered a Caesar salad from the hotel menu, and then went up to my room to shower, read for a while and get some sleep.

The next day, Monday, we saddled up around 11 a.m. and began the long drive back to Tbilisi. Most of my fellow sojourners slept much of the way back, except for the crowd down on the lower deck of the bus that had a non-stop poker game going. (They were playing for Georgian coins of denominations smaller than one Lari) I read in David Copperfield, the book I had brought along to kill the road hours, (it's thick and therefore good for killing hours of any kind) looked at the incomparable Georgian landscape as the bus rolled along, and thought about the rewards that sometimes accrue from life when you don't know what to expect, and don't waste too much time worrying about it.

At Home In Tbilisi

I'm living, here in Tbilisi, in what the Russians call a "one-room apartment."

What do the Georgians call it? I have no idea, but the Russians are not popular around here, so who knows? But Georgia was part of the Soviet Union for a long time, (one reason the Russians are not popular here) and so this apartment in which I am living is known as a "Krushschoba." That's what they call these piles in Moscow, and there are plenty of them there. They were called "Trushchobas" when they were built circa 1960 on the orders of former Soviet premier Nikita Kruschchev. Naturally, Russian smartasses started calling them "Kruschchobas" after Kruschchev," and they are pretty awful.

Krushschev was trying to solve Moscow's housing crisis in a pretty damn quick hurry. There just weren't enough apartments. People were living five families in two rooms. "Communal apartments." Awful. Nikita tried to solve that problem, but as always when decisions are being made at the top, with no consultation from anyone, the solution was ... poor. Communal apartments were replaced with lousy, cheap, crumbling 30-square-meter dumps. All over the USSR, not just in Moscow. And it's in one of those that I'm living now.

Not that I'm complaining. In my last update from Tbilisi I told my readers (both of them) that although Teach and Learn With Georgia, the organization that brought me here, intended that we teachers of English all live with host families, I didn't really want to. I like to have my own place, and I do, such as it is.

My ex-girlfriend Nadya, back in Moscow, lives with her mother in a place much like this. Only I think hers is bigger. I have a sitting room, a bathroom and a kitchen. The kitchen is the size of what used to be a phone booth back in the United States before phone booths disappeared, killed off by cellphones. (Oh, by the way, public phones are also dead here in Georgia. The old Soviet-style public phones around Tbilisi have been eviscerated; their dials and guts are gone. They are now basically receptacles for trash.) I wouldn't recommend trying to play handball in this place. It's way too small.

But I have a stove, a bed, a sink, a shower and a toilet. Who could ask for anything more?

Taxis are plentiful here, and relatively cheap. The cabdrivers all understand Russian, which helps me because I speak a little Russian. I can say, for example, "Отведите меня к общественной 117 школы. Прямо по этой улице, затем повернуть налево." They understand me, and off we go. Two Lari, or about a buck and a half.

I'm not bothering to learn Georgian. I'm only going to be here until next spring, then I'll be somewhere else. Georgian is spoken only in this little country. Russian might be useful to me somewhere else, like Brighton Beach, New York, for example. Georgian? forget it.

There are a number of small markets here in my 'hood, so I can get what I need. The local beer is good. And there is plenty of produce. Yes, Georgia was the USSR's fruit-and-vegetable bazaar. When Georgia was part of the Russian empire, (and the Soviet Union was nothing more than a continuation of the old Russian empire under a new name), the Russians called Georgia the land of "grapes and rice." We're relatively south here, and things grow, as they don't on the other side of the mountains where it gets cold. Russia basically has potatoes, cabbage, carrots, beets and onions. Georgia has fruit. Tomatoes, bananas, apples, strawberries. Watermelons. Oh, my god, watermelons. They're everywhere. I saw a guy the other day driving a Lada down the street (a Lada is basically an old Fiat) and the entire back of the car was loaded with watermelons. What was he planning to do with 100 watermelons? I don't want to know.

Last Sunday I went with some friends to the Tbilisi zoo. It wasn't as bad as I feared. The elephants and ostriches seemed happy. Now, I'm from San Diego, which has the world's greatest zoo, although I haven't been to the San Diego zoo in 35 years. San Diego is a great place for a zoo because...well, because it's warm there and the animals won't freeze in the winter. I always wondered about the Moscow zoo. How do they keep the animals from freezing? Tbilisi isn't as cold as Moscow, but I still wonder. The zoo here in Tbilisi has rides. We went on the bumper cars. Reminded me of when I drove in a demolition derby, in Sacramento, California, in 1985.

Some of my colleagues, fellow English teachers, have attended what they call here in Georgia a "Supra." I'll never go near one of these things. A supra is an organized drinking party. Someone is named Grand Poobah, and when the Grand Poobah proposes a toast, everyone drinks. No one is allowed to drink until the Grand Poobah proposes the toast, but when he does, everyone has to. My pal Aman, an English teacher and the captain of the local American partying team, has attended a couple of these things and been so hungover the next day that he swore he would never drink again. Fat chance. I stay away from supras.

Georgia is a very poor country. That's okay with me. I like poor countries. They remind me of myself. I will probably never be able to retire, and certainly not in the United States. Too expensive. So I had better get used to living in poor countries, because a poor country is most likely where I'm going to end my life. Fortunately, ex-pat is a role that suits me right down to the ground. I do not miss America in the slightest. I have no use whatever for Barack Obama, Lady Gaga or So You Think You Can Dance. My parents are dead, the family house in California gone, and there is nothing in the United States I miss in the slightest except baseball. And I can follow baseball on the Internet.

God bless the Internet. And greetings from Tbilisi. Wish you were here. It would serve you right.

I Wish I Believed in Doggie Heaven

When I say that I wish I believed in doggie heaven, I am not being sarcastic. I am not being ironic.

For the moment, I am not being my usual smartass. I promise to re-assume that role momentarily.

But I really do wish I did. Believe in doggie-heaven, that is. I envy people who believe that all dogs go to heaven. When they lose their beloved little canine pals, they believe that those little pals get to spend eternity romping joyfully in some sun-drenched meadow in Elysium. 

That's so consoling. And I do so envy them. Because that consolation is so needed. There is no heartbreak like the loss of a beloved pet. It's just like the loss of a child, and there's no getting around it.

I don't know to what extent my ex-wife believes in doggie heaven. Probably she doesn't. But she has always been a huge dog-lover, and when we lost our "little girl," our miniature schnauzer Alexandra, in 2008, and I was crying "like a fire in the sun" as Bob Dylan put it, Valerie consoled with me with the very image I just mentioned, that Alexandra was at that moment romping in some sun-drenched meadow. Healthy again, strong again, able to see and run and bark again, as she had not been shortly before her death at age 16. In fact toward the end of her life Alexandra couldn't even handle steps: when we put the pups outside, she had to be carried.

Belief is such a balm. I envy people who have it.

I'm thinking about such things right now because I know one thing is true: if there were such a thing as doggie heaven, no one would deserve to be there right now more than my friend Callie, who died last month.

I never did take a picture of Callie,
but this little character could have been
her twin. She looked just like this.

Callie was a light-brown chihuahua. She was tiny. So tiny I could pick her up with one hand. Like Alexandra, she was old. Maybe 16 when she passed away. But her death still came as a shock to me because of its timing. I departed on July 30 of this year for Tbilisi, Georgia, where I am currently serving as an English teacher. I couldn't take Callie with me, so I left her with my sister. I knew she would be well taken care of at my sister's, cuddled, loved, given treats and made to feel like family, just as I had tried to make her feel in the one year that she and I got to spend together.

I arrived in Tbilisi on Aug. 2nd. One week later my sister informed me in an e-mail that Callie had died peacefully in her sleep.

Okay, she was 16. In dog-years that's 112, or so I've always been told. But to die so soon after I'd left the country? Did she die because she was pining for me? Did she die because I had stuffed her full of cookies and cupcakes while she was alive, unaware that she may have been diabetic? These questions tortured me. And yes, I cried.

Carla consoled me. "She had run her course," she said. "She never had much TLC until you came along. You did fine by your little doggie friend."

I tried. But somehow when your little doggie friend dies six days after you leave the country, and after you've tried your best to set her up with a good home, you feel responsible.

For the year that we got to spend together, Callie was my best friend in the world. In fact I was often made to feel that she was my only friend in the world.

I hope Callie didn't die because she missed me. I knew that my sister, and my niece Alicia, would make her feel part of a family. That's why I left her there. Carla had four other little dogs and two cats, so I figured Callie would have good nap-taking company. And in fact perhaps a day or two before Callie died, Carla did send me a photo of Callie curled up in nap-mode with Golden Boy, the big, friendly orange cat. He was twice her size.

Callie deserved to have a family. Before I came along, she didn't have much in that direction. Not that John and Mayra Hansgen, my landlord and landlady for the year I lived in California, were mean to her or anything. No, they treated her fine. It's just that they both had jobs and were most of the time not home, and Callie's only companion on their patio most of the time was Negra, another aged chihuahua, who was as mean and nasty as Callie was sweet.

Callie had been a stray. John and Mayra's daughter had picked her up and brought her home. That's really all I knew. The daughter gave Callie TLC when she was around, but she was only around about once a week. The rest of the time Callie was alone with Negra, something I wouldn't wish on anybody.

Then, in the summer of 2010, I came along. I had just come back out to California from the east coast, and was renting a room from John and Mayra. I paid little attention to any of the dogs at first. John and Mayra had four of them: Brandy and Koko were big dogs; they stayed mostly along one side of the house. Callie and Negra were the little ones; they stayed on the patio.

I was unaware of the doggie-politics of the household until one day when I happened to come out the back door and saw Callie lying on her back on the pavement, one paw scrunched up to her face, Negra standing over her. My first thought was that Negra was bullying Callie and that Callie had assumed the "submissive posture." I intervened. "Negra! You leave Callie alone, you little bastard!" I chased Negra away and scooped Callie up. Callie was terrified. I tucked her underneath my T-shirt and took her into my room. With her little head poking out of my collar, I sat in my computer chair and rocked her quietly until she calmed down.

As it turned out, Negra had not been bullying Callie after all. Callie was epileptic, and she had been having a little seizure.

But the experience bonded us, Callie and me. After that Callie decided that I was her very best friend. Whenever I would come back from driving my taxicab, early or late, if Callie were awake or should happen to awaken, as soon as I came through the patio gate she would climb out of her doggie-bed and here would come this tiny figure, trotting across the patio after me. Callie followed me wherever I went.

Animals are so great. They love you without guile, without agenda and without expectation. They expect nothing in return. They just love you because they love you. So unlike people. Callie decided that the thing she wanted most in this world was just to be with me. If I were there, she was there. How many times did I accidentally kick her because she was tiny and, when I came into the room, I didn't see that she was getting right under my feet? How many times did I accidentally whack her with the patio gate when I opened it upon returning from my taxi, not realizing that, having heard my approach, she was standing right there at the gate waiting for me to come in?

These mishaps broke my heart every time they happened.. And I would always pick Callie up, stroke her little head and apologize over and over. And she always forgave me immediately.

As I said, so unlike people.

Mayra didn't want Callie in the house because she knew that Callie, and Negra too, would piddle on the carpets if they were let inside. I defied Mayra, to hell with her. The carpet in my room had been ruined with pet stains before I even moved in. What the hell? I would let Callie in, but keep my door closed so she wouldn't venture out into the hallway. But every now and then I might go down the hall into the kitchen for something and forget to close my door. Sure enough, a moment later I would turn around and there would be Callie, standing in the kitchen door just looking at me with those big brown eyes, as if to say, "Are you still here, Daddy? Did you leave me?"

"No, I'm right here, Sugar Plum," I would assure her, then scoop her up and take her back into my room. I'd put her on the bed (she was too little to hop down) where she would make a little nest for herself among the pillows and curl up for a nap.

Sometimes Callie was very insistent about wanting to be picked up. I'd be sitting at my computer doing something, and I would feel her tiny front paws on my leg. I'd look down and she'd be looking up at me, again with those big brown eyes to which I could not possibly say no. "Pick me up!" Those eyes demanded. "I want to sit in your lap!"

I always did. And she would stretch out on my lap and go to sleep. But those naps were always short because I was forever having to stand up for something. This inconvenienced Callie, but again, she was very forgiving. She always came back.

But Callie's very favorite place was next to me in bed. And I don't mean on top of the quilt. She liked to burrow down under the covers and curl up right next to my skin. I usually did not let her do this; I was afraid she would burrow down there and, in her sleep, piddle on the sheets, forcing me to strip the bed and wash everything the next morning. It happened a few times. No, usually when she began to "burrow," I would scrunch the covers up tight so she couldn't get under them. After a few moments she would get the message and go make herself a nest among the pillows.  If she couldn't be right next to me, being a foot or two away was the next best thing.

But sometimes I would let her burrow, and she was never happier than when she was curled up in a little ball, right against my back, happily and peacefully asleep next to her best pal, me.

Callie often didn't get enough to eat because Negra was such a bully. Negra would hog all the food, and if Callie tried to come up and get some, Negra would snap at her and chase her off. I noticed this, as did John and Mayra. Callie was often fed separately from Negra. We would put her up on the patio table where Negra couldn't get at her and let her have her share of the food. John often gave the doggies chicken as a treat, and made sure Callie got her share. I would also give her treats, a diced-up frankfurter perhaps, or a cookie or a cupcake. I often stopped at Albertson's while driving my cab in order to make sure that when I came home I would have something in the way of a treat that I could crumble up for Callie in a little bowl.

When I was preparing to leave for this overseas teaching job, I agonized about what might happen to Callie. In a perfect world, I would have taken her with me, but pets weren't allowed. I did not want to leave her at the Hansgen's. It wasn't that John and Mayra were mean to her, of course not. But Negra was mean to her, and John and Mayra were, for much of the day, not home. I wanted Callie to be some place where she might get at least some of the love and affection I had tried to lavish on her during the year she and I got to spend together. I spoke to John, and he readily agreed that, if I could find a place where Callie might get more TLC (and less Negra) than she was getting at his house, well, that was okay with him. So I took Callie, and John, who had bonded thoroughly with my cat Humboldt, whom I had brought along when I moved in, well, he got to keep Humboldt. We did a swap, Callie for Humboldt. And I think Callie and Humboldt both did well.

I would like to think that Callie was happy during the one week of life that remained to her after I left the United States. My guess was that she would maybe pine for me for a day or two, then get used to being at Carla's and settle in with her new family. There wasn't much time for that, as it turned out. But I do hope that when she breathed her last on that Saturday night after I flew away, she was having a sweet dream about ... oh, maybe romping in a sun-drenched meadow somewhere, healthy, strong, able to bark again.

For the time being, Callie rests in my sister's backyard alongside Honey, my nephew Joey's dog who died three years ago. They both sleep beneath a beautiful, blooming yellow forsythia, a cutting from a tree which belonged to my late father, and which he gave my sister about a year before he died. So one corner of the yard is a memorial both to my father and to beloved doggie-friends. My father loved dogs. Peace be upon them, all three, and also upon those people I envy so, who believe that all dogs go to heaven.

Down and Out in Tbilisi

I am in Tbilisi, the capital of what used to be the Soviet Republic of Georgia, and is now just Georgia. But I want that understood right off the bat. I am not in Ted Turner's Georgia, I am in Josef Stalin's Georgia.

What am I doing here? At the moment, not much. I came here ostensibly to teach English. The Georgian Ministry of Education is going full-court press on teaching Georgian children (and cops) to speak English, and at the moment is importing English teachers by the truckload. I was among a truckload of about 20 or so who arrived here about two weeks ago. By the way, and without any false modesty, I'm a hell of a teacher.

I was supposed to be teaching in the tiny mountain hamlet of Stepantzminda. It's about 100 miles north of here, not far from the Russian border. I went there, and lasted about 36 hours. I was supposed to be living with a "host family." Well, my host family and I had what the Americans these days call "issues" with each other.  I think they thought I was crazy. I have a habit of muttering under my breath when sitting in front of a computer. I think from that alone they concluded that I was some sort of sociopath. For my part, I didn't like the way they treated me as if I were invisible. I had been told all sorts of things about Georgian hospitality. These people treated me like I wasn't there. The first night I arrived they didn't even offer me any supper. When I got hungry I had to go down the road and buy bread and cheese at a store.

Then there was their toilet. It didn't work. It just ran and ran and ran, and no one seemed the slightest bit interested in fixing it. Hey, I ain't taking a shit in a toilet that won't flush. At three a.m. on the first of my two nights there when I felt "the urge," I had to go out int the backyard where they kept their dog, chickens and horse and take a shit in the garden. I kicked dirt over it with my shoe. What is this, Tobacco Road? Get me outta here.

So. They didn't want me and I didn't want them. I hardly had time to learn the horse's name (It was Malchik, the Russian word for "little boy.") In less than 48 hours I was sent back to Tbilisi. That was okay with me. The countryside around Stepantzminda was jaw-dropping in its beauty -- towering mountains, some capped with snow. But the town itself wasn't much: 135 people and about 400 cows. I'm glad I was spared spending a Sunday there. The temptation to open my veins for something to do might have been overpowering, and I have not yet been to Italy. If I'm going to die, I want to see Naples first.

In truth, bad karma has been dogging me since I got here. I lost my wallet (although it did turn up). I also lost my passport. It did not turn up, and I had to go to the American embassy and get it replaced. Now, I spent a dozen years working in Amerian embassies and consulates, and they are just about my least favorite places on earth. Then, just six days after I got on the plane in Los Angeles, the news came that Callie, my beloved little chihuahua doggie pal, had died in her sleep. Just one bad thing after another.

When I became upset about losing my wallet, then became equally upset about losing my passport, "Giga," the bureaucrat who locally manages the program that brought us here, decided he was going to send me back to the United States. How dare you get upset about your wallet disappearing, he implied? There must be something wrong with you.

We got into a spirited argument about that, but finally struck a compromise: I can stay in-country and teach, but I cannot live with a "host family." I have to have my own place.

This will be more expensive, but it actually suits me just fine. I had been living in a rented room in California for a year when I picked up this gig, and was beyond sick and tired of having other people underfoot all the time, telling me to tiptoe, not to dunk my zwieback in my Bosco and sticking signs all over the house saying you can't rock in the rocking chair after 11 p.m. Besides, I like doing my own cooking and have not been able to for some time. The couple I lived with in California included a Guatemalan wife who was so damned persnickety about everything that I didn't dare use the kitchen for making anything except coffee and toast. Georgia, I've been told, has very traditional notions about gender roles, and men simply do NOT cook in this country. That's women's work. Well, to hell with that. I don't want any woman cooking for me. Bring on my own place. And my own stove.

But as of this writing, I'm essentially Saul Bellow's Dangling Man. Today is Wednesday and I have not heard a word from TLG (Teach and Learn with Georgia) since Saturday. I'm staying in a hostel on the outskirts of Tbilisi, waiting for them to find me an apartment and a school. It's very hot here at this time of year. I walk around town sweating a lot. I read. I drink beer. I smoke. I watch Dudley Do-Right cartoons on my laptop (when it will connect to the wi-fi network.) I try to get used to the local toilet paper, which could be used to sand furniture.

Georgia is a very old country.  There have been people in this part of the world since this part of the world belonged to the Romans. Or did this part of the world ever belong to the Romans? I should know the answer to that. I was a history major in college. But I don't. I do remember that the Black Sea was considered outside the pale of the Roman Empire (the poet Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea when Augustus Caesar, the Roman emperor on whose watch Christ was killed and by the way one of history's great prudes, decided that Ovid was a pornographer), and Georgia is east of the Black Sea, so probably it never was part of the Roman Empire.

The Russians have been hanging around this part of the world for 200 years or so. They got into a war with the Turks or maybe it was the Persians (or maybe it was both of them) back in the 18th century, and decided they wanted a buffer zone between themselves and the Turks (or the Persians.) They've been trying to subdue the Caucasus ever since. It's the same stunt Stalin pulled when he annexed eastern Europe in 1945: invaded by the French in 1812 and then by the Germans in 1941, the Russians wanted a buffer zone between themselves and western Europe, and they maintained it until they ran out of money. But geography will tell: while it was easy for the Russians to bully eastern Europe with tanks, the Caucausus is mountainous country; mountainous country is notoriously difficult to invade and easy to defend, so the Russians never really established hegemony over Georgia, or Chechnya, or Abkhazia or Ingushetia or Dagestan, although they fought a war with the Georgians as recently as 2008 and the region of Georgia known as South Ossetia is still occupied by the Russians and is technically considered a war zone. We've been told not to go there.

If there is an upside to all of this, it is that everyone in this part of the world understands Russian, and having studied Russian in college, then spent a year in Moscow during my State Department days, I speak and understand a little Russian. Not enough to engage in an abstruse discussion of the prose style of Lev Tolstoy versus that of Fyodor Dostoevski, but certainly enough to give directions to a cab driver, sit down in a cafe and order a cup of coffee or walk into into a store and ask for some bread and cheese. 

This has saved my butt, because nobody could possibly learn Georgian, at least not in the five days which was all the Georgian language training they could give us. Even if I wanted to learn Georgian, which has more in common with Arabic than it has with Russian, I'm only going to be here for nine or ten months, which isn't long enough to pick up any local language.

Besides, the way I figure it, why should I go to the effort of learning a language which is spoken by only four million people in the entire world, all of whom are here, in a country about the size of South Carolina?

Once out of Georgia I would never use Georgian again. Russian, on the other hand, is spoken by close to 300 million people all over the globe. I might have use for Russian somewhere else. So, rather than kick myself all over the place trying to learn Georgian, I think I will work on improving my Russian while I'm here trying to improve other people's English.

I'm waiting for the weather to cool down, which in turn, hopefully, will discourage the mosquitoes here. And I'm waiting for my assignment. Meanwhile the taxicabs here are relatively cheap, there is a Metro, and they have a local cheesy-bread here that is to die for. Stand by for updates from a wannabe ex-pat.

I'm serious. I don't intend to stay in Georgia beyond my assignment here, but ex-pat is one of my life goals. If I have my druthers, the United States will see me no more.

Meanwhile, I think Tbilisi is seeing more of me than it cares to. Serves it right.

A Page from a Cabdriver's Diary

It had to happen sooner or later. Every taxicab operator in the world probably has this experience at least once. I had it last night.

No, I wasn't robbed. I have been assaulted while driving a cab, but so far I have yet to feel the cold blue steel of a 9mm Glock stuck in my ear, followed by a growl of "Gimme your money."

Maybe that's next. Bring it on. I mean, if the guy doesn't blow my brains out, it'll be a good story. And if he does, I won't have to pay the rent next month. A real win-win.

But last night, shortly after midnight, I got a dispatch call to a north side bar here in Chula Vista called On The Rocks. It's a hip-hop spot in which, at 12:30 a.m. of a Sunday morning, you can drink beer while enjoying the mellifluous tones of Eminem or L.L. Cool J shouting that he's gonna fuck yo' bitch and take yo' ride. A real classy joint. I pick up customers there all the time, but wouldn't be caught dead (no pun intended) going there for anything else.

Anyway, when I got out of my cab and went into On The Rocks looking for my customer, I walked right into the middle of a bar fight. As the rap music blasted away, some guys were swinging and shoving and shouting at each other in front of the door. The bouncer, a burly guy with a beard, was trying to break it up. Burly or not, he was having only limited success.

I walked past the melee and went over to the bar. I had to shout and wave my arms to get the bartender's attention; she was enjoying the fight. "Red Cab?" I yelled over the music. "Somebody call Red Cab?"

"I don't know nothin' about no fuckin' cab," she yelled back. Like I said, a classy joint.

Squeezing my way back through the combatants, I returned to my cab and got on the radio. "I'm at On The Rocks," I said. "But there's a bar fight going on and I can't find my customer," I said. "The bartender said she didn't know anything about anyone calling a cab. She was kind of rude."

"Well, she had something else on her mind," the dispatcher said. "I'll bell you back on stand four."

"Check," I replied. ("We always have to say "check," like we're doing Sam Spade. It's company policy.)

Unwilling to leave without at least trying to pick up a fare, (after all this is money we're talking about), I lingered for a few moments in front of the bar. The bouncer had finally managed to eject the two Snoop Dog wannabes who had apparently started the fight. They were shouting back at him. It wasn't fair, they protested, that the other side in the fight wasn't being ejected as well.

"I'm kickin' 'em out now, bro, I'm kickin' 'em out now," he commisserated, making hand gestures to indicate that all was under control.

"You want me to call the cops?" I asked him.

"No thanks," he said.

I drove away. I decided to go on back to my room and call it a night.

On my way back down Broadway I chanced upon some cops in the middle of hassling somebody. The cops were out in force last night, running DUI checkpoints, pulling people over, breaking up fights. Just another quiet Saturday night here in the old South Bay. At Broadway and Davidson, the location of Wild Wooley's, a bar frequently even more un-mellow than On The Rocks, (there was a stabbing there in March) two units, lights flashing, were doing something to somebody. I pulled over just as a motorcycle cop pulled up to join in the fun.

I walked over to the motorcycle cop. "They just had a bar fight at On The Rocks," I told him. "It may be over now, but there was still some chirping going on when I drove away. You might want to go by and make sure it is over."

"Okay, I'll tell dispatch," the cop said.

I got back in my cab and continued south on Broadway, heading for the barn, as it were. But then my radio crackled to life again. "145, your customer came out of On The Rocks. He's standing out front." (145 is my cab number.)

"Okay, I'll go back." I popped a u-turn in the middle of Broadway and went back to On The Rocks. (12:45 a.m. is just about the only time you can get away with making a u-turn on Broadway. In daylight it's one of Chula Vista's busiest streets.)

Back at On The Rocks, two police units had arrived and the usual "he said she said" was underway. No business of mine. My business was "Brian," my own personal drunk, whom I had picked up there before. Surprise: Brian wasn't alone. He had two buddies with him. All three of them were as plowed as a cornfield, and, although they were happy-drunk, not mean-drunk, their adrenaline was pumping like a gusher in view of what had just happened inside the bar.

They climbed into my cab, all three of them shouting, laughing, cursing, insulting each other. Insulting me. I went along with it. Drunken boys will be drunken boys.

"Where do you guys want to go?" I asked.

"The Silver Dollar," Brian said. "You know where that is?"

"Buddy, I grew up around the corner from the Silver Dollar," I replied, swinging out of the parking lot. I wasn't lying. I grew up on Madrona Street, literally right around the corner from the 300 block of Third Avenue, where the Silver Dollar is. (And also Dock's, but that bar deserves its own blog posting -- I got drunk there with my oldest friend on the night before my wedding in 2005.)

It turned out that we had the makings of a lively debate there in the cab even if these guys hadn't been drunk. The four of us had attended three different Chula Vista area high schools. Brian went to Hilltop; the second guy, whose name I didn't catch, went to Bonita Vista. The guy sitting right behind me shouted that he was "Chula Vista High, Class of '73!"

"Really?" I shouted over the shouting. "I'M Chula Vista High, Class of '73! What the hell's your name?" I had to yell my question three times before he heard me over his buddies' yelling.

"Jeff McKissack," he shouted back.

"Jeff McKissack! I remember you!"

I did, too. In fact I remembered three other things about Jeff besides the fact that we had walked across the same lawn in matching blue caps and gowns to collect our diplomas on the same June afternoon in 1973. Unless I'm misremembering, (and my memory is pretty good), Jeff and I were in the same gym class during our senior year.

The other two things I remembered about him were, first, that he had one of coolest cars on campus: a beautiful, yellow 1957 Chevy Bel Air. I mean a car right out of American Graffiti.

The second thing was that Jeff McKissack, at age 18, was the first person I ever heard use the expression, "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one."

We got to the Silver Dollar, everyone still shouting away. "Hilltop!" Brian yelled. "We used to kick your asses all the time!"

"Hilltop, feh," I replied. "Your whole football team was nothing but a bunch of friggin' ballerinas."

"You tell him, Kelley!" Jeff yelled, offering me his fist for that knuckle-on-knuckle buddy-tap.

They were all out of the cab now, but I had a hard time getting them to shut the damn doors and go into the bar so I could go home. They invited me to "Take a 20-minute break and come have a drink with us," but I declined. I really did want to go home.

But I handed Jeff my business card. "Call me when you're sober," I said. "And don't LOSE that!" I really would like to have a cup of coffee with this guy. I haven't seen him in 37 years.

I headed once again for home, but a guy flagged me down on Third Avenue. He wanted a ride home. I picked him up. What the heck, another quick six or seven bucks before the final bell.

On the way to his house up off of I Street (where my mother lived as a little girl, by the way) I told him what had just happened.

"Isn't it incredible?" he said. "What a small world."

"Well, I don't know," I said. "It seems like a lot of people I went to school with are still hanging around here. I've come and gone, myself. And come and gone. I was in the foreign service for 13 years. I've lived all over the place. But there are people I went to high school with who never drifted very far from this town."

"Different strokes for different folks," he said as I dropped him off and he paid me. "You have a good night."

"Well, mine's over," I said. "But you have a good night too."

I finally got back to my room. But I was too pumped up to sleep. Liquor might have helped, but for one thing I'm on the water wagon these days and for another, even if I wanted a stiff one, it was now getting close to two a.m. and here in California there's a state law that the stores can't sell liquor between 2 and 6 in the morning. I went back out and drove to Walgreen's instead for some over-the-counter sleeping pills.

Back home again, while I waited for the pills to take hold, I called a former girlfriend of mine who lives in Moscow. Her name is Nadya. I had no hesitation about calling her because there's an 11-hour difference between San Diego and Moscow. When it's three a.m. here, it's two O'clock tomorrow afternoon there. I had a phone card in my wallet which made calling Moscow very cheap; Nadya and I talked for an hour and I think it cost about three dollars off the card.

I told her what had happened. "Incredible," she said. Nadya is an English teacher in Moscow. "Incredible," with the "r" slightly rolling off her Russian tongue, is one of her favorite words.

Lights out finally came at four a.m.

Now, I'm sure that Jeff no longer has that '57 Chevy. But I sure would like to see what he's driving now. And get caught up on 37 years' worth of all that life, love, catastrophe, joy and sorrow that pile up to where, when you see someone you haven't spoken to in that long, you find yourself uncovering an entire hidden life about which you knew nothing. When last I saw Jeff, he was a boy with sleek shoulder-length hair, the way so many boys wore their hair in the early seventies. Now he's a middle-aged guy with a crew cut.

Yes, I would like to have a cup of coffee with Jeff. I hope he doesn't lose that card, because as drunked-up as he was last night, I have little doubt but that, come this morning, he probably remembered nothing of On The Rocks, a bar fight, old high school rivalries revisited at the top of our lungs, or me. Hell, he probably didn't even remember having been in a cab.

People tell me I should write a book about my experiences as a cab driver, both here and on the east coast. I may do it, because I have a title that I know will make it a hit. Given the number of drunks I ferry around on Friday and Saturday nights, I'm thinking of calling the book Lord of The Barflies.

And now I think I'll saddle up and go see if the Sunday hangover crowd needs any rides home from church.

Dear Miss Cyberhearts...

I returned to the west coast last year from the east coast, for a number of reasons. On the list, but quite low on it, was the fact that I was desperately lonely.

Oh, I had a girlfriend. I was crazy about her, as who wouldn't be? She was wonderful: smart, beautiful, sexy, tender, caring...the problem was that I seldom saw her. Her career came first, her children second, her parents third, and so on. I think I ranked about ninth. I was lucky if I saw her once a week. The rest of the time it was just me and my shadow, driving the PT Cruiser down the avenue.

Well, it's been ten months (to the day, actually) since I pulled back into southern California.

And I am still desperately lonely. My best friend at the moment is a tiny, aged chihuahua dog named Callie. She's good company, but you can't really discuss the films of Ingmar Bergman with her. She prefers a lemon cookie. I try to have one handy whenever she comes to the back door. She's too old to bark anymore; she just makes this sort of chirping sound and I know it's she.

Coin toss: which was it that sent me back to dating's version of a Black Hole, Match.com? Was it loneliness or boredom?

Both, I guess.

I do NOT believe in cyberdating. It doesn't work. Only once in my life has a meet-your-mate web site ever gotten me as far as a dating relationship. Her name was Tanya. We had a summer romance of sorts, then, right after 9/11, she dumped me like an overripe casaba melon. I never really knew why. Several years later we had dinner together and all she would tell me was that it wasn't because of another guy. I guess that was supposed to make me feel better.

I think part of my problem with Tanya was the same problem that Allan Felix had. He's the character Woody Allen played in Play It Again, Sam. If you remember that flick, Allan was a movie critic. And a movie fanatic. He lived vicariously through the movies. His wife Linda didn't like that. She wanted more excitement. So she left him. "She said I didn't make her laugh. Insufficient laughter, that's grounds for divorce now," he complains. "And she wants to go skiing. She wants to ski down the side of a mountain, laughing like an idiot."

Tanya was about 10 years my junior, and I think she wanted more of a wild-n'-crazy guy than me. I'm not against doing things on impulse, but I am kind of a creature of habit. Left to my own devices, I'll go to bed at 10 p.m. Tanya wanted more, I guess, than just a good cook who could be relied upon to show up on time, and was able to talk about Tolstoy, Scriabin and Billy Wilder.

Okay, let's get the obvious downside to cyberdating out of the way first. Everyone knows this. People LIE on dating websites. They trim years off their ages, pounds off their bodies and inflate their resumes. Fortysomethings tend to post pictures of themselves that were taken shortly after high school. If the average cyberdating profile is to be believed, an awful lot of skydiving candidates for Congress were late for picking up their Oscars because their Lamborghinis were being repaired.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. But not by much.

One of my other problems with cyberdating is its total lack of parity. Women on these web sites get so much more e-mail than men do that they can easily pick and choose during the sorteo. Men are at a disadvantage; we don't get anywhere near as many "winks" as women do, so we can't be so choosy.

We're also much more readily disposed of, because the women know that if they give one of us a thump and don't like the sound, there are 256 more potential losers waiting out in the hallway, adjusting their pinkie rings and sucking in their stomachs.

But I have a new problem with cyberdating, one I just recognized after many vigils in front of the flickering screen. This one really depresses me, and I don't know why I never noticed it before.

Is there some professional profile-writing service out there, creating Match.com profiles for women at $25 a pop? Because I keep seeing the same things over and over. It's like somebody's using a template. "I'm new at this." "Gee, I've never done this before!" "I'm looking for THE ONE." "I'm not into games." (who is?) "I love sunsets, blues, white wine and clubs with live music." "I have a great sense of humor, LOL." (Gag me.) "Looking for my soulmate." (If you find him, let me know.) And so on and so on.

And while we're on that subject, would someone explain to me just what the heck "Spiritual, but not religious" means? It's like saying, "I'll have a Cafe au lait, only leave out the milk." Whatever it means, it sure seems to describe a lot of women, because an awful lot of them pick that instead of "Protestant," "Catholic," "Jewish," "Muslim" or whatever. Why not just check "No Choice" and skip the New Age gobbledygook?

Now, I have done this thing on both coasts, and I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but logging on to a meet-your-mate website here in my native California, I'm dismayed at finding that just about every girl out there is a California Girl.

Ironic? Not really. The media created the "Angry White Male" and the "Soccer Mom," and the media also created the California Girl. As Billy Joel sang years ago, "Los Angelenos all come from somewhere." 

Most people who make a fetish of  living in southern California actually come from Michigan, Maryland or Ohio. I suspect that these "immigrants" helped create the stereotype, but there is definitely a perceived "California mindset." And as I peruse the profiles on Match.com within 50 miles of San Diego, I'm seeing altogether too much of this kind of stuff: "I'm into yoga, rock-climbing, raw vegetables, holistic wheat germ and my own personal style of spirituality." Bully for you, Ms. Dalai Lama. Get outta here. 

Maybe my bar is set too high. I'm looking for a woman who can write Basic English. That lets about 90 percent of the population off. "I'm looking for a man that can make me laugh." That's, "a man WHO can me make me laugh," dear. Believe it or not, men, like women, are "who's," not "that's."

 And I don't want to read about how you love "car's," "dog's" and being sent "flower's." Go text yourself.

The only place I have ever met women that seems to be worthwhile is at work. That was fine when I was working for the government, or for a technology company on the east coast. But these days I'm driving a cab. People who take cabs fall into three basic categories, none of which bodes well for romance: (1) Those too old to drive themselves anymore. (2) Those who have had their licenses suspended for various felonies and misdemeanors, and (3) Drunks. Drunks are good tippers, as a rule, but dating one isn't on my bucket list.

So for now I'll probably keep poking, with a sinking heart and even lower expectations, on my keyboard, reading about all of those "optimistic, see-the-glass-as-half-full" types who love "champagne, sunsets, bath-with-candles and Dave Matthews," who are not seeking "a man to complete me," but rather looking for someone who is "sensitive, a good listener and likes the Denver Broncos." What the heck, it kills time.  And who knows? Maybe some of them are drunks who have had their licenses suspended, and might need a cab. If it isn't too much wear and tear on my heart, it might be good for business.