Change becomes your unwanted friend

They say as you get older, the less you like change. I would also add uncertainty into the mix and has much to do with why I dread Saturdays. Its going to be long, and at my age, I would really like to have leisure time. You know, on the weekends when 'normal' people are out doing things and spending time with friends and family. I spend time with shoppers, drunks, angry people who call me raciest. Well, you get the picture.

This is just not what I envisioned for myself. Unfortunately, the aspects if this business and the persistently bad economic situation in the Tampa Bay area, has left me between a rock and a hard place. I just don't have the energy to go for the long hauls anymore while loving every second of it.

I would once bound out of bed and look forward to the day. Not so much anymore. The economy has taken; the taxi overloards have taken; the gast compaies have taken; life is taking its place in line looking over the shoulder of everything else while I try to land on the backs of giant birds to carry me to a safe landing. So much has passed; so much has gone away. I have found a real, impenetrable irony about life -- it marches forward with or without you. In the final analysis, change does become the one constant.

I recently told a taxi cab driver friend of mine (I drove with him in Las Vegas twenty years ago) that the reason we get up each day and do this is becasue we are familier with it. Not really for any other reason would you continue to come up short in life.

Uncertainty is always there no matter the structures you erect like the preppers you see on TV prepared to ward off all intruders to their world. Kindness will be replaced by a more base feeling of self interest, which has been there all along. You can have your guns, your compound, your plans, but the unknown will always be an intruder. He will interrupt what is calm and ordered in your life. There is not escaping his arival.

I always had this vision during my life that one day I would find the perfect women and our family would camp at Yosemite National Park. Don't know why. Perhaps its nearly a metaphor that all is right in the world. I never did make it to Yosemite. My friend George and I did, however, visit the Green Swamp. After awaking in the morning I looked out of my tent and George had made his way to camp perimeter. What lay in front of us was one of those beautiful sunrises you dream about. The fog, the mist, the lighting, all was perfect. And for one brief moment, all was right with me.

It would be later in the day after breaking camp that the feeling of foreboding would creep back in. I was headed back to a life where so much had changed. Just eight years ago when I started the original "Tampa Taxi Shots" it was full of images of friends. Now, most of them are dead. I guess saying goodbye is a natural part of life. Security is not found in repeat motions of your ordered life. It is in knowing that is not possible and change will always be there. Smell the roses before there are no more to smell. It sure would be nice to see Yosemite just once.

Sunrise over the Green Swamp