The Comment That Went Viral

I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times.  There's a feature in it -- the comments section -- of which I'm particularly fond. Roughly half the articles, and nearly all of the Op-Eds and Guest Essays, have a comments section.  On any given day there are thousands of comments from readers -- in fact, sometimes a single article by itself may receive over a thousand.  It's like the old "Letters To The Editor" of the print era on steroids. 

It's easy to make a comment.  Here are the rules of the game:

-- comments are moderated for being "on-topic" and "civil"; 

-- they cannot exceed 1500 characters;  

-- each article which permits comments has a time limit for submissions.  If you get to it too late, it will be closed;

 -- you can make a comment to a comment (a "reply").  Thus discussions occur among commenters.

-- comments can be "flagged" by readers as inappropriate.  They may then be removed by moderators.

-- you can click "Recommended" beneath a comment if you really like it.  These "Recommended" comments can then be viewed in a window of their own when you click on "Reader Picks".  They're listed in order of which got the most.  This creates a popularity contest of sorts among the readers.  

-- there's also a section called "NYT Picks".  Click on that and you will see the comments chosen as most deserving of attention by the moderators of the Opinions Section. 

-- and finally there's an icon for "All" comments, listed in chronological order.

Because the Times is one of the most widely read and respected papers in the U.S. (and the world), it attracts readers who are often quite well-versed in the subjects being written about and their comments may offer a new perspective that had been overlooked by the author of the article.  It tends to be a smart crowd.

I consider myself well-versed in certain areas: New York City in general; taxi driving and the taxi business; transportation; and, of course, my own experiences with the human race as a longtime NYC taxi driver.  If I feel I have something relevant to say to an article in these zones, I will often make a comment using the pen name "Old Yeller".  

So here's what happened...

On August 24th last year the Times ran an Op-Ed by Jerry Seinfeld called "So You Think New York Is 'Dead' (It's not.)"

In his piece Jerry came down pretty hard on "some putz in LinkedIn" (the owner of a comedy club in Manhattan who, after relocating to Miami, had written what was basically an obituary on the city.) Jerry kicked the guy's butt, so to speak, and made a good case for the city's resilience and revival.  Before the comments section was closed it received a whopping 2,740 comments. One of them was mine.  And thus began the journey of a comment...

-- I started my day on August 24th as I always do, reading the Times over breakfast.  And after breakfast.  I did not see Jerry's Op-Ed.  

-- Later in the day I received an email from my buddy in the U.K., Jodie Schofield, alerting me to Jerry's article and providing a link.  How could I have missed this?  I read the article, loved it, and immediately wrote this comment:

"I've been a NYC taxi driver for many, many years. My favorite type of ride is the rare one of picking up a man who has just emerged from a hospital following the birth of his first child. It is the best day in his life and I usually find it difficult to hide my own tears of joy as he tells me all about it.

My second favorite ride is similar. It is a young person with a dream who is coming to New York City for the very first time. I am the taxi driver taking him or her to Manhattan from the airport. I insist on the Upper Level of the 59th Street Bridge as our route. Excitement grows as the city grows larger and larger as we approach Manhattan. Finally, almost at ground level, the ramp takes us so close to the surrounding buildings that we can actually see the people inside. Touching down on E. 62nd Street, my newly minted New Yorker is experiencing for the first time the "energy" that is so often spoken of. It's like watching a child approaching a roomful of birthday presents. All things are possible. It will take more than a crumby pandemic to change that."

-- About 15 minutes after I submitted the comment I received an email from the Times telling me it had been approved. (Normal procedure, they do that for every comment they publish.)

-- An hour later I checked the comments section of Jerry's article to see if I'd received any "recommends" or, better yet, if my comment had been chosen as a "NYT Pick". It had received a handful of recommends but was not a NYT Pick. Oh, well.

-- After another hour, I checked again. I discovered that my comment had miraculously been switched from the "All" section to the "NYT Picks" section! Wow, that never happens, at least not to me. Wondering what could have caused this momentous turn of events, I found that a reader named Flaminia from Los Angeles had made this reply to my comment: 

"@Old Yeller, THIS should be a Times pick."

Apparently a moderator agreed. In the contest of Which Comment Gets The Most Recommends, this is a big deal. The elite "NYT Picks" comments are seen by more readers than the ones in the "Reader Picks" and "All" parts of town. More views means more Recommends.

Unbeknownst to me, a fire was being lit. I'm not sure of the exact timeline, but as far as I can tell it began in the morning of Aug. 25th with a tweet from Morgan Von Steen (@mvonsteen, who tweets about "design & technology in government, especially New York"). She tweeted:

This comment on

@JerrySeinfeld

's piece in

@nytimes

made me tear up.  

And then she posted the comment itself.  

As the day went on, Morgan Von Steen's tweet generated over 9,000 retweets, more than 1,400 Quote Tweets, 76K likes, and a swarm of comments, many reminiscing about their own first ride into Manhattan, their ride in a taxi on the day their first child was born, and especially about their love affair with New York City.  

We were off to the races.

-- Upworthy.com on Instagram posted Morgan Von Steen's tweet, generating another 53K likes:

-- The attention the comment was generating got on the radar of the NY Times Opinion Section people.  They highlighted it on LinkedIn:

-- My daughter, Suzy, and my nephew, Sanjay, alerted me that my comment was apparently going viral.  That was exciting, but, wait! People reading it would only know that some cab driver in NYC calling himself "Old Yeller" had written it.  I want people to read my book and my blog, of course, and they don't know that "Old Yeller" is me.  Some clever way to identify myself was needed...

-- I went back to the replies to my comment in the NYT Picks.  I discovered that Patricia Caiozzo from Port Washington, New York, had written: "@Old Yeller.  Your post is excellent.  Perhaps you write in your free moments?  You should."  

Perfect!  

-- I replied: "@Patricia Caiozzo. Thanks, Patricia.  In fact, I do.  I have a blog called 'Cabs Are For Kissing'.  Hope you'll stop by."  And then I added a link to my blog.  Now not only readers of the Times could find me, but the moderators of the Opinions Section could, too.  And for the next few days, presto, the hits on my blog went out the roof.

-- At the same time Suzy got on Twitter to inform commenters who were wondering who this "Old Yeller" guy is and shouldn't he write a book or have a column in the Times or something, that Old Yeller is her father and he did write a book, and here's the name of the book, and he has a blog, too, and here's the link to that.  (This is why you have children.)

-- Jodie in the U.K. did the same thing, except for the part about me being her father.  There is no truth to that rumor.

-- A few hours later Sanjay alerted me that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had retweeted Morgan Von Steen's tweet and had added: 

Governor Andrew Cuomo 

August 25, 2020  · 

The naysayers have predicted the “decline” of New York before. They have always been proven wrong — and they will be again.

Read this beautiful comment written by a NYC taxi driver on Jerry Seinfeld's New York Times op-ed.

#NewYorkTough

-- My head was beginning to swell.  Governor Cuomo, wow!  It was almost enough to make me forget that he had renamed the new Tappan Zee Bridge after his own father.  

-- And my head-swelling problem was not helped when an article from the online business magazine Fast Company was brought to my attention, claiming that "the best thing about about Jerry Seinfeld's 'NYC Is Not Dead' article is this cab driver's response" (click here for that.)  Could my comment have upstaged the great Jerry Seinfeld?  Is that possible?  I'm thinking I may need to have the doors in my house widened so my head can fit through. 

-- To make my head-swelling matters worse, there was this from supermodel Bella Hadid, with 32 million followers on Instagram:

-- And then her sister, Gigi, another supermodel who has 50 million followers on Instagram, did the same. 

-- On Aug. 26th, more media attention in this article in the Daily Mail in the U.K. 

-- After that it became difficult, if not impossible, to figure out the numbers the comment generated.  If there's some way of calculating this I'd like to know about it, but I guess it's safe to assume it must have been in the millions.

 

NY Times Interview

On Aug. 27th I heard from Shannon Busta, an editor on the NY Times Opinion Desk, informing me that as far as she knew this was the first time a comment to an article in the Times had ever gone viral, and asking if I'd be interested in being interviewed.  I was.  It was half an hour, live -- which is the interview equivalent of walking on a tightrope.  

Click here to see the interview.

Why Was The Comment So Popular?

For one thing, it was short and to the point.

It was written at a time when virtually the entire human race was suffering from a mutually shared reality, and with no end in sight.

More than that, I think, it was because it has the power to rehabilitate the personal purpose line lying dormant in the minds of those who read it.  There are certain people -- you could call them dreamers or creatives -- who at some point in their lives have had an epiphany.  They have discovered exactly what their purpose is in this lifetime.  They have made a promise to themselves to pursue that purpose, no matter what it takes.  For many, this means coming to New York City.  The skyline of New York, one of the great sights of the world, is symbolic of that dream.  To recall that first moment they ever laid eyes on it is to blow apart the barriers that have been holding them down and bring their purpose back to life.  

You could just about raise the dead with that.

Two Concise Paragraphs

I've been asked where the full versions of the two stories that are tightly packaged into the comment can be found.  The story of the "newly minted father" is in this blog.  It was published on March 16, 2013.  Go to The Best Day of Your Life.

The story of the dreamer coming to the city for the first time and seeing the New York Skyline as we approached Manhattan was published in my book, Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver.  I am including it here in my blog for the first time.  Go to From JFK or just scroll down.  It's right below this post.

And Then There Was This

In November a facsimile of Jerry Seinfeld's op-ed on a gigantic billboard was attached to the facade of a luxury apartment building under construction in the Upper East Side.  Unfortunately the Comments Section was not included!  Read about it here.

From JFK

I had been waiting in the taxi lot at American Airlines for half an hour or so on a pleasant evening in June, 1990, when suddenly the line started moving -- two flights had come in simultaneously and the newly arriving passengers were jumping out of the terminal like popcorn popping.  Within five minutes one of them was sitting in the back seat of my cab and we were on our way, fortunately, to Manhattan.  (When you pick up a fare at the airport, you're always a little worried that the ride will be a shortie to Brooklyn or Queens.  Manhattan is the place you want to go.)

My passenger was a twenty-something kid, an "Agog-er", eyes all aglow at seeing the Big Apple for the very first time.  New York, he said, was the place he'd been dreaming of coming to "forever" and finally his dream was coming true.  He was from the Midwest somewhere and had studied documentary filmmaking at a couple of different schools, and now at last it was time to take the Big Plunge.  His excitement was palpable even though we were still ten miles away from the part of New York that even New Yorkers call "the city"... Manhattan.

You know, I have been saying that one of my favorite kinds of fares is the one with elderly people who are still enjoying living.  Let me confide in you now that my very favorite type of ride -- the one at the top of the list -- is this one, the trip to Manhattan with the wide-eyed virgin, so to speak.  I become the impromptu tour guide, an embedded guru, offering advice and insider skinny, but secretly longing to experience vicariously the thrill I hope they are about to have when they see it for the very first time.

After twenty minutes of stop and go on the Long Island Expressway we arrived at the last exit you can take before entering the Midtown Tunnel -- I did not want to take that route into the city -- and I got off there.  We drove a few more blocks and soon arrived at the exact spot where I needed to be for this particular ride -- the entrance to the Upper Level of the 59th Street Bridge on Thompson Street.  I made a right onto the long ramp that rises, before it feeds onto the bridge, above houses, factories and the Number Seven subway line.  There are five bridges that span the East River, but the one with not only the best view, but the best feel is the Upper Level of the 59er, and that's why I chose to take him this way.  I wanted him to feel it.

Now here's the thing about the Upper Level -- first the broad skyline, that endless vista of skyscrapers -- is one of the great sights of the world.  You can see many of New York's iconic structures quite clearly, and that in itself is spectacular, but the main thing, due to its location and its clear sight lines, is the sense you have of the city getting larger and larger and LARGER as you approach it.  New York, that faraway dream, is becoming a reality.

Look -- look! -- there it is!  It's really there!

And then, as the roadway of the bridge begins to descend toward ground level, the immensity of the place starts to sink in.  The buildings gradually surround you -- look, you can see people inside them! -- and one has the sense of being literally devoured by Gotham.  

Finally touching down on East 62nd Street, the "energy" of New York City hits you square in the face. People are crowding the sidewalks, walking quickly as if they're late for something, the traffic is bumper to bumper, and, hey, look at that -- there really are yellow taxicabs all over the place.  The feeling comes over you that if there actually were a place where your dream will come true, this is what it would look like.

I studied my passenger in the mirror.  He was gazing eagerly out his window, trying to take it all in, mesmerized and enchanted, as I hoped he would be.

"So, what do you think?" 

"Wow!" 

We headed across town on 63rd Street, made a left on 5th Avenue, and started coasting down the avenue which runs straight through the middle of Manhattan.  

"Look, " I said, "there's Central Park."

"Oh, yeah, wow!"

"There's Tiffany's."

"Wow!"

"There's Rockefeller Center."

"Oh, yeah, wow!"

When we got to the south side of 34th Street, I suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped.

"Get out," I commanded.

"Get out?"

"Yes, get out and look UP."

He did what he was told and found himself gazing at the tallest building he had ever seen.  You just can't appreciate the size and magnificence of the Empire State Building unless you're standing directly beneath it.

"Oh my God!" he exclaimed as he climbed back into the cab.  He smiled like a little kid at his own birthday party who was about to start opening a whole roomful of presents.

Oh, yes.

He had arrived.

It had begun.

Excerpted from Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver  (HarperCollins)

Get `Em While They're Hot

What's that?

You still haven't bought my book, Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver?

Well, good news, your holding out is about to pay off, at least if you own a Kindle.   HarperCollins is now offering the ebook edition for a mere $4.99 on Amazon.com. The price had always been $10 and change, so... what a bargain.

Just click here and you're on your way.

Say what?

You need further convincing?

A promotional video or something?

Well all righty, then, here you are:

The Kissing Hail

It’s quite common in New York City to see people kissing each other on the sidewalk, like this:

What’s not common is to see someone hailing a cab while kissing someone. Imagine one of the people in these pictures waving an arm in an attempt to communicate to a taxi driver that his services are required while maintaining the kiss. In Chapter 16 of my book this is referred to as “The Kissing Hail”. It’s a thing of beauty, requiring balance, agility, peripheral vision, upper body strength, and a need to make a train.

I saw one recently in Tribeca at around 10 p.m. as I was driving up Hudson Street in search of my next passenger. I was impressed not only with the inventiveness of the hailer, a young man with an attractive young lady wrapped around him, but with my own ability to see it coming. You see, an alert taxi driver sees people kissing on the sidewalk not only as an urban sideshow, but as a business opportunity.

It comes in two forms:

1. There’s the First Time We’ve Done This kissing. Usually (but not always) seen quite late at night - say, after 11 - it’s what happens after two people have either been out on a date or have met in a bar, have taken a liking to each other, and are bringing the attraction to its next logical step. They will often be propped up against the side of a building, perhaps just off the sidewalk a bit, in an attempt to create their own little space. There’s no separating them. An explosion could go off on the other side of the street and they would continue to stare into each other’s eyes, run their hands gently across each other’s faces, kiss passionately, come up for air, and do it again.

There is no business opportunity here. Just keep driving.

2. But then there’s the Until We Meet Again kissing. Again, two people are embraced in a passionate kiss, but there are subtle differences. They are usually close to the curb. There is no gazing into each others eyes. There are no exploratory caresses. There’s just the tight embrace and the prolonged kiss, as if to say, “I want you to remember that I love you, you mean a lot to me, sorry we now have to part, we’ll be back together again soon.”

When a cabbie sees this, slow down. One of them is about to hail you.

What happened on Hudson Street was that I was cruising along, looking for my next one, but caught a red light at Franklin. As I waited for the light to change I couldn’t help but notice the two people going at each other with some vigor. After fifteen seconds or so of careful observation, I decided they were Until We Meet Again kissers. I was pretty sure one or both would be wanting a taxi, but I had a problem. There was construction taking up half the road and I wouldn’t be able to stop and wait for them to cease osculation without blocking cars behind me. I would have to keep moving when my light turned green.

As more seconds ticked by, tension grew. The light on the Franklin Street side turned yellow. Then red. My light turned green. Damn, why don’t these two stop kissing each other already? I mean, come on, enough! I inched my cab forward, keeping an eye on them. Slowly, slowly, until I heard a car behind me start leaning on his horn (a New York City tradition). And then, just as I was about to step on the gas and forget about them, it happened…

…the Kissing Hail!

Yes, without parting bodies, without unlocking lips, without even looking at the vehicles approaching on Hudson Street, the guy’s hand went out behind his back and started waving! I hit the brakes, pulled over, and brought the cab to an abrupt stop. The cars behind me expressed their displeasure and one driver gave me a little scowl as he squeezed around me, but I didn’t care. This was business. Like a fisherman reeling in his line, I awaited the arrival of my catch.

The young gentleman walked his girlfriend to the cab, gave her a final kiss, and she climbed in. “Make sure she gets home safely,” he said, not so much really a communication to me but a gesture meant to give her one last assurance of his caring about her before they parted for the evening. I thought it was a nice touch.

And off we went on a long ride out to Queens.

The hail was so extraordinary that I felt I should acknowledge its brilliance, even though it wasn’t she who had performed it. So I told her about “The Kissing Hail” and how rare it is to see one and how it’s in a book that I just happen to have on my dashboard and here take a look at page 323 and why yes as a matter of fact I wrote it myself.

My passenger was kind enough to overlook my need for attention and we engaged in one of those conversations that can occur sometimes in a taxicab by which at the end of the ride you feel that you’ve made a new friend.

There’s something about the randomness of that, like the randomness of life itself, that I find so appealing. It’s the reason I’ve stuck with this profession for so many years, if truth be told.

Time Magazine Article and Promotional Video

I've had an article published in the online edition of Time Magazine.

Click here.

It's called "The Art of Hailing a Cab". In it I offer sage advice as to the proper way of executing this vital form of urban communication. Here you will also find the official "International Taxi-Hailing Point System" which puts in ink how points are awarded for scoring hails, from 1.0 at the bottom to 6.0 - the "perfect hail" - at the very top. Like ice skating.

It's actually an abbreviated version of a section of Chapter 16, "Taxi!", from my book. Of course you'll have to buy the book to read the whole thing.

So there's the obligatory plug.

Note: When this post was originally published it included a one-minute, promotional video which the folks at Time were nice enough to allow us to include. This was put together by Scooter McCrae, the video wizard at HarperCollins, who rode around with me for six hours one night. Six hours of filming reduced to a one-minute video - that's show biz.

You can now see the video by going to the post "Get 'Em While They're Hot" in this blog.  Here you will find me navigating the streets of New York City while pontificating at the same time, a thrilling display of multi-tasking which took me years to master.

Hope you'll enjoy watching it.

Page One!

To my (and everyone else's) astonishment, the New York Post, in addition to a two-page spread in the January 19th Sunday paper, put a lead-in to the article, with my picture on Page One!

I am now one of very few people in this world who can claim to have had his picture published on the first page of the New York Post without being either a terrorist, a murderer, a politician, Lindsay Lohan, or dead. Plus I took advantage of the very rare opportunity, while purchasing several copies at a local deli, of holding the paper up to the fellow behind the counter and asking, "Does this guy look familiar?" One must seize upon opportunity when it is offered.

The article was written by Susannah Cahalan, the best-selling author of one of the most riveting books I've ever read, Brain On Fire which I recommend to you heartily. My thanks to Ms. Cahalan, to Sunday news editor Paul McPolin, and to night desk editor Mike Hechtman.

Click here for the online version of the article.

Having now acquired a taste for the Page One Experience, or perhaps just being on a hot streak, the mass circulation free morning newspaper, Metro New York, ran an article about the book on Monday, Jan. 20, and put the story, with a picture of moi, on... Page One!

Click here!

And then, on Thursday, Jan. 23, the other mass circulation free morning paper, AM New York, ran yet another article on, uh... Page One!

Click here for that, if you can stand even more self-aggrandizement.

Hotter than a firecracker!

Media Appearances

With the U.S. publication of Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver approaching on January 28, I will occasionally be deviating from the kind of content I usually publish here to make announcements of promotions of the book in various media.

The first of which is:

There will be a book review in the book section of the NY Post this coming Sunday, Jan. 19. I’m still not sure exactly what this will consist of, but since a Post photographer came over to Columbus Circle on Tuesday to snap some shots of moi in my cab, I’m expecting it to have a picture or two and be more than just a blurb. So please pick up a copy of the Post on Sunday if you can and check it out.

And on either Saturday, Feb. 1, or Sunday, Feb. 2 - the date is not yet certain - sometime between 10 a.m. and 12 noon on one of those days - (that’s a bit vague, isn’t it?) - I will be interviewed on the Joan Hamburg radio program. That’s WOR-710 (710 on the AM dial) here in the New York area. I'll give more precise information when I have it. Of course.

Stay tuned!

More Speed Of Particle Flow

I picked up a twenty-something fellow a few nights ago in Chelsea who was on his way to 57th Street and 3rd Avenue in Midtown. For five minutes there were no words spoken between us except for my “hello” and his announcement of his destination. And then, this:

“Are you the Eugene Salomon who wrote the book Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver?” I thought one of my ego gratification wet dreams had finally come true - I’ve gotten someone who’s already read my book as a passenger in my cab.

“Yes, I am,” I replied as I geared up mentally for some serious adulation. Surely he was about to tell me that not only had he read the book, he loved the book; no, no - he adored the book, he couldn’t put it down, he’d told all his friends about it! It would be as if he’d just read The Shining and the next day there was Steven King somehow sitting in his living room. Incredible!

“You read it?” I inquired, buoyantly.

But no, he had not.

Deflated, I asked him how, then, did he know about the book and me? His answer was something that is really a sign of the times: he’d looked at my name on my hack license and silently did a search on his device while we were driving across 23rd Street. And there it was.

It was another example of the world we live in today. (See the post
“Speed Of Particle Flow”.) Fascinating, but kind of disturbing at the same time. Now you can sit in a cab and know whatever’s on the web about your driver without him knowing that you know. But putting aside this dubious aspect of this ability, it turned out to be the means for a lively conversation and a great ride. I told my passenger, whose name is Mark, all about the book and how it came to be. And as a reward for his interest, he is now the proud owner of one of these:

yes, a Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver air freshener!

This is the brainchild of Victoria, my publicist at HarperCollins, who sent them out to media around the country with an advanced copy of the book to attract attention and hopefully get lots of reviews. (The scent is apple, as in “The Big Apple”. Cute.)

Publication in the U.S. will be on January 28th, so Mark will have to wait until then to get his copy - he sent me an email the next day saying that he’s pre-ordered it.

Thank you, sir!

New Do

As you can see, a makeover has occurred. How do you like it?

Please take a look around. Aside from the new colors and the header with the picture of that taxi driver who might be me, there's now a subject index on the right-hand side. If you scroll down below the links to the taxi driver blogs and the archives, you will find there links to the subject matters of every post I've ever written - from bagels to baseball, pissing to pedestrians, morons to manners, and let's not forget dogs, drunks, insects, lunatics, remarkable people, and evil jockeys. So browsing around will now be much easier to do.

This subject index is something I've been wanting to add for quite some time but was too tech challenged to do it myself. The credit for that, and for the whole makeover, goes to the team at HarperCollins360 - thank you to Jean Marie, Victoria, and Michelle - who might be upset with me if I didn't mention that my book, Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver, will be published in the USA on January 28th, and that you will be able to order it by clicking on the link to the book on the right.

A bit of news there.

Hope you like the new look!

Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver

Well, off she goes on her own into the big old world.  Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver was officially published in the U.K., with distribution to the Commonwealth countries, on Jan. 17th.

I received a couple of advance copies on the 16th and placed one conspicuously on the dashboard of my taxi on the 17th, Publication Day, which was also a driving day for me.  It was a cheap ploy to attract attention from alert passengers onto the freak occurrence that their taxi driver had written a book about taxi driving in the same city in which they happened to be riding in a taxi.  This desperate plea for attention resulted in two sworn intentions to buy the book, several lively conversations, and in each case above-average tips.

So now I know that even if the book is a complete flop commercially, I have found yet another way to increase my tips.  Brilliant!  Or "brill", as my U.K. friends would say.

I am enthusiastic about how the book looks and feels.  The spacing of the paragraphs between the stories in each chapter is easy on the eye.  Its size and weight make it consumer-friendly, I think, and its length of 391 pages seems to me to be not too small to feel that there's not enough and not too big to confront the idea of reading it.   

And I think you'll find that the book "moves", meaning it takes you from one place to another rather effortlessly, like a ride in a taxi with a good suspension.

Now all you've got to do is get it.  And since you're a reader of this blog you are morally obligated to do so, or my agents at HarperCollins will track you down.  They know where you live!

If you're in the U.K. or in a Commonwealth country, you should be able to find it in your local bookstore.  Or if not, you can order it from Amazon.co.uk, of course.

If you're in the U.S. it can be ordered from Amazon.com. But you could also order it here for no shipping charges.

I hope you'll get it, read it, love it, and want to marry it.

And your comments would be most welcome, as always.

Me Bewk

Oh my God, how I have been longing to write this post.  Here's a story about something that's been in the making for a very long time.

As you may know, I started driving a taxi in New York City in 1977.  Already a writer at heart, I recognized from the start that this profession of taxi driving automatically provides a continuous source of what writers refer to as "material", and I started compiling notebooks of my more interesting fares. 

In the mid-nineties I decided it was time to take a crack at writing a book of my favorite taxi stories and I produced a relatively thin volume.  I shopped it around a bit, received some encouragement, but no bites.  I put it aside and placed my attention on other projects, mostly stage plays.

In 2006, having by then a better idea of how my taxi book should be structured, I decided to rewrite it.  I started working on the project, but, wait, we were now in the cyber-age and it hit me like a feather that a better idea would be to start a blog (this blog) first, then rewrite the taxi book.

If you've been a reader here for a long time (and I thank you), you may have noticed that at some point - around 2009 -  my posts became less frequent.  That was because there are only so many hours in a day and I was spending more and more of them writing the book. 

I am not a particularly fast writer.  I tend to turn phrases over and over until they sound just right to my mental ear, and I am a ceaseless self-editor.  These are not necessarily virtues in a writer, but I seem to be stuck with them, so I carried on in this fashion until, finally, the book, a full-sized 250 pages, was finished - yes, finished! - in the spring of 2011.

An analogy that has often been made to artistic creation is that it's like having a baby.  So much labor and care goes into the thing, and when it's finally born your dearest hope is that it will not only exist but grow and meet its potential.  You want to see that baby acquire strength and be able to make its way in the world on its own, sort of as an independent entity.  In a way, you also come to see your creation as a gift from yourself to the world, even if "the world" never knew who you were, and even if you never made a dime from it.  To know that your gift had been delivered, that it had created some worthwhile effects on those who had been willing to receive it, that would be a great satisfaction indeed.  But as many of us know, that is where the greatest disappointment awaits you.

In 1981, after two years of disciplined toil, I completed a full-length comedic drama written for the stage, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II set in modern times.  I thought then, and still do, that it was well-written enough to warrant professional production.  I tirelessly sent letters off to all sorts of theatrical enterprises and put it into the hands of whomever I could find who had hands.  My friend Ed, who reads a lot, called it "literature".  My friend Tom, a Shakespearean actor, said it was "better than Henry IV, Part II".  Wow.  And my mother described it as "a charge card at Bloomingdale's".  How could it miss?  Well, to this day A Creator Of Superior Realities has yet to have had even a staged reading.  So I know that disappointment well.

I knew, however, that the taxi book would be different because with a book, even if everything else failed, at least you could always self-publish.  And some self-published books actually do quite well.  After you've written a play or a screenplay you still have a whole series of production hurdles to jump over.  One never likes to think about what the chances are of ever making it past all these hurdles, but the sad truth is that of the vast quantity of plays and screenplays that are written, only a very few make it onto a stage or a screen.  This can be quite a slap in the face, considering the effort that went into its creation.

But this was a book, not a play, so shortly after completing it last year I began the process I have learned to loathe of sending out communications to literary agents.  The idea is: a) get a literary agent, b) the literary agent gets a publisher, c) the publisher publishes your book.  I researched the names and email addresses of dozens of agents, wrote a query letter which in itself was so well-crafted it could have won the Nobel Prize for Query Letters, and started sending them out.  After several months of this activity, though, my results were fruitless.  A few "thanks but it's not for us" replies and the rest simply never bothered to respond at all.  But I was not terribly discouraged.  I knew self-publishing was a route I couldn't be shut off from and I was pretty sure that the readers of this blog would want to read the book once it became available.  These two things kept me in motion.

And then something happened, I guess the kind of thing every blogger dreams about.  Through what might be called karma, fate, determination, intention, or just the residue of design (luck), I was able in January of this year to get the manuscript into the hands of a major publisher in England without an agent and that publisher, HarperCollins, offered me a book deal.  My book, which is to be called Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver, will be published in the U.K. in print and as an ebook this coming January, and subsequently in Canada, Australia, and Ireland.  Publication in the U.S. is still pending at this writing.

How's that for some front-page Cabs Are For Kissing news??!!!

I'd like to tell you a couple of things about me bewk.  The stories are categorized into chapters - for example there's a chapter of celebrity stories, another of road rage stories, and so on - and are connected together by an opinionated, first person narrative, kind of like if the reader were a passenger in my cab.  In fact, these stories have a verbal tradition.  I've been testing them out on passengers for over thirty years.  Nothing like having a captive audience to practice on!

I'd also like you to know that of the 108 in the book, only nine of the stories have already been published in this blog, so the book is not a compilation of what's already been written here.  You see, I've been holding out on you.  You've never read my best stories unless you've been sneaking into my room while I was sleeping. So if you were thinking, why buy the book when it's already here, fageddabowt it.  You're gonna have to fork over some dough, yo.

The truth is, I'm pretty confident you will enjoy reading Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver.  It was a labor of love and to say I'm proud of it would be an understatement - it's my personal best, maybe even my justification for having lived.  I will be posting updates here (of course!) about exactly when it will be published in various parts of the world and how you can order a copy.  Or ten copies! 

So that's the big news.

I thank you again for being there.

:)