She says she is coming from a poetry reading and I start asking her questions about the local poetry scene. Was she at an open mic, or a show, or just a few friends who get together to write and share? Was it a one-off thing, or does she do it regularly? Do we have a lot of poets in this city?

“You seem interested. Are you a poet?” she asks.

“Not really,” I tell her. “I write a poem every once in a while, but I am a standup comedian, so that’s similar in some ways.”

“True, we both hate ourselves,” she jokes.

I force a laugh, but I tell her, “You don’t have to hate yourself to be an artist.”

“No, just a good one,” she says, still with a semi-playful tone.

I get the joke. I’ve heard the joke. I’m sure I’ve made the joke myself. It’s the one about how you end up in the arts because of trauma, because of some unhealed darkness in your soul, some emptiness you’re trying to fill with validation or attention. Your brother was the golden child and you were a disappointment. Nobody took you to prom. Mom ran out on the family and gave you a complex and now you’re cursed to wander the world in search of observational comedy.

I get it. I’m just getting tired of it, is all.

For one thing, it’s barely a joke. It’s a bit like that guy who invites the woman back to his place but laughs when he says it. Kidding if you don’t agree, serious if you do.

Sometimes I run into a comedian I haven’t seen for a while, I ask where they’ve been, and they say, “I haven’t been performing much because my life is going well.”

A few years ago, after a breakup, a bunch of them told me, “You’re going to get so much great material out of this.”

It’s a dumb mentality.

I’m so jealous of your cancer! It’s gonna make you so talented!

Fuck off.

Whether it’s poetry, comedy, theater, film, music, literature, or painting, an artist is a tour guide for a human experience. That’s all. Tune them to your frequency, present a journey of emotion, and walk with them.

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If you think suffering is the only experience that works as fuel, you’re being masochistic. True, an actor might take an emotional snapshot at his father’s deathbed and use it years later in a play, but he ought to take the same snapshot at the birth of his child, playing Legos with his nephew, lying on a beach with the woman he loves, or laughing at his sister tripping over a coffee table to get away from a spider. It’s all life. From marriage to divorce, from pain to pleasure, from gratitude to resentment, it all fits into art.

This is what I try to tell the poet, and she nods along and says she’s just kidding. Maybe she is, but I think the cliché of the tortured artist has duped a lot of creatives into believing they must derive their work from their misery alone, rather than from their life experience as a whole.

Oh, I don’t deny it can get a reaction more easily. Presenting an inner wound is a quicker path to the audience’s tears than joy is, just as rage often earns a bigger laugh than compassion. But that doesn’t mean despair is the only path to art. It just means it’s the path of least resistance.

Most of this isn’t part of my conversation with the poet. Most of it goes on in my head. Actually, most of it lives in my head pretty often, because I travel in creative circles and a lot of people I meet have drunk this particular Flavor Aid (contrary to popular belief, there was no Kool-Aid at Jonestown), and some days I get halfway through a pitcher of it myself before I snap out of it.

It’s bullshit.

“It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya,” to quote the great George Carlin.

That’s what I’d like to tell the poet, but she couches her comment about hating herself within a joke, and I never find the chance to say it. So I’m saying it here instead.

If spilling your pain all over the canvas is helping you get it out of your system, by all means, do so. But that’s a narrow view of what art is. There are colors you can paint with besides blue.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories from my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post new stories every month in 2026.

Five minutes into a thirty minute ride, she thinks she’s going to vomit and we do an emergency pull-over. He opens the door for her and she slumps out of it with just her seatbelt holding her into the car because she can’t support her own weight. Between retches, she keeps apologizing. He tells her, “Don’t worry. I’ve been way drunker than this many times,” and I wonder exactly what “way drunker than this” is supposed to look like.

After another five minutes of driving, we have to pull over again, even though there doesn’t seem to be anything left in her stomach. She’s just dry-heaving as her husband says, “Don’t worry. They didn’t even kick you out. I’ve been kicked out of soooo many strip clubs.”

Put that on a résumé.

When the retching has stopped, we drive for another five minutes, then have to pull over a third time.

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He finally becomes concerned and suggests we take her to a hospital. I tell him at the rate we’re going, it’d take half the night to get her to one. He calls an ambulance to meet us in the parking lot where we’re stopped.

When the paramedics get there, they give her a once-over and say she doesn’t show any signs of alcohol poisoning. They tell him that either he or they should monitor her through the night and make sure she doesn’t choke on her own vomit. Mr. “I’ve been drunker than this many times” says he’s pretty drunk himself and that it’s probably better if professionals have that responsibility.

I’m all ready to turn them over to the paramedics and close out the ride, but—plot twist—they have a kid at home, and the husband needs to get back and relieve the babysitter. The paramedics take the wife and I take the husband. But at least with only him in the car, the remaining fifteen minutes on the GPS genuinely takes fifteen minutes. No more dry-heaving stops.

All in, the ride takes roughly a full hour.

He tips me $80 in cash though, so I still give him five stars.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories from my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post new stories every month in 2026.

It is sitting in the back seat at the end of my shift, discarded or forgotten. Was it from the last passenger? Or did the last passenger assume it was mine and not mention it to me? It cannot have been there long without somebody saying something. It is late at night. People forget things. But it doesn’t take long before I notice or someone calls it to my attention. How long has this camera been sitting here?

It’s an SLR. Not a DSLR, but an SLR. As in, not digital. A film camera. A Pentax Spotmatic, to be specific. About a $200 camera. It’s worn in. It looks like it’s gotten a lot of use. It’s not something many casual photographers would use anymore. Photography is likely a hobby this person is serious about.

I know the feeling of a serious hobby. I know the pain of losing work. And I know that, while it always sucks to be out $200, an artist’s instrument can also have any level of sentimental value, and whatever is on the film might be worth more to the owner than anything. So I report it in the app and note that it would likely belong to one of the last few riders of that day.

Two days later, a message from the support staff informs me they have not been able to find the owner.

I try sending messages to some of those passengers myself. They tell me they didn’t lose a camera, if they bother to respond at all. Try as I might, I cannot find the owner of this moderately expensive and likely sentimental piece of equipment, with film inside it that could be worth any amount at all.

Why would someone not claim it?

And that’s where my writer brain kicks in. I’ve been narrating true crime books, reading story after story of serial killers, jealous spouses, and all manner of sick individuals. My mind focuses on the film—the handful of exposures saved forever within the camera. What are they? What moments are immortalized within those flashes of light?

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I imagine a murderer, his camera forgotten, receiving messages to ask if it’s his. He cannot answer, for what if the film has already been developed? What if someone knows, and as soon as he admits to ownership of the camera, he has admitted to the crime?

I imagine myself stricken with curiosity, taking the photos to be developed, only to find the FBI at my door before I’m even told the photos are ready. I see myself in cuffs, baffled by a barrage of questions about photos of bound and tortured individuals.

Or I imagine myself thinking, No, the photos weren’t for me. It would be a violation for me to look at them. So I toss the film, never to be seen by human eyes, and the evidence of sadistic evil that could have been finally unearthed instead remains buried. The killer stays at large, and more people die who perhaps could have lived if only I’d looked. If only I’d been nosier.

And even though I know it’s probably just friends and family, a birthday party, landscapes—even though I know almost all photos are harmless—I also know anything is possible. The film on an orphaned camera, the flashes of a life, could be any life. Any moment of a life. Even the last moment.

And so it sits on the table in my apartment—lonely, mysterious, and bursting with infinite possibility. Now and then I glance at it and wonder, Whose camera were you? Why don’t they want you? What did you see?

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories from my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post new stories every month in 2026.

It’s been a long road to finally get here. I started typing up the story and it ended up longer than I expected, but I guess that’s why I have a Substack in the first place. So here’s the long, winding story of how this project came together. It’s basically two stories that eventually intersect.

When I self-published my first novel back in 2011, I was already thinking about a short story collection. As a kid, I loved short stories. I loved all sorts of fiction, but there was something about a story that you could read in one sitting, and maybe retain in your memory well enough to tell around a campfire with friends or family. I always wanted a book like that with my name on it. But in my self-publishing days, I was improving as a writer at a pretty quick rate, and if I wrote a short story, I usually hated it within a year or two. That made it hard to build up enough stories for a collection.

In 2017, I was sitting on a lot of writing (screenplays and short stories) that were gathering dust. I made myself a goal of getting 100 rejections that year. I had spent my whole creative life as a self-starter type, so I had rarely submitted anywhere, but there was now a mountain of writing that I didn’t know what to do with. I submitted screenplays to competitions and festivals, and I submitted short stories to anthologies and magazines, collecting rejections on a spreadsheet to try to meet my goal.

Two key things happened that year. The first was that I sold my first three short stories, to three separate anthologies. The second thing was that I discovered GenreBlast.

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Researching places to submit screenplays, I learned about a young film festival called GenreBlast that was in its second year. It sounded like they had a good sense of humor and a love of schlock, so I sent them a horror-comedy screenplay called College Beach Party Massacre 4. Word came back that it was nominated for Best Unproduced Screenplay, and booked a ticket to Winchester, Virginia to attend.

The experience was borderline life-changing.

It wasn’t the first film festival I’d ever been to (I think it was the third), but it was the one that made me fall in love with the experience. I watched every single movie on the lineup (40 hours of film in 4 days, or thereabouts) and I still think back on many of the crazy things I saw there. The theater and the hotel were walking distance from each other and there was nothing else to do in Winchester, so attending filmmakers could either watch movies or hang it out in the bar. Both were great choices. I didn’t really have a group of creative friends anymore, so it was a jolt of creative energy I didn’t realize I was starved for. I am still friends with many of the people I met there.

As icing on the cake, at the end of the festival, they held their awards ceremony and College Beach Party Massacre 4 won Best Unproduced Feature (GenreBlast remains the only festival to have given an award to that crazy script). I was given the first trophy of my life.

I vowed that, for as long as GenreBlast existed, it would be on my calendar. There have been years since then that financial hardship made me miss it, but as long as it exists, it will always be on my radar, and I will always be there if there is any way I can.

(What does any of this have to do with your new book, Greg?)

(I’m getting to that.)

A year later, I came back to GenreBlast with two scripts — a feature called The Patience of Vultures and a short called The 4th Floor. Both were nominated, and I was given a bonus award called the Nuclear Pen, which GenreBlast gives to writers who earn multiple nominations in the same year.

Having a sense of ritual, I decided that from that moment forth, I would sign every writing contract with my Nuclear Pen. Every contract since has been signed with that pen, and the pen is never used for anything else.

By 2018 I was selling short stories left and right, breaking out the Nuclear Pen every couple of months. I was back to thinking about a short story collection.

One difficulty of a collection is that when you sell a short story, part of what a publisher is paying for is a window of exclusivity. It is usually in the contract that, after they publish it, you cannot print it anywhere else for an agreed-upon period—usually a year or two. So every year or so, I would think to myself, “I have enough for a collection here. I just have to wait another 9 months for the exclusivity windows.” Then I would write a new story I loved, sell it to somebody else, they would ask for 18 months, and I’d have to ask myself, “Do I want to publish a collection knowing that one of my best stories is missing? Or do I want to wait a few extra months?”

Meanwhile I kept going back to GenreBlast. They kept giving me more trophies. They asked me to judge their screenplay competition. They asked me to be part of a panel called “How Not To Suck At Screenwriting”. I started to feel like part of the GenreBlast family.

Then, Nathan Ludwig, the creator of GenreBlast Film Festival and an author himself, started GenreBlast Books. We talked a bit about how it would be cool if we could do a book together, and I asked him if he’d be open to a collection. He said he might be, and I sent it along.

In 2025, I was inducted into the GenreBlast Film Festival Hall of Fame and performed there as a standup comedian (a new experiment for the festival, and one that I think went really well). While I was there, Nathan pulled me aside and told me he wanted to publish my collection.

Yesterday, I received the contract, and signed it with my Nuclear Pen. It felt like a full-circle moment to use the GenreBlast pen to sign a GenreBlast contract for the stories I’ve been writing since I joined the GenreBlast family.

Once there’s a cover reveal and a release date, I’ll go into a little more detail about what’s in the book, but I’ll tease a couple things now:

• I mentioned earlier that in my pursuit of 100 rejections the same year I ended up at GenreBlast, I made my first three short story sales. Two of those — Bad Hair Day (which appeared in “Monsters of Any Kind” from Independent Legions Publishing) and The One About Maggie (which appeared in “Ashes and Entropy” from Nightscape Press) appear in the new book.

• The short screenplay The 4th Floor that was nominated at GenreBlast the year that I won the Nuclear Pen? It is a short story now, and it will be published for the first time in the new book.

• Another short screenplay, Deprivation, was nominated for Best Unproduced Short at GenreBlast in 2019. It has also been turned into a short story and will be published for the first time in the new book.

• My 2020 short story The Morbs was published in “Halldark Holidays” from Cemetery Gates Media. I liked it so much that I adapted it into a feature-length screenplay, which won Best Unproduced Screenplay at GenreBlast in 2022. The original short story will appear in the new book.

• Another 2020 story, Summers with Annie, is probably the best-reviewed story I have written to date. It appeared in “Worst Laid Plans” from Grindhouse Press. GenreBlast Films, a film production company from the creators of the festival, adapted Worst Laid Plans into an anthology film. While Summers with Annie was not one of the adapted installments (it would be a tough one to film), but it’s yet another connection between GenreBlast and this particular set of stories.

That’s 6 of them. There are another 12. A total of 18 stories—11 reprinted and 7 brand new. A couple of the new ones have been driving me nuts for years because I know they’re great and I haven’t been able to find the right home for them. I should have known when they did find a home, it would be GenreBlast.

I never thought it would take this long to finally put together a collection, but I really didn’t want my first collection to be so-so. I wanted it to be something special, and I think it is. I’m also glad I waited as long as I did, so that it can be a GenreBlast project.

The cover (which is gorgeous) and release date will be revealed soon.

I welcomed the new year at Mad Swede Brew Hall, the venue where I filmed my special, and where I have performed most often over the five years or so that I have been doing standup. It was their going-out-of-business party, and it was a bittersweet celebration with many of the people who made the place so special. I got a lot of footage, and at some point I am going to try to cut it together into a mini-documentary.

Some of you commented on my last Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver post, which I kind of framed as the end of the project. I have other rideshare stories, and I’m still working on getting them all written and polished. In 2025, I made it a goal to publish new installments every week, and I succeeded in that goal, but it’s a lot of work to keep it up with that level of frequency. In 2026, I am thinking of making them a monthly thing instead of a weekly one. At some point when I feel like the collection is “complete”, I am also considering self-publishing all of them in a book.

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My standup special is doing better than I expected on YouTube, with over 24,000 views in the first two weeks. Over the coming months, I’ll be posting a lot of segments from the special on Instagram and YouTube shorts, trying to gain a larger online following and hopefully making it easier to get booked in areas where I have never performed before. While I’ve occasionally traveled for shows, I still haven’t really done a proper “tour”, and I wouldn’t mind giving that a shot if I can work out the logistics.

I also recently started digging into a sketch comedy project, originally called Greg and Other Gregs, that I filmed in 2019 but never finished editing. It was a series brief skits (mostly in the 1-2 minute range) that I wrote and filmed by myself, playing every character. I wrote 30 of them, but only filmed 10 before a camera issue put the project on hold. By the time the camera was fixed, I had moved, and the project fell by the wayside. Recently I’ve started editing the ones that I filmed, and some of them seem funny enough to be worth putting on YouTube. If they are well-received, maybe I could even make some new sketches. I’ll play that by ear.

Finally, I should have a fiction project coming this year that I will announce at a later date, and a movie project that has been “three months” away from getting made for five years now. With some luck, maybe this will finally be the year that it takes shape.

All of that is to say, I am, as usual, working on a lot of projects and look forward to unveiling them as they become ready. If you are a subscriber, you’ll always be the first to find out about them.

I drive her almost an hour from the Boise airport to Idaho City, a tiny mountain town of a few hundred people, where she is staying because she tells me every hotel in Boise was booked. I went to high school in Idaho City but I haven’t been there in a long time. Along the way, I tell her about the town. I point out spots from my childhood even though it’s after midnight and she can’t see them. “It was a long drive from my dad’s place to my mom’s, so they used to meet there and trade us off,” “Over there was a big rock we used to jump from into the creek,” “That was my house. It’s a camp or something now, but it used to be a home.”

When I drop her off and head back to Boise, it’s a long drive by myself. Most of the winding, mountain highway gets bad cell service, so I start off listening to a podcast, but before long it cuts out and I drive in silence, getting bored, counting down the mile markers.

Halfway back, I have to pee. There are no rest stops, but it’s mostly forest on both sides of the highway and no one is out here in the middle of the night, so when there’s a safe place to pull over I get out and walk to the tree line.

I’m struck by the dark. It’s been a while since I’ve seen country dark. It’s not the same as city dark. Some people who have lived in the city their whole lives have never seen real dark. As I stand at the tree line, I see nothing, but light draws my eyes upward to a clear sky where stars shine down, and it strikes me that I haven’t seen the stars—really seen them, the way you see them in country dark—in a year or more. I watch them for a minute, remembering those childhood skies, then I go back to my car.

Driving in silence, still waiting for the podcast to kick back on when cell service returns, my headlights illuminating these familiar curves, I get an odd feeling. A voice in my head says, “You were about to have a moment, you idiot. There was a lesson there, when you were looking at the stars, and you literally pissed it away.”

When there is another chance, I pull over again. This time I shut off the engine and leave my phone in the car. I use the front bumper as a step to climb onto the hood of my car, then I lie on my back on the roof, looking at the sky with a little more focus.

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I remember how it happens. At first you see 100 stars. The bright ones. They strike you right away, and they’re pretty. But if you’re patient, if you don’t let your phone or another light distract you, in a few minutes you will see 1,000, and pretty becomes beautiful. The longer you wait, the more they reveal themselves, until they bring with them something more.

I wait.

It’s cold and I don’t have a jacket but I decide I don’t mind. I let myself feel the cold, I listen to a creek somewhere in the dark that I can’t see, and I wait for the stars to come to me.

I see one edge of the sky that glows with ugly light pollution, and I know that’s Boise. That’s home. I think of Henry David Thoreau, who walked away from civilization and found himself transfixed by the way ice cracked on a pond. I think of a conversation from the movie My Dinner with Andre, which I watched for the first time recently, about an electric blanket and how technology insulates us, seduces us with comfort as it takes us out of our shared world and puts us into worlds of our own, so subtly that we don’t realize we’ve lost something.

I think of ancient civilizations that looked at these stars, shining down just as they do now. I think of how they saw them every night, how they had no choice but to see them, and how today we miss them. I wonder, despite the obvious benefits of the incredible cities we’ve built, if we’ve given up too much of the world’s majesty in return. Ancient man looked up and saw gods. We see streetlights. But if we get away from the streetlights and let our eyes adjust, the gods are still there.

And now I like that I’m cold. I like that the cold is something I’m feeling, that the creek is something I'm hearing. There are thousands of stars now. An infinite universe. And I am in it. I am part of it. I am here. For a while.

Eventually, the moment passes and I climb down from the car. I get back in and I drive. My phone gets a signal and the podcast comes back on. I listen to strangers joke about trivial things and I can’t hear the creek. The heater is on and I can’t feel the cold. My high beams light the road and I can’t see the stars.

And I do feel insulated. But I am glad I took a moment to stop.

I make a mental note not to let it be years before I look at the stars again.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver has been a series of true stories from my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver, which were posted every Monday in 2025. Perhaps I’ll tell some more sometime.

It’s Christmas Eve and snowflakes are falling gently, lit up by red and green lights. I pull up at a cul-de-sac in a gated community, where a longhaired, heavyset man in his late twenties wearing an ugly holiday sweater hugs a well-dressed man with salt-and-pepper hair before getting into my back seat.

I ask him if he’s coming from a holiday dinner with his parents. He says they’re not together anymore, but he was visiting his dad tonight for Christmas Eve, and he’ll visit his mom tomorrow on Christmas. I tell him it’s nice that they’re both still close by and he can see them both for the holidays. He asks if I’m visiting family and I tell him no. Most of my family is in Illinois, and my brother who lives here is visiting them. I have a sister here but she has a family of her own, so I will probably just be working, but I’ll give everybody in Illinois a call. He says he’s sorry to hear that, and that everybody should be with their family on Christmas.

When passengers ask me about my job, sometimes they ask if I have ever been worried for my safety and I tell them it’s never happened so far. The way this ride is starting out, I would never guess that this will be the one. But I’ve seen and read my share of dark stories. I should know better than most that horror has a way of sneaking up on you.

After a few minutes, conversation dwindles, and I get on the freeway, where we’ll be traveling fifteen miles to get to his apartment. In the back seat, he begins doing something I can only describe as aggressive whispering. It’s a guttural, snarling sound, too quiet to make out. It sounds like maybe he is wearing earbuds and listening to death metal, not realizing he’s half singing along. Or maybe he has sleep apnea and he’s dozing off. I look in the mirror.

He’s not sleeping. His eyes are open. I can’t tell if he’s listening to music though. It’s dark back there, and all I see is his silhouette and the whites of his eyes. Even if it was bright, his hair is covering his ears.

A few miles on, he’s louder. I still can’t make out what he’s saying, if anything, but it’s more than just labored breathing. There seem to be words within that throaty whisper.

“What’d you say?” I try asking.

“Nothing,” he says, in the friendliest of tones. I can’t see him very well, but I can hear the smile in his voice, like one of the helpful characters in a stop motion Christmas special. Or like the character who gets bitten by a zombie and keeps it to himself.

He is quiet for a minute or two.

Then he isn’t.

My best guess, at this point, is Tourette Syndrome. When I was a teenager I read the novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette Syndrome, and it got me interested in the condition for a little while. I know that, while Tourette Syndrome often calls to mind people who involuntarily shout swear words, that’s actually not very common. That symptom, called coprolalia, only occurs in a small percentage of people with Tourette’s. Among those who do have the symptom, some use slurs, some use profanity of the sexual or scatological variety, and some just shout gibberish. What I’m not so sure about—what I begin to ask myself as I drive on this dark road with this stranger in my back seat—is whether, sometimes, coprolalia could take on the sounds of demonic possession.

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A demon is exactly what this guy sounds like as those harsh, guttural sounds resume, starting as a whisper and then rising in volume to something closer to a standard speaking voice.

“You doing okay back there?” I ask.

“Yep! Doing good!” he says, in that overly cheerful voice, the gravelly, evil one disappearing once more.

And look, I’m sure it’s exhausting to have an illness that you’re made to feel you have to apologize for. I get that. So you can argue that I’m the asshole when I say this guy really ought to explain himself to me, but man, we’re going sixty miles per hour on an icy road and he’s making devil noises over my shoulder. For the safety of both of us, I would think now might be a moment when it would be worth saying something like, “I have Tourette’s, by the way, so if I’m making noises, don’t worry about it.” That would take down my level of discomfort pretty close to zero. He could go full Exorcist at that point, screaming about whose mother sucks what in which place, and I could shrug it off.

I’m no expert, but if it is Tourette’s, I think he’d be aware of the sounds he is making. That said, from what I understand, high-stress situations exacerbate symptoms, so if I start calling it out and putting pressure on him, it might make things worse. I certainly don’t want that to happen, but a little bit of reassurance that he’s not going to grab my neck from behind and try to bite my face off might be nice. Especially since, to reiterate, we’re on the freeway. There is ice, there is traffic, and there is no exit for the next four miles.

Still debating my best move, I look around my vehicle for anything that might function as a weapon just in case. The best I’ve got is the large, steel water bottle in my cupholder—not great, but not nothing. I keep one hand on it.

About the time I’m considering all this, the guttural voice reaches a high enough volume that I am finally able to make out a couple of words.

“Demon, demon,” he chokes out in an animal growl.

If this were a movie, this would be the part where I say, “Nope,” and then swerve off the road and deliberately ram into the guardrail, sending the car rolling hundreds of feet down the road, hoping the seatbelt and the airbags will save me and slay the demon.

But this isn’t a movie, so the strategy I go with is much less badass.

“You listening to music or something?” I ask him, trying to keep to a polite and non-accusatory tone.

“Nope, just enjoying the drive,” he says, back to that cartoonishly friendly tone.

“You sounded like you were whispering something,” I try, giving him the easiest path he could possibly take to explain his condition.

“Uh… Maybe just talking to myself,” he suggests.

The first hint of the growl starts back up. “Grrrrr…”

“Starting to look like Christmas out there,” I say, just to say something, just because, if I can keep the friendly Dr. Jekyll occupied with banal conversation, the evil Mr. Hyde seems unable to take the wheel.

“Yeah, hopefully the snow will stick. Demon…”

“Yeah, doesn’t feel like Christmas if there’s no snow on the ground.”

“I agree! Grrr…”

The last mile or so goes like that. It’s an introvert’s worst nightmare—make polite small talk or suffer the sounds of demonic rage. We talk about the weather, about Mondays, about traffic, and coffee, and boxers or briefs, and any fucking thing that can save us from two seconds of silence.

For those few minutes, I forgive every motormouth I’ve ever met—every vacuous, jabbering gasbag whose every opinion spews out like green vomit at the first trace of quiet. I wonder, do those people truly love the sound of their own voices as I always assumed, or have they simply met this fucking creature in back seat? Are they talkative, or are they afraid for their lives that they might encounter the demon again?

I get him to his apartment, distracting him all the while with benign chit-chat. He thanks me for the ride and I wish him a merry Christmas. Only after he’s shut the door and walked away do I release my death-trip on the water bottle, the edge of the lid having imprinted itself across my palm, practically drawing blood.

I never do get an answer as to what the fuck all that was about.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday in 2025.

You can click over to my YouTube channel, or you can watch an embedded link right here:

I hope people enjoy! It was an exciting few years developing this act.

Big thanks to Flying Fedora Film for helping me put this together and making it into such a quality production, as well as to all the people and institutions listed in the credits, and everyone in the audience (except that one woman). I am grateful to all of you for helping to make this happen.

It is a holiday gauntlet as I turn onto her street. Two front yards, directly across from one another, are packed with every Christmas decoration you can think of—candy canes, reindeer, snowflakes, snowmen, elves, grinches, Santas, and sleighs, all lighting up in flashing sequences.

I expect my fare to be a bubbly holiday obsessive, until I realize I’m actually picking up a woman from the undecorated house next door. Then I expect a scrooge.

She turns out to be neither.

“I see your neighbors are in a Christmas arms race,” I observe as she gets in.

She laughs. “It’s not my house; it’s my mom’s—but you don’t know how right you are. She’s lived there thirty years. Her neighbor always went all-out with decorations. Not like this, at first, but enough to stand out. Then, about ten years ago, some people moved in across the street and started trying to one-up them. Now, every year, they’re trying to outdo each other and it’s getting ridiculous. The last couple years there’s even a third neighbor trying to get in on it.”

“Well that sounds like fun for your mom, getting to watch the competition every year.”

“No, she just feels self-conscious, because she’s old and can’t be outside all day decorating. She thinks everybody is going to think she hates Christmas.”

I decide it’s best not to mention that I was expecting a scrooge to get in the car.

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“Well, it’s too bad she feels self-conscious. I imagine the neighbors are just having fun with each other. I doubt they’re giving much thought to whether she’s joining in or not.”

“Oh, she’s not worried about the neighbors. It’s just that there are apps now where they list all the best decorated houses, and these ones get put on there every year. So every year the street fills up with people coming out to see the houses and my mom is like, ‘All we have is a snowman and a wreath…’”

I feel bad for the old lady, but it still makes me chuckle.

“Well, somebody who uses an app to come see the best decorated houses isn’t paying attention to the neighboring houses. They just want to see the over-the-top ones.”

“I know. That’s what I tell her. Plus I’ve got a Gen-Z daughter who is all about saving the planet, and she’s like, ‘Grandma, those people are wasting so much energy. I’m glad you’re not participating in that.’ And I’m just sitting here as the exhausted Millennial mom, going, ‘What are you gonna do?’”

I drop her off, and it occurs to me I’ve been pitched a Christmas episode for any given family sitcom all in the space of one car ride.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday in 2025.

He’s in his thirties, well-dressed in an endearingly nerdy sort of way.

“I met a girl last week,” he tells me. “Today is kind of our first date.”

“Oh cool,” I tell him. “Where are you going?”

“It’s a Christmas party at her work, so it’ll probably be pretty quiet and laid back.”

“What kind of work does she do?”

“She’s an accountant,” he says. “It’s gonna be a whole party full of accountants, so if I’m not the funny one in that room, I’m doing something wrong.”

I sense a creative type. Maybe a fellow standup comic? A comedy writer, or actor? Even if it’s just for fun, someone who prides himself on being the funny one in a room could be a kindred spirit.

“What do you do?” I ask him.

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“I’m a financial advisor.”

There is a long pause. From his comment about accountants, I would have expected something drastically different. Financial advisement and accounting are practically the same job. Most jokes you would make about an accountant you could just as easily make about a financial advisor. I half-expect that he is loading up a joke right now, but he doesn’t come out with one. Eventually, I try to do it for him.

“Is that a bit like, ‘In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king’?”

He shrugs, not sure what I’m getting at.

“At a party for accountants, the financial advisor is the funny one?”

He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even seem to understand that I’m making a joke.

“Well, I hope so,” he says sincerely.

Jesus. If this guy’s the funny one, accountants must be boring as shit.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday in 2025.

“For Nate?" he asks through the open window.

“Uh, Nathaniel, yeah,” I tell him, looking at the display. I roll up the window because it’s starting to rain. He and his girlfriend get in the back seat. It’s two in the morning and the bars are closing.

As we drive, the rain falls harder. We’ve made it a quarter mile, just far enough not to be near any open businesses, when the app suddenly says “rider canceled” and the current ride disappears from my screen.

“Did you just cancel the ride?” I ask him.

“No.” He gets out his phone and checks the app on his end. “Wait… It says ‘driver arriving now’.”

He and I groan, both realizing what’s happened. She just looks frightened.

“There must be two Nates leaving that bar,” I tell him.

“Ugh. I should’ve noticed when you said Nathaniel. I am a Nathaniel, but I don’t think it says Nathaniel.”

“Let’s get out,” his girlfriend says. “Request another one.”

The rain is angry now, coming down on us like a beating.

“Do you have Venmo?” he asks me. “Could I just pay you that way?”

“That’s fine,” I tell him.

“No… We should get another one from the app,” she insists.

“It’s pouring rain,” he says. “He can take us. We’ll just Venmo him.”

“We don’t know who he is,” she whispers, quietly enough that I’m not supposed to hear, but, I guess, accidentally louder than that.

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“It’s up to you,” I tell them. “I’m happy to work it out with Venmo, but if you’d feel more comfortable getting out, you can.”

I sound suspicious, even to my own ear. In horror movies and true crime documentaries, this is the part where the audience is rolling their eyes at the protagonists, maybe even shouting at the screen, “Get out of the car, you fucking idiots!”

If you have never been mistaken for a serial killer, what you may not realize is that, once you’re under suspicion of serial-killerism, it is nearly impossible to do anything un-serial-killery. You can’t say, “You’re totally safe, by the way.” That’s fucking terrifying. Remind them it’s cold and rainy out there and nice and warm in here? Serial killer. Try to soften your voice so you don’t sound threatening? Serial killer. Start whistling? Definitely a fucking serial killer.

Afraid to do anything that might seem serial-killer-ish, I pull over and stare straight ahead in total silence like a serial killer.

She is pretty adamant about getting out, and eventually, he acquiesces. I leave them on the side of the road, hunched in the pouring rain, dark and cold in the late night wind, with surge pricing kicking in on the app so that they will pay twice what they otherwise would have, plus the cancellation fee from their “real” driver.

Hopefully they know how to tell a story. If they can tell their friends about the creepy driver who picked them up in a rain storm, who almost convinced the boyfriend to give him their address, who probably had a trunk full of tools to dissect them—that story might be worth the miserable night. If they don’t know how to tell a story, and they had to stand in the freezing rain and pay a bunch of money to get home from the bar because they weren’t sure about their driver—they have my sympathy. Rough times have so much more value when you know how to tell a story.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

Here is a poster:

And here is a brief teaser:

The special was recorded back in March of this year, produced by Flying Fedora Film. Including credits and an opening sketch, it runs just over 66 minutes.

Subscribers to this site will be notified the instant the special goes live. You are also welcome to subscribe to my YouTube channel, where the special (and some other things I’m working on) will soon appear.

It’s been quite the project, but the finish line is finally in sight. I can’t wait to introduce this hour of material to the whole world.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American followers who celebrate.

He’s got long, gray hair and a leather jacket. He probably looks like I would look in fifteen years if I weren’t already going bald.

“This is a great car,” he says when he gets in. “Hyundai Sonata. Perfect rideshare vehicle.”

I tell him I’ve been driving it a couple years and don’t have many complaints. When the first lull in conversation hits, he looks out the window and shakes his head. It’s nighttime, but there is a lot of traffic heading downtown.

“Don’t know when this city got so big,” he laments.

As cities go, Boise really isn’t “big”, but it’s big in relation to what it was a short while ago. A lot of people who have been here a long time have a wistful, rose-colored memory of what once was. I think that happens often. Partly it’s just that change is painful. We all miss certain aspects of our pasts, and whether or not our cities are to blame, they make easy scapegoats. If life is chaotic, it’s because our city is chaotic. If it’s boring, it’s because our city is boring.

Many years ago, when I lived in China, I met a Parisian man in a cafe. I told him I’d never been Paris but that I hoped I’d get to see it one day. “Don’t bother,” he grumbled. “It’s shit.” It made me laugh. Even when you’re from one of the most romanticized cities in the world, if you spend enough time there, it’s shit.

Not that it can’t be true. I think it goes both ways. Your inner world reflects how you see the outer world, and the outer world reflects your feeling about your inner one. I think Boise is a pretty good city, but one man’s shit is another man’s Shinola, to mix idioms in the grossest of ways. And it’s true that the infrastructure here hasn’t been able to keep up with the population boom, so there is sometimes a feeling of crowdedness and there is certainly a frustrating abundance of construction.

“Used to be all farmland out here,” he says. “Traffic like this at ten o’clock at night… I don’t know. I guess I don’t have to tell you. You’re driving in it all day.”

“It’s not usually too bad,” I say. “Rush hour gets rough sometimes, but other than that…”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting old. I turn 50 this year, and I’m making it a goal to get on my way before then. Been here my whole life, but it’s time to go.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Haven’t figured it out yet. Probably nowhere most people have heard of, though. I’m looking for a town, not a city. A village, even.”

“Gotcha.”

“Somewhere without a Walmart—that’s rule number one. No franchises at all, if I can help it. Gonna go out there with my dog in the back of my truck, buy a few acres, and build something.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”

“It’s a plan, anyway. Don’t know if it’s a good one, but it’s something.”

“Are you gonna build the house yourself?”

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“Oh yeah. That’s what I used to do. But I quit a couple years ago. Now I’m a rideshare driver, like you.”

“Oh really?”

We swap rideshare stories for a bit. He asks if I’ve ever kicked anyone out of my car and I tell him I’ve been close a couple times but it hasn’t happened yet.

“I only did it once,” he says. “This guy was trying to talk politics with me. It wasn’t even that I didn’t like his politics, it was just that I don’t like talking politics. But he just wouldn’t stop. I kept telling him I wasn’t gonna talk about it, and he kept demanding to know what I thought, and eventually I just pulled over and told him, ‘You can get out here. Good luck with the next guy.’”

I don’t try to talk politics with him, but I feel like I can guess his. He’s a manual laborer who is tired of the growth of the city, looking to move somewhere rural and take his dog with him in the back of his truck. But I could be wrong. And as passengers go, I agree with him that political ranters are some of the worst, so if he doesn’t like talking politics, I’m more than happy to oblige.

Eventually he circles back to his plans to move. “I figure if I don’t leave by the time I’m 50, I might not do it at all,” he says. “People get to be 60, 70 years old and they’re too set in their ways or their health isn’t good enough.”

“I think a lot of people wouldn’t even uproot at 50,” I tell him. “Not from somewhere they’ve lived their whole life.”

I mean it as a compliment, but he doesn’t seem to take it that way. “Yeah, well, it’s how it’s gotta be. This…” he gestures broadly. “This doesn’t work anymore.”

“No, I just meant it’s good that you’ve still got that adventurous spirit at 50. I think a lot of people don’t.”

“Well, I’m a healthy 50. Still get a lot of exercise, still eat right. Even go down to the bar every couple weeks and play some punk rock.”

That surprises me a little. “Punk rock?”

“Hell yeah. You don’t think an old guy can play punk rock.”

“It’s not that. It’s just… putting your dog in the back of a truck and moving out to the sticks to build your own house… I’d have figured you more for a country guy.”

He laughs. “Yeah, well… it’s a hair’s breadth difference between punk rock and outlaw country.”

I guess that’s true.

I mention that I’m a comedian and we swap stories of crowds and venues for the remainder of the drive. It’s interesting. Two performers in leather jackets, both rideshare drivers, both sick of hyper-political people, one going bald and the other going gray.

“The driveway is in the alley,” he says as we get close to his house. “Right up here. See my car on the left?”

I do. It’s a Hyundai Sonata. A little older than mine, and a different color, but at the end of the day, more or less the same thing.

“Perfect rideshare vehicle,” he says again as he gets out.

“Sure is,” I tell him.

So he’s closing in on 50 years old. That puts him 13 ahead of me. I wonder if I’ll have a dog and truck by then, and where I’ll be headed.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

There are four of them, all loud, leaving a bar at closing time. She gets in the front seat and asks me if I have any stories of crazy pickups from tonight. When I say no, she asks what the craziest I’ve had was.

I go to my standby—the UFO abductee. It’s short and sweet and I can tell it well, usually getting laughs out of people and starting a conversation. On this night, it’s impossible to tell the story. For one thing, the people in the back are all shouting overtop of each other and interrupting the story to talk to the woman up front. Worse, she herself keeps interrupting the story, stepping on the pacing with unrelated questions. It’s a two-minute story that ends up taking five minutes and I never really get through it. I’m already looking forward to this ride being over.

“Okay, so I’m writing a screenplay and I’m working on the pilot script for the first episode,” she says.

(Writing tip: Try to strip away redundant language. For example, instead of saying “I’m writing a screenplay and I’m working on the pilot script for the first episode,” say, “I’m writing a pilot.”)

“It’s about crazy first dates,” she says. “So I’m collecting stories of crazy first dates. Do you have any crazy first date stories?”

I have at least one really good one, but I already tried telling one story on this ride and she and her friends made it impossible. I also write both fiction and standup, and I could make good use of this story in either of those mediums, so I’m hesitant to pass it off to another writer—especially one whose work I don’t know.

“Not really,” I lie.

“Oh come on, you must have something.”

“Eh, I’m a writer too, so my really good stories I like to save for my own writing,” I say.

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“Yeah, but this is my idea,” she says, as though she owns a copyright on ‘crazy date stories’ as a premise.

“Well, I’m not thinking of anything anyway.”

She gets out some notes and reads me two or three crazy date stories that other people have told her. A couple of them are admittedly pretty funny. If she is a good writer, there are a few episodes there. She has more than enough for a pilot. If I were her, I’d be hard at work on that script and resisting the urge to say too much about it until I had it just the way I wanted it. But to each their own.

“So those are a few of them. And you’ve got nothing?” she asks in a sneering tone as we pull up outside her house.

Here’s the thing. I collect stories. I’m collecting a story right now. I don’t have to beg and plead for them, nor do I have to scorn people who don’t want to give me theirs. Every experience I have might be story. Every person I meet might be a character.

Remember those Magic Eye images where you had to look at them just the right way? Like the schooner in the movie Mallrats? That’s what story hunting is like. You can scour and scrutinize for hours and get nowhere, but if you’ve trained your eyes, you can relax, and stories will jump right out at you.

“I’ve got nothing,” I tell her again.

“I can tell you’re someone who never has anything interesting happen to you,” she says as she leaves.

I close out the ride, put the car in gear, and enjoy the quiet. I head for my next passenger, continuing to have nothing interesting happen to me.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

I pick him up from an assisted living facility in the mid-afternoon. He is blind, and probably in his late sixties. A woman helps him out to the car and says goodbye.

For a rideshare trip, it’s on the long side. First we’re going to an address twenty minutes away, then we’re coming back.

In between rides I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. When I pick a passenger up, I tend to switch to one of three XM radio stations—one is classic rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s, one is alternative from the ‘90s and ‘00s, and one is metal mostly from the ‘80s. I basically make snap judgments when I see the passengers. Classic rock seems like the safe pick for this guy, and the first thing we get is Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run.

“I karaoke’d this song about forty years ago and got a standing ovation,” he tells me.

Swish.

That sets him off on stories of different songs he’s karaoke’d, bands he’s seen, shows he’s been to. We sing along with Mary Jane’s Last Dance and Baba O’Riley, then after a while he says, “So let me guess… 65.”

I pause for a minute. “What are you guessing?”

“Your age.”

I laugh. “I’m 35.”

“I am so sorry,” he says.

But he’s blind, and we’re talking about music from his generation, so it’s not really that weird of him to assume I’m his age. Still, I’ll try to remember this moment the next time somebody asks me to guess their age and then looks all hurt because I was three years high.

“My first concert was Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he tells me. “It was about ‘75 and Free Bird had just come out. It was an outdoor show. I was about 14 and my brother was going, so my parents made him take me along. He and his friends ditched me for most of the show, so I was just standing there by myself with about five joints in my pocket. I had a great time.”

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He tells me a dozen stories like that one. He tells me about multi-week trips dropping acid and seeing all the greats, about playing the drums but never having the balls to join a band, about missing the draft for Vietnam by a year, about riding dirt bikes in childhood and motorcycles in adulthood.

“I spent more time on my bike than I did with any of my wives,” he says, “which is probably why I was married three times.”

When we get to his destination on the map, it seems to be an abandoned building.

“Where are we supposed to be going?” I ask him. “I don’t think this is right.”

“Wienerschnitzel,” he says.

Sure enough, there is a Wienerschnitzel next door. We go through the drive-thru and he orders three chili dogs and a chocolate shake. It costs $15 and he hands me a twenty to pay for it, saying, “Wow, that’s cheaper than the ride.”

“How much was the ride?”

“About forty bucks.”

I can’t help laughing to myself. This guy is spending $55 and the better part of an hour for chili dogs and a chocolate shake.

On the way back, he tells me that he recently visited a friend who took him out on his dune buggy and wanted to get drunk with him.

“I can’t do that stuff anymore,” he says. “I can drink a beer or two, but then it’s time to go to bed. He’s my age, but he’s still drinking like we did when we were 20. I don’t get it.”

He’s a little more pensive now, talking about how life has calmed down. He lost his sight to glaucoma four years ago and now he lives in assisted living and jokes around with the staff and they tell him he should do standup, but he doesn’t know how to get started.

“I run an open mic,” I tell him. “Come by one week. I’ll put you on.”

He makes me repeat the information to him, but he doesn’t sound serious about it. When you’ve had this conversation as many times as I have, you can usually tell the people who like the fantasy of doing it and the people who are genuinely interested in giving it a try. It’s a ten-to-one ratio, at best.

I get him back to where he lives, help him out of the car, and he takes my arm so I can guide him to the building. “The front door,” he says. “Girls don’t like it when I go in the back door.” Then he laughs like a child at the double-entendre. If he never shows up to my open mic, it’s probably no great loss.

“I’m not done yet,” he insists, as I open the door for him and hand him his chili dogs and milkshake. “I’ve got at least one chapter ahead of me. I already think—no, not think, I know—that the Lord is going to restore my sight. And then I’m gonna get back on my bike, and I’m gonna ride around spreading His glory.”

And hey, he never joined a band and he may never come to my open mic, but I wish him the best when it comes to the miracle. I don’t go in for a Divine Father so much as I do for Lady Luck, but he can pray and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for him, and that way we’ve got all our bases covered.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

They’re in their forties, both fit and well groomed—the kind of couple you expect to see in a coffee shop, making a spreadsheet with their workout schedule, meal plan, and each of their responsibilities to their home business.

“Uber is so fuckin’ stupid,” he says after a minute of driving. “Why would it tell you to turn there? We could take this street all the way to my house.”

“Maybe it’s faster,” she suggests with a shrug.

“It’s not faster. How would it be faster? It’s one fuckin’ street. Now we’re going to fifteen minutes out of the way on some other fuckin’ street?”

It’s a fifteen-minute trip, so we’re definitely not going fifteen minutes out of the way. It’s possible it’s a couple minutes slower since it’s an increased distance, but it’s also possible it’s faster since the speed limits are higher this way. It’s also rush hour and there are a lot of road closures that are causing major congestion all over the place, so in general, it’s hard to say.

“I can make a u-turn and we can take your way if you want,” I tell him.

“No, it’s whatever. We’re going this way now.”

So much for “fifteen minutes out of the way”. Apparently the one minute it would take to turn around isn’t worth it.

“God, all these fuckin’ road closures,” he says. “Nobody in this city knows what the fuck they’re doing.”

“Well, there’s always roadwork to be done,” she says. “It’s really never convenient.”

“Yeah, but they shut everything down at the same fuckin’ time, and then as soon as they’re done with one thing, they shut down something else,” he says, and I don’t bother telling him that he just said two opposite things.

The more they talk, the more it becomes apparent that they are cartoon characters. Every sentence out of the man’s mouth is negative, and every sentence out of the woman’s mouth is positive. She remarks about what a beautiful city it is, he remarks about how they keep fucking it up. She says the trees are beautiful. He says people are spending a fucking fortune cutting down the trees. Everything is “fucking” too. He reminds me Dennis Farina’s character in the movie Get Shorty remarking that “They say the fuckin’ smog is the fuckin’ reason you have such beautiful fuckin’ sunsets.” I’m not one to get offended by language, but Jesus, change up your fuckin’ descriptors once in a while, would you, please?

“I flew in this morning,” she says. “I like the airport here, how it’s small and easy to get around.”

“Did you see the collapsed fuckin’ hangar?”

“No.”

“These fuckin’ idiots. They were building this big fuckin’ hangar, but they were cutting costs and the fuckin’ thing collapsed. Bunch of people fuckin’ died.”

“That’s sad.”

“It’s not sad, it’s fuckin’ negligent.”

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The other thing I’m noticing is he doesn’t seem capable of agreeing with anything anyone else says. I find him grating after two minutes. I don’t know where she gets her superhuman positivity but it’s like she doesn’t even notice. She just keeps smiling and saying positive things and he just keeps shooting down all those positive things. They say opposites attract, but this is fuckin’ ridiculous.

I eventually gather that she is a flight attendant, which seems fitting of the permanent smile on her face. She talks about spending the last few days in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and having lots of fun there (surprise: he thinks both places fuckin’ suck).

I get them to a beautiful house on a hill. She thanks me for the ride. He just gets out.

Passengers and drivers can give each other star ratings. Anything less than a three, from either party, and the app will never match us again. It’s handy for passengers who get a driver they find rude or dangerous or whose car is filthy, and it’s handy for drivers dealing with obnoxious passengers. I’m pretty lax. If somebody is drunk to the point of being a vomit-hazard, I’ll vote them down so I don’t have to take the risk again. Or if they leave a mess. Or if they are excessively rude and argumentative and I’d rather not have another interaction with them. But it’s rare.

With this guy, I hesitate. In spite of everything, he was actually never disrespectful toward me personally, he didn’t make a mess of the vehicle, and he wasn’t plastered. He’s not what I’d think of as a “bad customer” exactly. He’s just a drag to be around.

I think of that Black Mirror episode with the social credit ratings that rule everyone’s life. I don’t like that technology is increasingly immersing us in a snitch-based culture where we anonymously cut each other down over perceived infractions, hiding behind phone screens like cowards as we vote on who the digital gods should bless and who they should smite. But I still don’t like the guy.

If this were a movie, I would say something. Rather than giving him one star behind his back like a coward, I would groan, take a deep breath, and roll down the window just before he walked away. I would say, “Excuse me? Sir? I just have to tell you something, because I don’t know if you have someone in your life who will say it: it seems like you’re really successful, and your disagreeableness might help you a lot in the business world, and you have a beautiful house, and if this is your wife or your girlfriend, she seems just so great, and honestly, good for you, but the thing is… you are just fucking awful. I spent fifteen minutes with you just now and you complained about thirty things. I feel like if I had one of those clickers that they use in sporting events and I was trying to keep track of your complaints, I would’ve been so busy with it I would have crashed us into a goddamn bus. And I don’t know if you have, like, friends and loved ones, but if there are people who spend time with you, it can only be because you’re successful and they’re hoping that some of your status will rub off on them, because status is all you have. As a person to hang out with, you’re like an anal rash. You’re just so unbelievably irritating. If a child complained as much as you do, you’d never take that child anywhere. You’d just leave him at home and go do shit without him. And maybe that’s what your parents did with you and it’s why you became independent and successful and also why you never had to stop whining about everything, but I bet you could get so much more out of life if you could just be, like, even twenty percent less of a dick. Maybe you could set an alert on your phone every forty-five minutes that says, ‘What was the last thing I bitched about’ and every day you could keep a list, and just try to take one-out-of-five at the end of each day and go, ‘You know what, I’m gonna stop bitching about that going forward.’ Or ask her for a few things that made her happy today and see if you can agree with, you know, one fucking thing. Just one. For the love of God! That might be fun for a change, wouldn’t it? Being happy about something? Come on, what do you think?”

I think the reason people say things like that in movies, is out of wish fulfillment. We sit in the audience, and we laugh or cheer, and we think of a coworker, or a neighbor, or a family member who we’d love to say it to. But most of the time, we can’t actually bring ourselves to do it. In real life, it’s how you get a tooth knocked out, how you get a call made to your employer, or at the very least, how you get a one-star rating.

In this guy’s case, I give him three stars. He’s not technically doing anything wrong, but given the choice, I’d sooner never see him again. And I guess I won’t.

Really though, I should’ve fuckin’ said it.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

They're heading to a show in their Halloween costumes, though I have my suspicions as to whether they're drinking age or whether they have fake IDs. They're college girls, I think, considering one of them lives in my building and my apartment is across the street from the campus.

“Can you guess what our costumes are?” one of them asks, for some reason. One of them is an angel and one of them is a demon and it's obvious. A four-year-old could guess it.

“Are you my conscience?” I ask, and they give me a weird look. I clarify, “I recognize you from my shoulders every time I have to make a difficult decision.”

They laugh.

Years ago, I wrote a novel called One-Night Stan's, which took place on “afterlife night” at the titular strip club, with all of the performers dressed as angels and demons and dancing to appropriate songs. Thinking of this, I put on Heaven and Hell by Black Sabbath and tell the girls it's their song. I think they're too young to know it, but Demon Girl in particular rocks out to it anyway.

“You should clock out and come hang out at the club with us,” says Demon Girl.

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I tell her no thanks. For one thing I've been running people to this venue all night and it's clearly a shoulder-to-shoulder kind of event with various DJs playing so loud you have to scream into the ears of the people next to you to be heard—not my scene. I also need to make money and the weekend is the best time to do it. But the excuse I use is that I'm almost finished with a sober October and it's too late to mess it up now.

In a beautiful piece of irony that I seem to be the only one to notice, Angel Girl starts going, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Get those last couple days in,” while Demon Girl says, “Pff, who cares? It's two days. You basically succeeded already. Come get a drink. It's Halloweekend.” They become the angel and demon on my shoulders like I labeled them when they first got in the car. It makes me smile. One of those real-life moments that, if you wrote it into a movie, people would go, “This is pretty on-the-nose. Can’t we find a more subtle way to do it?”

I don't go to the show with them, but a part of me wonders whether it was the right call—whether I’m too in the habit of making practical choices over fun ones.

However, the next fare I pick up is a couple about my age, who are leaving the show. They say, “Oh God, it sucked! It's so crowded you can't move, and the music is way too loud. You can't get to the bar, and if you do, everything costs a fortune. I don't know what the hell we were thinking!”

I nod a silent thanks to the angel on one shoulder. There but for the grace of God go I.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

As I mentioned back in February, I made a short film last year, which I submitted to several festivals throughout 2025. With the days of horror hitting their annual peak and the season of scary festivals coming to an end, it seems like the perfect time to show it to everyone. So without any further ado, here is Mad Brew (followed by further ado).

(More videos, including my standup special, will be coming to that YouTube channel very soon, so if you’re interested in my video work, consider subscribing.)

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Mad Brew recently played at GenreBlast Film Festival, Nightmares Film Festival, and From Beyond Film Festival. The film was originally made as part of the h48 film competition, in which participating teams have 48 hours. Teams are assigned a sub-genre, a prop, and a line of dialogue that they are required to include in the film to make sure they can’t cheat by starting early. In our case, we had to make a paranormal horror film that included a pair of knitting needles, and a character saying, “Nope. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

As a standup comedian, I have often worked with Mad Swede Brewing, and they were kind enough to let me film at one of their locations, including in the actual brewery where all the equipment is. When you’re making a movie on 48 hours with no budget, it’s helpful to have access to a location that’s a little more interesting to look at than your own apartment. We spent a long day filming in the brewery, with a group of people I know from Boise’s standup and theater communities.

I hope you enjoy Mad Brew. While I write all the time, it had been a long time since I had directed. I hope to do some more of it soon.

They're coming home from a Halloween party—three of them, all women, all in their twenties, all loudly drunk. They spend the trip complaining about the party they just left. One of them says, “I feel like I went through the seven stages of grief at that party,” earning raucous laughter from her friends. I’m pretty sure there are only five stages of grief, but who’s counting?

“That would be a good theme for a party,’ I tell them. “The stages of grief.”

“Oh my God!” one of them says. “We should use that as the theme for next year's party—the seven stages of grief!”

Everyone agrees, then she adds, “I always have the best ideas when I'm drunk!”

Her friends pat her on the back and concur that, yes, she really does have great ideas when she’s drunk. I stare ahead, grinding my teeth, and thinking that I was the one who suggested it as a party theme.

I have heard the word “hepeat” used in reference to the moment when a woman expresses an idea that goes ignored, then a man repeats the same idea as though it is his own, and everyone heaps praise on him. By that token, what’s happening in this car could be called a “shepeat”, but this is why using gendered language to attack behaviors that aren’t necessarily gender-specific, shall we say, chaps a lot of people’s balls.

Allow me to mansplain.

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It starts with a word like “mansplain” entering the lexicon in order to call attention to men who condescendingly explain things to women. It has its value, but some of the people who latch onto it are misandrists who deploy it cheaply to dismiss criticism. This grates on many people, but misogynists are the ones who take exception most loudly, and along comes another new word: “femsplain”. Much like “mansplain”, accusations of femsplaining are sometimes fair, but sometimes deployed cheaply and derogatorily. So misogynists and misandrists get busy tallying up mansplainers and femsplainers in one of 70 million stupid arguments that make up the current war of words between the wokes and the anti-wokes. Meanwhile, condescending explanation crimes of the man-on-man and woman-on-woman variety go largely unremarked upon, their perpetrators unshamed. Thus, a rift becomes wider, a problem becomes uglier, and we probably could have saved a lot of heartache by just using “splainer”. Often at the heart of our squabbles, we are not actually as divided as we seem. Man or woman, woke or anti-woke, nobody likes a splainer.

Which brings me back to “hepeat”.

I don’t want to say this woman is shepeating me. I also don’t want to take off the gendered prefix and just call it “peating”, because that’s a little confusing, and possibly offensive to people named Pete. My father is a Pete. My middle name is Peter, and while I’m clearly being a splainer at the moment, I like to think I’m not a peater. We already fucked things up for a lot of Karens who probably did nothing wrong, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to reverse course on that one, but let’s at least not do it to the Petes. Instead, let’s invent a new term.

I’ll nominate “idea-cucking”. That seems like a good way to describe the feeling when you have an idea that you love and cherish, and then some other asshole comes along and has their way with it right in front of you.

Nobody likes to be idea-cucked. And if the women in my car weren’t so drunk and loud and impossible to get a word in with, I might remind them that a Stages of Grief party was my idea, and then splain to them that there are only five stages of grief, but I don’t have the energy for that.

And anyway, they’re trashed. When they roll out of bed the next morning with their Halloween makeup smeared on their pillowcases, staggering their apartments in search of coffee and fried food, they really might go through seven stages of grief. But I would bet money on one thing: they are going to forget all about my (yes, my) party idea. And that gives me a happy feeling.

Male or female, there is a name for that happy feeling that I don't have to make up a word for. That happy feeling is called schadenfreude.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.

I am trying to watch a classic horror movie every day for the month of October. Right now, I’m living in one. Rain is coming down in sheets and every now and then a streak of lightning ignites the sky. The streets are deserted, and only a few people are visible through dimly-lit windows.

I pull up outside a bar and two men in their twenties run to the car, hunched over in the rain. They get into my back seat as quickly as they can and I begin to drive.

One of them, who clearly sees the night the same way I do, asks me, "Are you going to take us to our destination? Or are you going to take us to the middle of nowhere and kill us?"

"Don't ask that!" the other guy whispers sharply, sounding scared.

"It's funny you bring it up," I tell them, "because I watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre earlier tonight, about some people who get killed in the middle of nowhere."

"Don't kill us," says Funny Guy. "We're good Catholics."

"That's funny too," I say, "because yesterday I watched The Wicker Man, about some people who kill a good Catholic."

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Scared Guy isn't amused by any of this, but Funny Guy is, and Funny Guy is the one who used the app, the one who will rate me and decide my tip, so I follow his lead. When I make a turn (which the app told me to make) and he fakes a scared face and asks, "Why are you going this way?" I stare straight ahead and say in a menacing tone, "Don't worry. I know a shortcut."

Scared Guy hasn't seen many horror movies, or he’d know that Funny Guy almost always dies before Scared Guy, and since Scared Guy is in a car with two Funny Guys and there's no woman here to be Final Girl, his odds are actually really good.

The writer in me kicks in and I say, "What would really be ironic is if you requested a ride to the middle of nowhere, and then when we get there, you kill me."

They both laugh at that, and it reverses the dynamic. For the rest of the ride, they imply they’re going to kill me. Scared Guy becomes another Funny Guy, and I become the new Scared Guy, which perhaps increases my odds of survival and lowers his.

I drop them off and we go our separate ways without any of us being murdered, though I’d like to think, as soon as they get into the house and out of my sight, Scared Guy’s face will drain of all emotion and he will hack Funny Guy to pieces. That's clearly the best twist ending.

Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.