Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Another Sad Artist

Episode 55 in a series of true rideshare stories

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.

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.

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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.