Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Octopus Fan
Episode 32 in a series of true rideshare stories
I start the conversation in the same lazy way that I do with all my passengers, by asking, “How’s your day going?”
He replies with an answer I’ve never heard before. “Not bad. I learned some crazy shit about octopuses.”
These people walk among us—the ones with no use for social scripts. They are out maximizing the potential of every interaction, as the rest of us pathetic organisms sleepwalk through our chances to meet each other, talking without conscious thought and saying nothing. “Hello.” “Hi.” “How are you?” “Fine. You?” “Pretty good.” “That’s good.” “How’s work?” “It’s fine.” “Love your shirt.” “Thanks.” “Your welcome.” “Have a nice day.” “You too.” What the fuck are we doing? Why are we boring ourselves and each other when it would take so little effort to say, “I learned some crazy shit about octopuses” and let the chips fall where they may? Why can so few of us present ourselves to strangers with that kind of reckless abandon?
“What did you learn about octopuses?” I ask, and if there is a human being alive who would not ask that question in that moment, I don’t want to meet that boring motherfucker, or fatherfucker, or, most likely, nonfucker.
“Well,” he says, “I watched this video called ‘Octopuses are making fish armies’. Apparently when octopuses hunt, sometimes they team up with a group of fish, and all the fish start looking at rocks to find one with mollusks under it, and when one of them finds one, they tell the octopus, and the octopus surrounds the rock so the mollusks try to escape, and it eats a bunch of the mollusks, and the fish eat the ones that escape. Plus, if the fish aren’t focusing, the octopus punches them. They showed a video of an octopus just hauling off and decking this fish in the fucking head.”
I drop him off shortly after that, but he sends me the video so I can check it out between rides, and it does indeed include an octopus decking a fish. It’s amusing, and a somewhat interesting wildlife video, but more than anything, I come away thinking, ‘I wish more of us wore our enthusiasm on our sleeves like that guy.’
“How’s your day going?” I ask my next passenger, a few minutes later.
“Good. Yours?”
I take a breath. “Not bad. I learned some crazy shit about octopuses.”
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 often like to skip right past the smalltalk to the crazy shit when I meet a new person. Just as a test to see if they can hang.