1984 London Cab

As you know, my Texas based London Black Cab is for sale, and I also have an owner wanting to sell hers too in South Carolina. Here are the details – if you have interest, please use the form below or call 323.428.3748  to get in touch or comment on this post and I’ll connect you. It’s black and crocodile and has ridiculously low miles for an eighties car. I have to imagine that my cab has at least 200,000 miles on the streets of London under its belt.

“I’m in Charleston, South Carolina …my London Cab is newly painted, has a GPS, Black on Black with faux croc interior…it’s a 1984 , suicide doors, runs on propane, has about 49,000 miles on it…asking $15,000, it runs great but the battery dies if your not careful  you really need to watch if you leave a light on or leave a door open it drains  quickly, the air conditioning and heat work has a great sound system and video player in it!”

Having owned a black cab for a year, having AC is huge – and the battery drainage is entirely normal. The internal passenger compartment lights are taken from an age when lots of amps were pushed through robust wires to make a faint orange glow. So they use a fair amount of power, as do the running lights. Suffice it to say, make sure the doors close properly when you park.

Black on black Black cab back

323.428.3748

OK, so by day, I’m a superhero helping people live in greener homes, but by night, how do I save the planet? More specifically, how do I do that in Las Vegas?

Pretty simple I utilize the three “P”s – preparation, practice, and pernicious rage. Imagine if you will that some weird nuke stuff has been put into the plot of a bad DNA apocalypse movie, and the film has gone all zombie all over. In Vegas. So, what every eco-warrior wants to know is this: what machine gun should I use for a zombie hunt. Here’s a video of me trying out a few guns.

There’s a great little warehouse nestled on the wrong side of the tracks which doubles as a gun range, and I went there after hanging out at my conference all day to release some aggression while giggling at the child-like simplicity of an automatic weapon, loosing dozens of slugs of lead into a lifeless rendering of an undead nazi.

Predictably, I messed up a little and got eaten by the paper monsters, but a rollicking good time was had by all. Except the nazi. It had been almost ten years since I had shot a very big machine gun in Vietnam, but the old magic was still there. As long as all I had to do was squeeze the trigger, and someone else put the boom boom slugs into it for me.

Oh, and when I got home, I bought a Prius. Planet of the future and the present saved.

So while I was in Las Vegas, I was also not at my good chum’s birthday in England. So in the absentee Oscar winner style, I made a video.

“Are you beating Vegas?” slurs the red-faced man at the next table in Harrah’s Buffet Breakfast. My first response, “Like a red-headed stepchild” I squash between my brain and my mouth, and give an answer instead designed to indicate I am not one for conversation right now. Too much going on in my brain, and while he may still be rocking from the night’s partying, I am reeling, and my head is spinning. As my good friend Jamie puts it – I’m high as balls.

Someone beat her head clean off

The first time I came here, I had just turned 21 years old in Gatwick airport, been mugged in South Central Los Angeles due to some very poor map-reading, and even worse decisions. After fleeing the city of angels, I had read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as my companion drove, and my idea of the city was one of drugs, filth, and hyperbolic mis-adventures, which of course my companion and I did our best to recreate.

At this tender age I was still part of my school friend tribe – focused mainly on drinking as much as possible and hitting the clubs. I also was moving into what was my university tribe – focused on drinking, drugs, and bad nightclubs too. So my idea then of beating Las Vegas was based on carousing around and seeing the sights, the most memorable of which was a car in flames in front of Excalibur.

The next visit was almost ten years later when my tribe was primarily the technology startup which dominated my late twenties. Living and working in San Francisco a friend and I had decided to get away for a Christmas Eve before I headed on to a holiday in Cozumel (where Ron Malibu was incidentally born at a very late night in the hotel bar). The watchwords of that trip were drinking, and ordering as many shrimp-based dishes as possible from the room service menu at 3am on Christmas Day.

Another decade later and this time I’m here for a conference. I am actually the type who wants to learn as much as possible from the event, which means early nights and taking care of myself. My current tribes include the crazy fit kickboxers at Martial Way Academy, and the eco-warrier community in which I live, though my tribes are now with a small “t”, rather than dominating my every waking moment. So beating Vegas has become a study in maintaining some kid of self-discipline in an environment that encourages wild abandon. I’m not sure how the 21 year old me would view the man sat here typing alone in his hotel room before 8am, after having completed 258 crunches, waiting for the buffet breakfast to digest so he can sneak in a run before the learning starts. Working on improving and changing myself into the person I want to be has meant very little intoxication for the lost six months, and eating thoughtfully. My gift to myself for my birthday in eight months time is a six pack, at which I am working daily.

So last night I went to see Absinthe and was studying the abs of the male performers as much as the asses of the females. No, I don’t think I’m bi or curious, I just want to see what a six pack looks like so I have something to aim for. Parts of my psyche are unchanged – the buffet was irresistible, and my three plates have left me more stuffed than perhaps I would like – it’s hard for me to resist perceived value. In my current incarnation working in Mueller Real Estate in Austin the key phrase is not to leave anything on the table. Unfortunately, while this makes me a great negotiator, it makes me a poor buffet diner – constantly evaluating the alternatives and ramifications of every piled spoon moving to my table:
“I can buy oranges outside, but not pineapple. Smoked salmon is expensive, don’t load up on eggs. Eat fast so my stomach doesn’t notice it’s being ram-raided by a smorgasbord of incompatible fruits and protein. And pineapple is high in Vitamin C.”

These thoughts run around in my head with nowhere to hide, so why then did I eschew dialogue with a fellow diner, and why if I’m trying to live well, am I “high as balls“.

The simple reason that I can’t focus and my breathing is shallow is not from snorting dirty coke from a show-girl’s powder room, it’s the stinking allergy meds. After a long battle with cedar pollen in Austin, which I had some measure of control over by avoiding dairy and most gluten, I got blindsided by the hay-(fever-)maker of a plane flight followed by the pervasive stench of fag smoke which shrouds the hotels and casinos. Being in a bar with my wife in Garland that both allowed and seemingly encouraged smoking was too much for me last week. The smell disgusts me and I wanted to leave as fast as possible. I hate being in smoky places.

There appears to be little choice here, and my sinuses hate me. So I gave in to drugs, and my garbled thoughts are spinning merrily out of my head as the nausea grips my body. I can’t even breathe well, and I woke up unable to pry apart my eye lids apart after conjunctivitis had marched into the territory of my tear ducts as my antibody army lay dormant and concussed by anti-histamines.

I may yet beat Vegas – the thought of nasty cocktails mixed with corn syrup and paint stripper is not appealing, and I will probably only gamble on the super cheap slots and maybe the craps tables just to get a taste. I’ll beat off the street hawkers trying to push the promise of super model sex for $35 as I walk and run past them. (wait, I said “beat off”, that didn’t come out right…) and I’ll take advantage of some of the cheapest hotel rooms known to Western man.

My Tribe with a capital “T” now is really my wife and kids, so winning is coming back in one piece without buying a time share or gambling away the proceeds of my latest vehicle transaction, and learning enough from this conference to keep my kids in buffets until they leave home. Whether I’ll beat the pink-eye and congestion is another matter.

If you have an audible subscription, then if you try to cancel your account, they offer you a $20 credit to stay with them. You can then use that to buy Keith Richards’ Life, as seen below and still have a nickel.

Add Life To Cart - makes me feel like the Creator

I’ve decided to sell it. My black cab is for sale. It’s a riot – it really has been fun. I’ve enjoyed the wrestling with clutches, figuring out how to get it inspected, and show-boating about in it.

Taxi posing at Mueller

Most of my friends tell me I should keep it forever, and they’re right -I’ve always wanted one since I got to the United States, more so when I start to get homesick in the summer. I say homesick, I probably just mean “want to be anywhere further away from the Equator than here” sick.

There’s nothing wrong with it – I’ve got it into a condition where it starts, goes and stops right on cue, and it’s the shiniest it’s been in a long while. Check out the latest photos of my London Taxi. I half heartedly put an ad on craigslist a week ago, and showed it to a few people this week.

If you know anyone who wants to get an unusual Christmas present for the friend who has everything, a working London Cab is my suggestion.

Shiny black cab

$5,000 and it’s yours – drop me a line.

Fun facts about my taxi:

• 2.2l Leyland diesel engine
• 4 speed manual transmission
• New clutch and a squillion other things
• It lived in a museum for 25 years
• It has suicide doors and jump seats
• There are advertisements for cigarettes in the back
• There’s a parts place in Dallas TX
• It’s older than my sister

It’s been too long since I prodded these bitten-nail fingers over the plastic squares my dears, partly as I’ve joined a cult and partly as I’ve been floating in a sea of indecision. Without so much as a paddle or a rudder, or at least any discernible course. Lest the goog think I care less now than I have ever done about the world of Subaru Brats, London Taxis and sausages, I must peel off the outer layer of confusion from my foggy brain, and rearrange it in a demi-linear fashion onto the page.

It was of course about ruddy time that I got into a cult. I’d been cultless for so long that I was starting to wonder if I would ever entertain a courtship with a new group again. Some kind of hobby celibacy had taken hold, and I was divorced from the world of writing, crafting and setting fire to things among fields of the semi-naked. Cult for me is not the pejorative Branch Ronian kind of deal where I take people from the bosom of their rural Christian upbringing and force them face first into a pit of stench and debauchery (though that does sound like the kind of hobby that I might like to get involved in when I retire, recruiting the weak and vulnerable at Cultist Anonymous meetings at a smoky pub in Clapham Junction). For me cult is all about joining a group whose social norms are significantly different from the ones to which you are accustomed, or perhaps bored of.

my goal for all to plainly see

So my new cult is simply kickboxing training, where the December piece of resistance is to perform 10,000 push ups. (press ups to those of the Western world who use push-up only in the same sentence as “Eva Herzigova” and “thrupenny bits“). It may quite possibly overdevelop several parts of the body, namely the bit responsible for arithmetic dividing 332 by the number of hours left in the day and the left tricep. But I’m part of something bigger than me, and it doesn’t require any belief in supernatural entities, and I got to write my honest goal down on day one of joining. To be a badass. I mean, sure I want to look good in a bikini at my impending 4oth birthday party, but I don’t just want the looks – I want the lifestyle.

So it is that I entered the larval stage, hoping to emerge the vibrant hued butterfly. I read that “classic” book by Ericl Carle about the hungry caterpillar to my kids. It’s supposed to teach nutrition and counting and “science”, but it’s a crock. The nutritional wisdom is a bit like the sinners guide to getting into heaven by changing your mind and surrendering and believing as soon as you can smell the WD40 on the hinges of the pearly Bill and Melindas. OK kids – this is what really happens if you eat sausages and chocolate cake for a week and then  chase it with a bit of salad. You still get sick.

And if you then take a long nap in a house made of your own vomit, you don’t wake up transformed. You wake up dead. In a plywood bed. Think kale, little ones, kale and lots of pushups. And you can grow up to be like your old man. Though hopefully less cynical and bitter.

How the Sandra Bullock am I supposed to teach my kids about not being bitter and twisted? Is there a book for that Eric Carle? Maybe I missed your colorful little volume in which the teenager stabs six nuns, punches a pregnant woman and then writes a few letters to Santa and makes good with the world. Oh Mr. Carle, how you let me down.You simplified the world and lied to me with your promise of three plums on Wednesday and a happy ending. I am now distraught. Vulnerable. Back in a cult.

At least I’m on my way to being a badass.

I’m sorry HSBC, but having some imaginative stoner throwing jazz noodles around the inside of some micro-wave meal of a christmas ballad with a delayed saxophone is not really getting me into the spirit of the season in which you claim call volume is higher than usual.

I’ll give you call volume, how about me yelling in block capitals for the thirteen minutes I’ve been on hold waiting for you to let me know how I can get access to my account now that you’ve changed the over-zealous security features of my online account which I only opened as you used to offer a reasonable amount of interest on a rainy day fund but which you’ve now cut, and you’ve also cut your security requirements in half. Shouldn’t that have made logging in easier?

Is the security now more lax as my money is now worth less to you, and are you paying less interest as you’re having to hire yourself people in a call center to put me on hold and explain why I can’t log in.

I mean, what is a bank anyway? You come across all nicey nicey when I’m a student, offering me a family wallchart and a porcelain pig when I sign up as you think that I’ll bank with you in perpetuity despite shoddy service, and here I am twenty years later on hold. Why couldn’t you have put me on hold when I was a student and as stoned as your rinky dink musak saxophonist and I had nothing to do all day but wait in line to earn a crust at the sperm bank? That way we wouldn’t be here right now, wasting my cell phone minutes.

HSBC, was it you that woke my son up at 3:30am this morning, and stopped me from getting any sleep? I’ll bet it was, you hapless fudgewits. Are you conspiring to bring down the economy and ruin my day? I bet you were just annoyed because Standard and Poor downgraded a bunch of your buddies’ credit ratings last night, and now you’re picking on the man on the street, trying to make yourself feel all big by leveraging some toxic assets to maintain your deposit requirements.

Oh really, I’ve already put you on hold and answered a call from a real estate agent and told her to go paddle herself manually up the sewer that her clients have dropped her in, and then now I’m back on hold with you again. How does it feel HSBC, being on hold with me? When your beleaguered call center muppet comes on the line and asks me for my name, how I about I tell him that his call is very important to me and ask him if he minds being on hold until I’ve finished what the frack I’m doing. See how you like it HSBC.

OK, it’s been 25 minutes now, which means that I am typing at the rate of approximately 40 words a minute, which is good to know. I think I’m going to hit you where it hurts, below the purse strings. I’m moving my money from your anemic interest bearing account as soon as you answer the pigging phone and tell me how to access it.

And seriously, what kind of image does a porcelain pig convey about a bank built to weather a storm? Something fragile and unable to bounce if dropped? Why not just give out mini-mattresses for us to stuff money under. Let’s face it Russian people don’t trust banks, they keep all their money in cash. In their wallet or under the mattress – it doesn’t matter. One day, simple English folk like me won’t trust banks either, and the secure mattress industry will start to boom. Mark my words, high street banks who are in fact closing down their high street branches, turning them into All Bar Ones which are now closing down as people can’t afford to go out and drink.
Screw you HSBC, I’m coming to buy one of your retail outlets, and I’m going to live in it. I’m going to pebble dash the exterior with smashed porcelain pigs, you unusually busy sub human scum. And I’m going to line the rooms with mattresses and my daughter is going to bounce up and down on all my money and you can eat toast with jam for the rest of your doomed and miserable days. That’s it. 32 minutes. I’m giving up.

I’m going to go to my nearest branch with a tractor covered in concrete and drive it through the door and ask for my money back. And no, I’m not dreaming of a white sodding christmas, I live in Texas you sheisters. Give me back my money.

I peaked a little and then settled down to losing fat

I’m not particularly obese by American or Scottish standards, but I’ve been dissatisfied with my body fat percentage for a while. Here’s what I did that helped me drop 15 pounds – some of it fat, some of it muscle.

1. Stopped doing things that didn’t work for me. Basically I stopped trying to add muscle at the expense of everything else. So no more post-workout carb and protein blitzes.
2. Find food I like to snack on. This was pretty simple. Cashews. Loaded with fat and calories, and supposedly good at improving mood. I eat the heck out of them whenever I feel peckish. Sometimes I eat about 3 cups a day. Crazy amount of calories, but it works for me.
3. Eat often. I eat a lot. It’s supposed to increase your metabolism, and I eat anywhere from 4-7 times a day as my schedule allows.
4. Don’t eat food product. I try to eat things that are made from food, with few ingredients. Nothing from a box, some things from a can, and as much as possible that I have cooked.
5. Salmon burgers. Frozen. Fried in oil. From the freezer to the plate in 6 minutes which is important when you’re eating all the time. I get them in bulk from CostCo.
6. Fruit and vegetables. I’m terrible at eating these – really. So I just get them juiced at Jamba Juice or the Daily Juice. Two stores that are on my way to other things.
7. Salad. Salad is dull as dishwater for me, so I cover it in oil and vinegar – either a home made dressing or store bought. I have a salad with a slice of bread and a salmon burger every day for breakfast whenever possible. The salad is supposed to fill you up. At any rate, it makes me less worried that I’m missing out on nutrients.
8. Exercise. I don’t exercise more than I used to, I just enjoy it more. I kick-box twice a week, and the difference with this is that it’s fun and I like the people. Which means I tend not to skip class. Working out alone sucks.
9. Cut out the rubbish. I stopped gorging on bread and cakes and chocolate and booze. For me the only way to stop drinking a lot of booze was to stop drinking at all. Same with chocolate. Bread I have in moderation, and I try to eat the decent bread. It’s not hard to figure it out looking at the back of the packet. I also avoid high impact carbs whenever I can. More sweet potato, less corn chips. I also avoid dairy, as it doesn’t work for me.
10. Sleep and drink water – in that order. I drink water before I eat anything in the morning. A hot cup of water with lemon in. It’s supposed to flush something or other out of somewhere or other. I don’t know if it works, but it sets my attitude that I’m not going to eat junk all day before I even eat anything.
11. Don’t eat carbs after 5pm. My kick boxing instructor told me this would help me wake up in the morning, and it really does. Sure I have a late night cookie from time to time, but I try not to. And I wake up with a ping every morning. Sleep helps with that too.
12. Measure every day. OK so this might be a little overkill, but I weigh myself every morning as soon as I wake up and take care of the pee-pee. So I’m measuring roughly the same thing each day. Me, slightly dehydrated from the night’s sleep and having just taken a pee. I chart it. If I was really good, I’d measure body fat percentage – my scale does that but I don’t trust the absolute numbers too much – just the daily changes.

So that worked for me. My weight has stabilized, so I’m looking for a way to get rid of another 4% of body fat – I know it’s vain and pointless but I want a 6 pack for my birthday. And realistically, most of life is ultimately pointless, so why not?

Taxi starts Honda

So I haggled with my wife for use of the 2008 Japanese minivan today – my mum is in town, and I can actually use 5 seats. Who would have thought I’d be using the original minivan to jump start it. Yes the 1967 Austin FX4 came to the rescue of the 41 year younger behemoth.

But I did. Even with one glow plug out of action, the taxi starts first time now.