Lyft driver: “Your name, is Slavic? Me too. Bulgarian. I drive fast for you, brother.”
Now he’s waxing philosophical about the Ottoman Empire, imperialism, and human nature. “Humans? We are the most dangerous animal. Other animals, they kill when they need to. We kill when we think we need to. It is not the same.”
He just monologued about climate change and the military industrial complex, and the difficulty of having a Balkan identity when every Balkan country changes hands “every twenty years”. “Our history is getting swallowed by the biggest fish, and that fish getting swallowed by the next biggest fish, and so on.”
He had so many more gems. We compared family names, realized that his daughter shares my grandfather’s name (the feminine version), and then he started talking about The Old Country. The city where he grew up had a population of 300, and the population of his whole country could fit inside Chicago. He came here twenty years ago seeking a better life, but “everything in America is too big, the cars, the problems, the inequality”. He pointed to his phone and called it “stupid little computer” that’s meant to control his life, not to improve it, and how the world is getting steadily worse and the little people can’t do anything about it. He told me to continue my studies so that I don’t grow up to work in the service industry and can instead try to stop the concentration of power into the hands of corrupt people. Then he shrugged and said, “But who knows? Can anyone do it? I don’t know if it’s possible.”
I tipped him 25%.
(via fury-brand)
