it's difficult to figure out just where taxi drivers acquired a reputation for wisdom. As one who made his living as a hack for seven years (and that's not counting the time I drove a cab -- ka-boom), I can confidently attest that taxi drivers, as a class, rank extremely low on the Lao-Tse Scale. Somewhere there may exist a phalanx of Checker-driving louts aflame with priceless insights, but it ain't in this city, pally.

In fact, when I summon remembrance of hack conversations past, what comes to mind is not so much the biting aphorism as the bovine grunt. "Pretty slow out there tonight" just about exhausted the dialectical skills of most of my fellow drivers. And conversations that started (as they invariably did) with "The asshole stiffed me!" or "I met this incredible chick last night" rarely proved enlightening or, in the latter case, credible.

True, the job did provide occasional flashes of Zen-like insight. I recall one memorable hoodtop colloquy on the crucial epistemological question of "Have you ever been so stoned that you..." (to be printed in next month's Social Text) in which one driver said, "Have you ever been so stoned that you're driving around empty, and the dispatcher calls out an intersection right near you, and you don't check in because you THINK you have a fare?" -- a parable that illuminated the human condition in a blinding flash. But such transcendent moments were lamentably rare.

The myth of the all-knowing cabbie may have started with those sentimental movies from the '30s and '40s, where tough, pizza-faced hacks with Joisey accents were always offering up homespun wisdom out of the corners of their cigar-chomping mouths. But what Hollywood giveth, Hollywood can taketh away, and Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" should have killed the idea of the Higher Hack off once and for all.

For those who have forgotten, soon-to-be-Mohawked protagonist Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in an agitated state possibly attributable to his habit of pouring Jim Beam on his Cheerios, approaches another driver, called "The Wizard" because of his supposed great wisdom, for spiritual counsel. The Wizard (Peter Boyle) proceeds to deliver a long, incomprehensible harangue, concluding with something like, "The way I look at it, when a man does a job, a man becomes that job." After a pause, De Niro looks at Boyle with his usual shy, semi-psychotic expression and says, "You know, that's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard." To which the irritated Boyle replies, "Hey, whaddya expect? I'm a taxi driver!"

But if taxi drivers are not especially wise, they probably offer just as good advice as most psychiatrists (who are not especially wise either, and have a much higher drop charge). Like the barber who doubles as a political analyst and the marriage-counseling bartender, taxi drivers hold down the working man's end of the advice spectrum. They serve as an unshaven Greek chorus, an erratically-braking source of Anonymous Truth. Strangers share intimacies with hacks for the same reason they do with priests or shrinks: there is something comforting about not knowing anything about the person you're talking to except that he could use a trim above the ears.

And confronted with the thousand weird and funny stories, the cosmic and mundane questions asked by complete strangers, it's not surprising that taxi drivers fall into their role as Everyman Buddha: for the duration of a five-minute ride (the length of a good song, a smoke, a long kiss) they are given dispensation to say things more intimate, audacious and, yes, sometimes wise, than most of us do in our daily lives. It's one of the profession's few perks.

"Taxi Wisdom," Risa Mickenberg's illustrated book of quotations drawn from actual conversations with New York City taxi drivers, is an eye-opening little chapbook of mobile aphorisms. Some of the "profundity" here derives strictly from weird malapropisms of the "we-are-two-wild-and-crazy-guys" school, where something gets lost in the translation from the original Albanian: "Bike messengers -- they search for death," for example, has that unmistakable Dan Akroyd ring. Other aphorisms are less than deep: "I see more of what is going on around me because I am not concerned with finding a parking place" will not cause Nietzsche to lose any of his eternally-recurring sleep, and "The traffic -- it slows, it speeds up again for no reason sometimes" poses no immediate threat to Kant.

But others are truly thought-provoking. Take the Heraclitean observation "The things you love are as stupid as the things you hate and are easily interchangeable." Or "As soon as you meet someone, you know the reasons why you will leave them." Or "When you think you have lost something, it is usually still with you."

My favorites, however, are the statements that are simply so weird that they cannot be deciphered. What are we to make, for example, of "Marriage is for when you (sic) life is not so good"? Or "You say you are happy, you are lying"? Or my absolute personal favorite, "People look so much better alone"?

Who knows? Who cares? For five clams, even a halfassed Satori is a deal, Mac. Now gedoutaheah.

Anne Lamott Her tennis court miracle

Unzipped Is a kiss ever just a kiss??

Beck No one-hit wonder