taxi1010.com - Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defence

"It's How To Change the Mood If Someone Is Mean."

This website has eighty-eight categories of Verbal Abuse arranged into eighty-eight "Clinics" or "Stargates." This level of granularity allows you (1.) to focus on keywords in an attack (you, don't, should, shouldn't, can't, etc.) and (2.) to accurately label the attack itself (baiting, bird-dogging, blind-siding, condescension, intimidation, marginalization, pestering, pushing your buttons, etc.) to bring about a more powerful level of understanding. Essentially, (3.) you replace the tension (they trigger) with cognitive reevaluation (you trigger), giving you an opportunity (4.) to "slip away from the infantile, humiliating, or thermonuclear aspects of the attack" (by noticing its common elements) and (5.) to not "grab hold of the provocative stick": ("You're a baby! You're a baby!" etc.) by reframing the attack in adult, knowledgeable, or lighthearted terms: (—Aw, shucks! —That was a cold cry!)

Stargate17 and Stargate07 are interesting places to start. Street Smarts is a gateway to all the other clinics. The Kids' pages rearrange the same material into twelve categories. The site is purposefully designed as a Japanese Mental Hospital. Stay calm. "Or panic!" as David Daniels used to say, "That's what I do." Then let intuition be your guide.

Taxi1010.com required twenty years of daily attention on my part (under the wrathful eye of the IRS) and will require more than a few minutes of casual interest on your part. I'm handing you a flute. That doesn't mean all you have to do is blow on it. You begin, strangely enough, by listening very carefully to the flute's expression – (to identify its literal notes, chords and sometimes furious musical composition, and its nighttime constellation, or guiding pattern, hidden by spin, inclination, foul weather & daylight) – You become a stealthy detective. The clues, hints, nuances, seasoning & tools leading to social skills under duress are specific! ... though the strategies, tactics and guiding ideas are universal. (The inherent insanity in all this is, at any given moment, what incenses one person is innocuous to another, (Try to get your foot stuck in the door, because what one person takes seriously, another person takes as a joke, and vice versa) so you might as well have fun! (You have an observer inside you. What sees all this?) The main idea is to pick up tidbits here and there.) People have written about "Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defense" in more than six languages, and you can easily dovetail its musical scales and breathtaking astronomy into your own extremely personal life.

Our next step is to make tiny iPhone silent movies (with captions) for younger generations, and for future generations, even though we currently don't have any money, cameras or movie-making equipment. We have a lot of hope. (Richard Ames Hart and Amoret Phillips, taxi1010.com, May 5, 2009)

Axioms: (1.) You are where your attention is. (2.) Arguing is, "I bite you!" and "You bite me!" - Defending yourself is not arguing. (3.) People are just going through things. (4.) If you don't let off steam, you die. (5.) Replace the "fight instinct" with words. (6.) You don't have to be a psychologist, religious figure, or big shot; you can just be a person. (7.) All you have to know is a thimble more than another person, or a thimble less! (8.) The part of you that dreams at night can grow and come into outside physical reality; it will help you; it will find you; it uses another language, the language of sensation. (9.) This very small part of you needs to be nourished - it feels like an intelligent child lost in the city - it asks questions. (10.) You need to be able to sense your own being, like a cat! You need to accompany yourself, like a dog! You need to like yourself, like a squirrel! You need to understand yourself, like a human being! (11.) A baby says, "I'm special!" "I'm good!" "I'm right!" "I'm important!" - that's a broken record - you have to go through puberty again! (12.) Always try to say very little.

With Fresh

Associations

Conversations with friends are filled with wonderful associations, so you know just what to say or do. If a friend says, "Down ... by ... the ... old ... mill ... ... ... ...," you cry out, "stream!" If a friend says, "Across ... the ... burning ... ... ... ...," you cry out, "sands!" Or maybe you cry out, "bridge!" That's the fun of it. You don't know where it's going to go.

The conversation is filled with warm, wonderful, rich and varied associations. Or not! If your friend suddenly says, "What's ... the ... matter ... with ... you ... ... ... ...?" your stomach lights up with a gnawing, burning sensation, and no words immediately come to mind. You secretly wish for the old mill stream! Because you suddenly find yourself walking across the burning ... fury!

Stop! Stop! Stop! "What's the matter with you, kiddo?" NOTHING DRASTIC. "What's the matter with you, buddy boy?" NOTHING DRASTIC. "What's the matter with you, you old scoundrel?" NOTHING DRASTIC. You can learn something new, and in doing so, release trapped fumes of simmering hostility with a crowbar of WORDS.

Taxi1010.com is an embarrassment of riches. Not only does it offer words, with new associations, and good things to say about yourself, beginning with really rude comebacks to bullies, it offers insight into why someone said something to you, and offers precise guidelines for dealing with it, as if you're a FLOOR MANAGER in a factory. A taxi1010 factory.

A FLOOR MANAGER takes the low road, responding to specific words and actions. A GENERAL MANAGER takes the high road, saying things such as, "Just deal with it!" or "Don't take the bait!" offering few specific solutions. Down on the floor of everyday life, amidst swift verbal exchanges, leaving little or no time for analysis, the taxi1010 factory solves the problem of being emotionally assaulted, by offering a cognitive string of pragmatic — often powerful, sometimes humorous — associations for your intellect to digest, strung out on every word, like ornaments on a Christmas tree!

In the taxi1010 factory, each word in an emotionally laden assault has a string of exactly four possible new associations: "What's" (1a, 1b, 1c, 1d) "the" (2a, 2b, 2c, 2d) "matter" (3a, 3b, 3c, 3d) "with" (4a, 4b, 4c, 4d) "you?" (5a, 5b, 5c, 5d). And in this case the answer is: 4c! NOTHING DRASTIC! And when you click on the word, "with," you're taken to the exact spot in the taxi1010 factory where this vicious vein of verbal violence unearths a crescent of pain, and wicks a healing salve!

Because, hello! You're the new FLOOR MANAGER! And welcome to the taxi1010 factory! We have a past, present and future. Memories draw people's emotions into the past, rubbing old wounds. Verbal interactions are happening in the present - It's clear we're better off living in the moment! Fresh associations, drawn from the Imagination of Nature, can convey we-who-are-alive! into the future. All real learning seems awkward, like learning to ride a bicycle . . . though making mistakes in the process of learning has an enormous payoff . . . You get out of the rut!

Nourishment,

Not Criticism 

The human condition imposes a certain reality upon everyone, which can have its advantages. For instance, a little girl lucky enough to hear a grandfather exclaim, "How did you get to be so pretty?" or "Where do you get such pretty clothes?" at first circles the room, trapping the heat of his adulation, searching for answers. If she's especially lucky, her mother will interject, "Thank you!" or "Way back! ... I don't remember," and the little girl will begin to realize, it's not answers, it's tools.

It's really a listening exercise. How can you listen to someone if you can't understand what they're saying? The main reason insults work is that you secretly agree with them or "go along" with them. If someone says, "Kind of a weird guy," and looks at you, you tell yourself you're weird. All they did was pull the trigger. You're the one that aimed the gun! The best responses are the ones you can say the next day ... "—You have a nice smile." (If you're too smart, you just humiliate the other person, and what good is that?)

"Kind of a weird guy."
—Just imagine.
—You have a nice smile!

Many people never discover such tools, staying mute, and in the midst of everyday verbal violence, say to themselves, "I just ignore them," the way a connoisseur ignores people in a library, criticizes art in a museum, or shops in a pickle store. It's all trapped heat, hatred and death.

Good tools provide nourishment. If someone says, "How did you get to be such a creep?" or "How did you get to be so infuriating?" a tool such as, "Way back!" lets a little moisture seep in, somehow providing tiny particles of humor, wit, and understanding, which take root in the moment – (& in any inner eavesdropper's consciousness) – and begin to grow.

The moment you realize, in the art museum of reality, you don't have to hate or criticize a particular person or piece, that there's at least one thing to be learned in anything you truly observe, you suddenly discover an underlying stream, or spring, and moving your attention one place to another, harvesting some ideas, allowing others to ripen, you discover the taxi1010.com factory is way more than a pickle store — it's a working farm!

An Assortment

of Sours 

My friend's daughter is six years old, and the other day, was passing around an assortment of candy sours: you could pick from red ones, pink ones, yellow ones, orange ones, . . . even purple-reddish ones . . . from individual trays in the candy box. Estrella didn't know the names of the sours, so her mother taught her to read their names from a table on the inside of the lid: You'd pick, say, a red one. She'd look at its position in the box, the corresponding position in the table inside the lid, and read out loud, "Cherry . . . That's a cherry one!" "And what's this one?" She looked at the table . . . "Watermelon."

On 2004-12-12 4:51 am, someone on the Internet said, "Get to the point already – That site was crap [taxi1010.com] – He/she just droned on and on, never getting to the point."

That's an assortment of sour words, isn't it? I think I'll pick . . . "point!" Then go to the table of words, look up "point," which takes me to bin 20! [out of a possible 88 "stargates"] That's where you find the response! A grape one!

There's an idea in science fiction, you go to elementary school, high school, out into the world, with failures and successes, and at some point learn one little thing, acquire some small ability, and with that, go back into the past and turn all your failures into successes . . . You get the girl, get the job, get the money . . . except everything's connected . . . and as you start to change the past, new perils pop up, new enemies emerge . . . so the idea becomes, how do you keep the girl, keep the job, keep the money?

That's the Point,

Isn't It? 

There is something so heart-wrenching about this critique of taxi1010.com I stole from Cornflower, over in Australia:

The struggle to understand taxi1010, which some people find confusing, is akin to looking something up in a dictionary when you were a child, and finding the alphabet 'confusing.'

By necessity, a Dictionary for Verbal Jousting must be divided into at least 88 pieces, with many interrelations, in order to cover everything that can possibly go wrong.

The 'something else' to which Cornflower refers has to be something akin to her connection with Nature, her connection to her ideals, her connection to her libido, her connection to her angry or frightened or hurt little child-beast (inner nature), and her connection to the part of herself that dreams at night.

What can go wrong is for any of those connections to herself to become broken by the vicissitudes of everyday life!

The purpose of taxi1010.com is to show by specific example how to maintain a positive connection with yourself, through playfulness, forcefully setting boundaries, and a watchful intelligence you could only call listening to yourself.

Your emotions, strange as this may seem, actually interfere with these connections. And other people trample you, push your buttons, interfere with you, separate you, inflame you, take control of you ... and they usually do so with words.

Your emotions are as complex as all the plays of Shakespeare put together! And the actors playing the scenes are as powerful as the Gods of Olympus. So, for instance, Falstaff comes onto your inner stage, wanting nothing except to jump into bed with his mother, and then Zeus makes his appearance, then Athena. A person's self-reliance can get knocked overboard and drowned! To say nothing of the other connections Henry David Thoreau wrote about in Walden.

In your inner theater you can hate someone and kill them, then the audience thinks it's good and applauds, and you can be the director! The way you do this is with words.

You don't want your inner life to be in an unwritten play with no form or words. Words replace vague, unspoken fears.

This website is ludicrously simple. If something goes wrong in the world, you can always rewind to the exact moment things began to go wrong, which is usually a particular sentence.

Now that particular sentence has words in it, and what we're going to do is respond to one particular word in the sentence, and take that word as a symbol for the entire sentence.

The keyword might be "don't," "can't," "you," or even "for" ... this is the way street-smart people respond to the world.

Next, to analyze the sentence, we're going to shuttle it into one of 88 categories where things can begin to make sense, against a broader landscape, to your inner nature! (1st, by accurately naming it, 2nd, by appropriately responding to it)

Somewhere on that page we'll look for a playful response, an honest response, a therapeutic response to let off steam, a response to set boundaries, or a response to infuse clarity and understanding into the situation without acting too smart ... transforming a sticky wicket into a beautiful beach: —I'm really looking forward to taking a vacation!

A person needs very little. An important part of yourself needs to hear you saying something right back when someone attacks you with words. Otherwise, you get washed away.

The idea is to add to your choices of how to respond ... depending upon facial expressions, tones of voice, level of sarcasm, bodily posture, personal relationship, emotional hot buttons ... something to match the exact situation.

The idea isn't to become physically entangled, emotionally entangled, or intellectually entangled with another person just because they said something. The idea is to have a nice life.

Just try to be yourself and allow yourself to live, and that part of you will show you things you couldn't imagine.

Because of certain traumatic events, many people stifle the parts of their minds that accurately perceive, when someone attacks, they are holding a stick of some kind ... though if you can just manage to see them on the opposite side of the stick, it becomes much clearer how to respond ... as if you've been raised in a big family from New Jersey, where they learn these things over eighteen years, while growing up ... The big brother pokes you, you grab the stick and push him down. Then he's in a sewer, and you're the big shot ... then you see it's something else, something deep, something simple.

"What have you done to support
product development in the past six months?"
—Who cares?
—You guys missed everything.

If you are truly a beginner, I would read Mind Candy cover to cover to become acquainted with the eighty-eight categories. It's The Field Guide to Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defence.

Finally, there is something quite heartwarming about the following comments I stole from sensibleerection.com:

"The Way
of the
Sly Dog"

>*vv~

"Watch
Things
Grow
with
Affection"