Dream Noodles

September 24, 2025

The cabbies strike. Again. This time it was a real cornucopia of, I don’t know, I can’t call it excess as most of it seemed practical, nor can I call it extreme as again, there seemed some logic behind the various choices. But what I can say is that tonight’s cabbie really pulled out the EGOT of stimuli.

First, the screens: but then that seems to be a natural state of being for a Trenčín cabbie: just light up the world and inhabit as many screens as possible, regardless if they’re necessary or not (they’re mostly not). In tonight’s edition, driver Boris had on each of his thighs — oh-so-balanced that he probably could teach Simone Biles a thing or two — a mobile phone.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vM8E6GIQgnU?rel=0

As he was driving, Boris would countermand the various demands of physics and shift his legs up or down depending on the situation in the car. A quick corner to the right meant that his left thigh ever-so-slightly angled upwards to balance the forces, while a shift to the left would introduce its opposite action. He was kind of like Bob Dylan before he went electric and ruined everything. Dylan had to strap his lips on his harmonica while strumming a tune on his guitar all the while belting out some tune about a woman he scorned all while keeping perfect time. Boris was a remarkable example of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. In his Toyota, all macroscopic flows of matter and energy cease because all driving forces are equal. Bravo, Boris!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7BnhaXT4Lzw?rel=0

But that’s not all. While he had two mobile phones on his thigh like a fighter jet pilot, he also — of course — had YouTube playing some inane Slovak pop music; a woman was writhing around on a red chair chanting something I couldn’t follow. Above that, the in-car display was split in two: on the left hand it was directions, while on the right, another video, this time of some hockey match, could have been the KHL but not sure. All I know is that sport was being played, a sort of male accompaniment to the writhing lady on the chair. What was on his phone, if the directions were already broadcast in a different screen, I have no idea, nor did I really want to follow his sexts.

Anyway, what really struck me, regardless of the JumboTron on display, was that Boris managed to eat pot noodles throughout all of this. And this, I presume, was not a one-off; Boris had built a special little canopy of noodles on his dashboard, a plinth of MSG to make sure the noodles didn’t slop about except in his mouth. On the dash, he had a kind of cozy custom-made to fit the idiosyncrasies of a Corolla, something that had obviously been laboured over. In fact, I have a feeling that this was not the first pot noodle cozy Boris had manufactured; it looked very slick, much more than a generic slab of fabric one could order off of Temu. This was bespoke.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/19W7fvOBG0c?rel=0

I know this because I saw something peeking out from the edge of the cozy, the bit that draped down and over the climate vents — which, of course, were cut out thus to not block any transmission of airflow throughout the car. This cozy was made to measure, a Chanel dress of the taxicab, so perfectly tailored that I don’t doubt if Boris’s wife ever wanted to send a human to space, she could easily do so what with those precisely engineered tolerances she managed to fit into a… noodle cozy. Anyway, peeking out along the fringed edge I saw some letters: I think I read: SLANÉ SNY. Salty… dreams?

I asked Boris: “salty dreams?”

“YES, I dream!”

You dream about noodles? I asked this not in voice but in hand gestures, pointing at his precariously perched pot of noodles and then miming the sleep gesture.

You: sleep: then, I made the universal sound of noodle-eating: SLUUURP.

YES! NOODLE DREAM!

SLURP SLURP!

But he actually slurped noodles; no acting necessary. Meanwhile, two phones were on his thighs, we were darting under the Nina Hagen Bridge, and he drove with his knees on the steering wheel while grabbing the little bucket of hot noodles and a plastic spoon in his other hand: SLURP! SLURP!

Dream noodles!

Dream noodles indeed!