{excerpt from THIS IS NOT A SELF-HELP BOOK}   Enough of this mental wellbeing crap! I’m begging you, just order me to buy a friggin’ mountain bike. Or how about a, “Drop and give me 38 burpees!”   Sorry, not sorry. You can try to worm your way out of it, but that last […]

  Carla Burns, recurring guest on The Hate Napkin podcast, sits down with Arik Bjorn to discuss his upcoming book, UBER NIGHTS.   CARLA BURNS: Well, I guess the first thing is the obligatory: tell us what Uber Nights is about.   ARIK BJORN: I’d say about 220 pages.   CB: Ahem.   AB: Sorry. Uber […]

  {excerpt from UBER NIGHTS}   Moron after moron, drunk douchebag after drunk douchebag.   Night upon night, the tread on the mental tires wears thin.   Then, Michelin Man, Jr. appears. And you feel giddy, renewed. Brand spanking new cerebral radials to hit the streets.   I pick up a teenager at the Amazon warehouse. […]

{excerpt from UBER NIGHTS}   If there are any bored anthropologists out there, they may wish to consider hiding in the bushes at the Greyhound Bus Station on the outskirts of Columbia. Most nights, it’s an ethnographer’s wet dream. An alphabet soup of the human condition.   Tonight, I pick up a woman taking the midnight bus to […]

{excerpt from UBER NIGHTS}   I only drive for Uber late at night. For myriad reasons, I hate daytime rideshare driving.   First, I’m not interested in driving elderly people to proctology appointments—there’s only so much information I can intake about a total stranger’s anal cell clumps.   Second, this town’s as hot as cow […]