“Oh, God. I hate to cut people off.”

Melissa Plaut steers her yellow taxi down the roiling river that is Manhattan's Second Avenue at rush hour. “It's not really justified, I know that, OK? It's just a necessity.”

A large white van swerves into Plaut's path. She hits the brakes hard.

“Oh, THANK YOU. Now you're going to cut me off? I don't think so.”

Plaut accelerates, pulls her taxi around the van and cuts quite smartly across three lanes. The van driver more or less strokes out. He makes not terribly friendly gestures with his hands and arms before rolling down the window and suggesting that Plaut commit a physically impossible act or three.

Plaut squints back at him.

“Hello!? You can't see I need to pull around you?”

She hits the gas and we head west across 57th Street. Plaut dodges a double-parked panel truck, swoops around a black limousine and slides her taxi to a smooth stop at a red light. She's been out of the garage for three minutes and already she's got agita.

“I mean, thank you, he can't see I want to turn?” She shrugs, whatever. “I try to smile at 'em, but he's just some IDIOT in the wrong lane.”

Plaut is pale and diminutive, with a mop of black hair-a green-sweat-shirt-wearing, black-T-shirt-and-jeans-clad 30-year-old taxi driver, writer and confirmed career wanderer. Her passenger's destination is three blocks away, and already her green-blue eyes sweep the street for new fares. She wonders aloud whether the action is better on the West Side or the East Side and whether she still digs hacking. Then she reminds herself that it beats her crappy old corporate job and maybe she should just shut up and live the adventure.

Where else is she going to learn how to say “tip” in Persian? Or rattle off all 31 major water crossings in New York City?

As for the moronic Jersey drivers who stop their stupid SUVs in the middle of Bleecker Street to ask directions, and the French tourists who consider the tip a bourgeois affectation? They become fodder for Plaut. Her blog gets about 140,000 hits per month.

Her blog thing is to stay true to the situation on the ground.

“It was a long, disjointed night,” she wrote last week. “I got into a screaming match with the cabbie pictured here (Cue to photo of clueless-looking male cabbie with a day's growth of beard). I spend so much time defending cab drivers, but I have to admit, there are quite a few who drive like (expletive) animals. This guy in particular pulled a really (expletive)-up move that forced me into oncoming traffic.”

Now what's missing here, because this is a family newspaper and not for those who sit behind the wheels of taxis in a city of 8 million mostly Type A obnoxious and (sometimes unintentionally) hilarious New Yorkers, are the inventive curses that function as verbs, adjectives, adverbs and personal pronouns for any proper cabbie.

It's not all a blue-invective jet stream. Some stories bring out Plaut's inner-sentimentalist:

“Another girl I drove tonight had an emergency of her own. I overheard her on the phone explaining to a friend how she was rushing over to her boyfriend's house to have ‘makeup sex.' It sounded urgent, so I got her there as quickly as I could.”

Ask about eavesdropping and writing and she shrugs, shy in that profane whatchagoingtodo way of hers. She types at 3 a.m. in her sixth-floor tenement walk-up in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn after driving the night shift.

“I only started writing this blog because I was so bored with myself telling all these stories,” she says one evening a few weeks back, poking at a matzo ball soup at the Hollywood Diner on the Avenue of the Americas (where, outside, as Plaut can't help but note, the traffic is flowing pretty well and quite a few shoppers are looking for taxis).

“The blog means you're not just having brain-numbing conversation; it's material,” she says. “I started sending it to my best friends and asked: ‘Guys, is this really stupid?'

“They were like, ‘Good. More words.' ”

“I drove two dominatrixes (dominatrices? dominatrii?) to the Upper West Side. One ... was having a lengthy phone conversation about which classes she should teach at a fetish festival ... a few of the classes she mentioned included ‘Intro to Japanese Rope Bondage,' ‘Rope for Couples' and, my personal favorite, ‘Erotic Macrame.' ”

January 2006

Melissa Plaut is the Jewish daughter who wanders, the daughter who doesn't know where her road leads. Her older sister, on the other hand, is the successful doctor in Los Angeles. Their mother, Susan Lifschutz, a retired public school teacher from the Bronx, gets on the phone and asks: “So, did Melissa tell you that she's very bright and that she went to the University of East Anglia in England for a year?”

Melissa did not.

Melissa grew up in Rockland County, a northern exurb of New York, and wrote poetry and whatever. She graduated from college in Albuquerque and worked at Dunkin Donuts and read Camus and Voltaire. She migrated to New York City, where she worked the rope line as a concierge for Miramax. “I never felt more disposable,” she says.

Then she wrote for Pops Smear, a culture 'zine. (“Our philosophy was sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. I wrote about the sex life of Siamese twins.”) Anything that good had to fold, and it did.

Eventually she landed a corporate job, writing ad copy. She got a real salary, the benefits, the paid vacation. Twenty-nine years old and she saw herself turning into the Chick in the Gray Flannel Suit.

“I was good at writing copy, and it scared me.” She's waving her hands to shoo away the memory. “I got tired of writing informational articles about man-boobs. It's soul-sucking, y'know?”

She got laid off. “I needed money. Like, immediately.

“I could never settle on any one thing; it's like my big problem. So I just told myself, ‘Start having adventures. You're going to live out your dreams.”'

Her blog can slide rough or shine like haiku, depending on her mood. One morning she watches an Urdu-speaking cabbie playing video games while he waits for his shift: “A taxi garage staple: A yellow disc speeds around a neon-lighted grid while eating white dots and getting chased by ghosts.”

Other mornings she goes off about “wimpy drivers in uber-macho SUVs” and East Side swells who hand her a $10 bill and ask for a quarter back on a $9.25 fare. The middle-aged men driving much too slowly in their fancy “midlife-crisis-mobiles” drive her especially nuts.

Readers comment a lot, mostly friendly, sometimes twisted, a few genuinely ill. Only her mother is forbidden to read it. A few months ago, Plaut described facing down a local drunk. OK, maybe she spit at him. The next day, her mother posted a comment noting that this was very very dangerous behavior.

Her mother thought the post was anonymous. Turns out the e-mail showed her town: Pomona.

Busted.

“I made some comments and it didn't go over well,” her mother acknowledges. “I want her to be happy, but not driving a cab.”

Plaut rolls her eyes over the matzo ball soup. “My mother,” she says, “makes a full-time business out of worrying.”

So what's next?

Friends suggest a book on her taxi driving, so, maybe. Her passengers ask her a generic version of the question. What do you do? Which is shorthand for: This isn't it, right?

“People in New York want you to be ‘headed' somewhere,” she says. “I tell them I'm working my way through school. It makes them feel better.”

One night, a female passenger studied Plaut's Taxi and Limousine Commission license and said, almost to herself: “I know a Melissa Plaut.” It turns out they went to high school together. Plaut felt her skin peeling off. “I know she's seeing me as an endpoint: 'Melissa ended up a cabdriver.' She doesn't see that this is a hinge. She doesn't see it as my adventure.”

She taps the Formica tabletop in the diner and smiles, a little sheepishly. She'd really like to become an animal cop, to save forlorn dogs and cats. But she needs two years of law enforcement training, so like maybe not. She may join the Peace Corps. Or become a ranch hand.

“You've got one life, but what am I going to do, choose one thing?” She shakes her head, impatient. “That's impossible. It's a waste.”