Overheard Starbuck

"'Most men and women are slaves to an ancient misfortune unknown to them'."

---"Happy New Year!"

"All that time and money wasted on getting high---hunting for drugs, being hunted because of drugs--is now being spent on bootie."
---"And gambling."
"Clear-eyed addicts."
---"And one-eyed addicts."

"He deserved to die."
---"Did they deserve to kill him?"
"He was garbage."
---"So they're garbage men then?"

"After falling what a blessing it is to be able to get up again."
---"Are you talking about viagra? ... 'Love me two times babe, Love me twice today'."
"No I was thinking about the simple acts of standing and walking."
---"You saw your grandmother? ... Nursing homes are depressing."
"When we're that old will we have people helping us move around? Will there be people who'll care for us and have time to talk to us.. to listen to our stories? ... Will we be around people who we'll want to tell our stories to?"
---"What do you think? ... Let's go clubbing."

"Those nuisance calls and wrong numbers aren't always wrong numbers you know."
---"And the voices in my head are etherial beings from a superior plane of existence with an obsessively benevolent interest in my scrunchy life-- keeping me from harm with their incessant hints and unasked for advice-- guiding me upwards and onwards towards true love and pure everlasting bliss."
"You too?"

"I had this dream. I was at our company's annual picnic and I heard someone say, 'they're the immortals'."
---"Like vampires or zombies?"
"They weren't scary or sexy. They were an ordinary group of people all ages and races in expensive leisure clothes but not as happy as one might expect. They all looked kinda cranky. ... I woke up thinking immortals were everywhere, like Mormons or rock climbers. That immortality was a lifestyle with clubs and organizations I would never be able to join."
---"Your dreams suck."

"Saturday I went for a drive to see what the Nature Conservancy was doing with that donated land near Route 41."
---"Around where Hitchcock filmed Cary Grant being chased by a crop-duster?"
"That's the place, flat and empty."
---"North by Northwest."
"I was walking in one of their fields when a flock of about two hundred starlings came flying over. They were close, strung out rather then bunched together, and as the flock tried to avoid flying directly over me --I must have surprised them-- I saw it become a single moving organism and as it undulated I could feel the movement of this huge chattering waving thing in the pit of my stomach--for a few seconds anyway--then thought about Chinese dragons. ... Amazing huh?"
---"You don't go in for sports do you?"
"Walking."
---"Walking's not a sport. No one pays to watch people walk."

"If there are people in this town surreptiously watching out for the children, why can't they watch out for me?"

---"You're not a child. ... Their grants don't cover nonessential adults. ... How do you know they're not?"

"If no one wore Italian shoes how would I know who to sleep with?"

---"Jewelry and tattoos."

"It's one of those days I wish I had a hostage negotiator making me promises--- keeping me on the line, keeping me talking-- doing his or her forensic best to stop me from doing anything that can't be undone."
---"To get that kind of attention don't you first need a hostage or two?"
"I don't want to frighten anyone. I just need someone to take me seriously for a few hours--to listen to my demands."

"You always like to think a bit of fun or at least a little pleasure went into your making; but I don't know. I can't guess if the dark-eyed stranger who put his hand up my mother's dress was cynical, or tender, or desperate, or carried away by the moment. Had she done it before? Did she know what she was doing? Was she scared or full of desire , or half-raped?"
---"Ever since you went on that leadership-training weekend Char, you've changed. I don't know you anymore."

"'Only that which is valuable is protected, and that very protection draws attention – it attracts through the act of providing security. The defense itself is a lure.'"
---"Allure? ... Homeland Security's technologies and systems as sex-aids: the States' security protocols for humiliating, that is, for 'securing' its citizens have become mass foreplay."
"Security is serious business."
---"Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Angelina et.al. are America's Helen of Troy, Florence Nightingale, Rosie the Riveter and Lady Liberty mashed together."
"You're confusing notoriety with value."
---"We all suffer the multi-billion-dollar exertions of the State's paranoia gladly. Secured in the knowledge that our discomfort enables these young women...or young women similar to them.. to be publicly besieged by media-money, paparazzi, alcoholism and drug abuse..to be free!"

"How many people waited for you today?"
---"Funny you should ask, my car stalled in an intersection on the way to work this morning and wow what a..."
"...With whom your presence not your absence was needed?"
---"One of the temps at work said she waited for me for an hour to reset the collating xerox machine, but I didn't get her message till quitting time."
"Margot just called to tell me she can hardly wait for me to come over,'and don't forget the butter'."
---"The temp was the thinner unmarried blonde. I think her name is Clare or Cher."

"She was lucky they found her when they did. Her mother had succumbed to depression but they showed her how pleasing their men could silence the voices in her head for days at a time. Doctors and psychologists came away satisfied and assured. She was a success. It's true they had to destroy her first husband and his parents but they were inferior people of eastern European stock. Compared to her unflagging dedication to the organization and years of unquestioning service they're of little consequence."
---"You're not making her conversion, her turning out, her therapy--what was done to her anyway?--sound all that beneficial for everybody concerned."
"Her second husband thrives; she gave him three children. You'ld have to ask her or her first husband about it. She of course, as a side-effect of the process, is not that reliable a witness. And if her first husband's still alive, he'ld be under surveillance and you really don't want to put yourself anywhere near that sort of scrutiny."
---"Jesus."
"They've gotten more compassionate. Because of their school outreach-programs fewer marriages need to be destroyed. Almost everyone now understands as soon as they or their partners are recruited, 'rushed' some call it, there's nowhere to run; there's no appeal. Most teenage girls can't wait to join. Most teenage boys are members before they know it. So less drugging is required and hardly anyone is killed or tortured anymore. ... They rule. They keep the home in Homeland Security."

"What do you do when you realize the people you love no longer have time for you?"
---"I'm going to Disneyland? ... Vegas?"
"What do you do if you realize the people you could love will never make time for you?"
---"Get a pet? Start a hobby? Buy binoculars and start stalking?"

"Don't talk to me about global warming, you drive to work everyday. You drive everywhere; you drove here. You want to give up your car for public transportation? Are you delusional? Are you insane? ... I didn't think so. So shut-up about agriculture and polar bears already. The President and those oil men are looking out for all of us, they got it covered."

"There's no reason to be alone."
---"There's no reason not to be loved."
"You're a good man. There's no reason you haven't found love."
---"There IS no reason I can't buy love. ... It's just my foolish pride."

"'Look for someone to make you slow'."
---"I'm lucky if I only spend two hours commuting everyday."
"Traffic is not a someone."
---"It's a beast."
"It's a swarm of which you are a part."
---"Talking about it won't change anything."
"'What can't be cured must be endured'."
---"Now you're pissing me off."

"When I was a little girl I use to dream of living in a place where everyone would be naked and where you would spend your time touching and doing anything you'ld like with each other. I use to call it ' playing earthly paradise'."
---"I've been naked with more doctors and strangers then people I've dreamed of touching."
"I was ten when my mother caught me 'playing earthly paradise' with Brad."
---"I was ten when my mother caught me playing doctor with Suzanne. ... I can't imagine a place without clothes. Free from fumbling with belts, hooks, zippers and buttons. Free from jealousy, obsession, coercion, loathing and boredom. "

"'Hit your mark...pause...then laugh'."
---"That was it?"
"Over and over again."
---"I wish I had talent."

"I never had sex with a stranger."
---"That explains so much. Day-in and day-out when men and women everywhere are sweating themselves silly to get sum or a little extra on the side--and happy as a clam when they do--you're doing what? Oblivious to the biological imperative? Ignoring the end-all and be-all of existence? Birdwatching, photographing flowers, blogging!?"
"I read alot."
---"You read alot? You're a joke--no you're a fucking menace, a dangerous man-- an ignorant romantic freak."

"All significant human interactions can be analyzed in market terms. What essentially drives human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material possessions. ... In the beginning there was barter. People were forced to get what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another. Since this was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange--credit, banking, stock exchanges--is simply a logical extension."

---"There is no reason to believe a society based on barter ever existed. Anthropologists discovered societies where economic life was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as gifts — and almost everything we would call 'economic' behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly who had given what to whom. Such 'gift economies' could on occasion become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly the opposite way from our own: Instead of vying to see who could accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the most away."

"Like your momma." (laughs)

---"Like YOUR momma".

"My mantra this week is 'sobriquet'."

---"Mine is 'noddle'."

"I'll never forget that look of shock and pain, and disappointment on his face right before he died."
---"Dude."
"I did that to him."
---"Awesome."

"I think a lot of burnouts, the druggies who are no longer fun--always in-or-out of jail or treatment, always on-or-off their meds--are not so much poster children for what happens with excessive self-medication but instead are gov't' black budget experiment rejects."
---"UFO abductees? Probe--ees? (laughs)
"That plus other secret eugenic programs. Initially to make soldiers better killers, but they're way beyond that now."
---"Their rejects are everywhere: where are their successes?"
"There's a rumor that some corporations and top secret agencies no longer require applicants for security jobs take lie-detector tests. Instead there's a simple non-invasive procedure involving a modified MRI machine, prescribed drugs and periodic brain scans."
---"I never liked those cops at the mall."

"I don't want to be invisible. I want to disappear."

---"And so you will someday."

"Are there many numerologists working in the post office?"
---"Astrologists in hospital birthing centers?"
"Divining geologists?"
---"Spelunking gynecologists?"
"And proctologists?"

"Listen to this (opens book & reads). 'When we are confused or in pain we often judge ourselves as not spiritual enough but the awakened heart does not judge anything. Not our family or our love, nor our pain and confusion, our passion or anger ..Terrible harm has been done by this misunderstanding. In mature spirituality we are willing to have a dialog with pain, with evil, to hold them in our prayers. In situations of great pain someone has to consciously suffer the impact to become the ground where the sorrows can be held & reworked. These things can be carried with grace. The heart has to hold the whole of suffering to be transformed'."
---"That's what you found? That's supposed to help? Rework the evil? Have a dialog with sorrow? Hold the hole of suffering? That's the way.. out!?"
"Meditate on it."
---"Meditate on this!" (hand gesture)

"Well?"
---"She didn't ask one question."
"Easy to look at though."
---"She thinks this's going someplace?"
"She's a babe!"
---"She knows when to smile."

"You've lost us...don't forget!"

---"Geez Louise, I'm a 180 pounds of fat, bone and gristle that won't just disappear. Even if I'm strunk blind, deaf and dumb whenever you all are around...No matter where I go, there I am. Thanks for the..warning?"