Overheard Starbuck

"Absolute control equals true love."

"Where did you ever get the idea "the good life" automatically made people generous?"
---"Easy living equals easy giving."
"It's like saying persecuted people and those in pain are more compassionate."
---"They aren't?"
"You freakin' Catholics. There are no shortcuts to freedom."

"I watched the video of him leaving. He held the large manila envelope with the photos we gave in in front of himself--as if in benediction-- with the four fingers of his left hand on the outside. While he was walking he seemed to make a point of pausing, squaring the envelope perpendicular to the floor, once towards the louvered door to the furnace room; once directed down the hall to the living room and once after turning back towards me standing ten feet away in the kitchen. I imagined he had pesticide poppers sticking to the tips of his fingers and was using the envelope to pop them and keep the blowback off his clothes."
---"Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?"
"Well if I can't tell you, who can I tell?"

"Oooh Maegan?! --Can you make that face again? Let me get my camera out. Who is that person? ... What crawled inside you? Wow. --That was sure something."

"I don't know how to thank her for everything she's done."
---"Flowers, candy?"
"I'ld have been found dead in a ditch long ago if not for her."
---"Jewelry, a car?"
"I'm such an asshole, I couldn't make her understand."
---"You haven't tried?"
"It never feels like the right time."
---"Tongue-tied and grateful: isn't that a Gram Parson's song? ... Don't wait too long."
"What's weirder is I know I'll never have the opportunity to pay it back--to help her or anyone the way she's helped me."
---"So you're taking all of her generosity with you when you go then?"
"I'm afraid so. ... "
---"Are you crying?"
"Nooo."

"Sometimes when I'm sitting I look out of my eyes as if they were an opening of a cave near the top of a mountain. My face becomes a rock face. My skull is a dome. My mouth and ears are other entrances--breath is the wind-- and my nose is like the nose of one the figures on Mt. Rushmore."
---"Lincoln's? ... Is your hair trees, grass or moss? Or is the top of your head exposed to the thin atmosphere's cosmic rays: alternately frozen then sunbaked?"
"I haven't thought about that...but my arms, legs and knees are foothills and my fingers, hands, feet and toes are rocks and boulders that've tumbled into the valleys below."
---"Sometimes I picture myself as the world's tallest building which just happens to be at the center of the world. The very spot on the earth around which everything and everone revolves. My eyes are the windows of the penthouse suite, my nose is the ventilation shaft, my mouth is a loudspeaker broadcasting to those below, and my ears are radio antennas. ... There's always a party going on somewhere in my building. The residents are never completely at rest. ... When I'm really into it my high-rise becomes the fulcrum upon which all the stars and galaxies in the universe are balanced."

"Don't tell me you're a fan?! How old are you?"
---"I'm grateful for the obliging way her tv character displays her cleavage."
"There's cleavage all over tv; more cleavage than curves. Don't you watch those entertainment-news programs?"
---"Cleavage is curves. ..Must be the California weather."
"I mean what's so special about her cleavage? Maybe there's something about those slasher movies she's always in."
---"You always try to analyse things."
"Hey my eyes are up here."

"She was one of hundreds who poisoned him in recent years with minute amounts of pesticides. That he was 85, already disabled and her grandfather showed them what a go-getter and team player she could be.
It was just her bad luck that he wound up in the hospital a few days later unable to eat and with problems swallowing.
It was her good fortune that no one noticed--or if they had noticed didn't care--what she and the others had been doing to him.
He never went home again. He died six months later; she cried at his funeral. Her grandmother was next."

"All my tattooed children."
---"What!? --Oh him. Yeah cuddly."
"I think I love the one's who must be cajoled and convinced most of all."
---"Uh-huh."
"I wonder if there are more tattoos in the southern states than around here?"
---"Goes without saying, more exposed skin."
"The farther south you go the more reptiles and snakes."
---"Huh?"
"Subliminal advertising."

"'The cat was created when the lion sneezed'."
---"I read that certain Native American tribes believe that after dark all cats become leopards."
"I wonder what you become after dark?"
---"The sweeping glare of a car's headlights... the cool flickering shadows of consuming information in a perhaps unoccupied room... the slowed breathing of everything alive...the distant roar of the furnaces and machines that never stop..."
"You've given it some thought then? --I was gonna say 'tiger'."

"Do you really need to know her name and if she's married? Nobody's doing you a favor, you've earned it. She's waiting for you; you've got thirty minutes. --Now dude."

"You devote too much time to the pursuit of the sensational and the glorification of the mundane."
---"I don't have money and I'm not good looking."
"Don't you have any friends?"
---"Yeah but they're all like me."
"Hopeless."
---"Watch what you say, you're on my turf here in the Hopeless Cafe."

"Sounds like?"
---```
"Take your time. ... Is it bigger than a bread box? ... Nevermind, it'll come to you."
...
---"Did you ever see that movie about Helen Kellar?"
"Waugh, waugh, waugh...The Miracle Worker"?
---"Did you know she was a radical leftist?"
"No but that's hardly inspirational...and box office poison."
---"There aren't enough angry role models in the media. Where's our Mr. T?"
"Al Gore? ... World Class Wrestling's still popular... and at least once a week Fox, CNN and BBC show video of angry muslim crowds doing their thing somewhere in the world."
---"How about a Helen Kellar cartoon character and video game?"
"Where in the name of equality, justice and profit-sharing she car-jacks SUVs, robs gun-stores and smokes everyone and everything that tries to stop her?"

"For her the words 'good' and 'girl' had too rarely been coupled in the same sentence."
---"One of yours?"
"It could be."

"On the day his father died he heard a man's voice in his head say, 'we got you'. Ignoring, quieting than silencing the voices in his head without pharmaceuticals was a war he fought and won years ago, so it was odd to hear from them again. He said. ' it was the grief talking'. His father had been sick for some time and his death was what one might call a mixed-blessing.

After the funeral he thought about the voices. He thought there could be people in America today -- clubs, groups and even agencies--organized by and for people who get pleasure from the pain and misfortune of others. --'Everywhere you go there's those bothersome others'--his words again. He won't call them 'psychic vampires' because that makes them sound exotic and dispells the idea that feeding off pain and misery was a human if somewhat primitive trait, like the interest in contact sports.

He wondered if sadists could be identified through psychological tests, like the ones given in the military. Perhaps they were recruited by secret organizations or not-for-profit agencies where in the interests of national security they were encouraged to refine then systematize their sadistic world view or aesthetic.

He pictures military-certified sadists during the Cold War being given free-rein, within certain protocols, to explore their impulses while black-budget-funded scientists devised mind-bending and body-breaking materials and machines based on their findings. As techniques and methods--drugs and machines--were perfected, charismatic sadists were hired to 'take it off the reservation': to teach motivational classes to small groups of interested civilians--starting with the family and friends of service personnel living near military bases and government labs with cults, churches, clubs, organizations, peer reviewed papers and award-dinners following within a few years.

Dirty tricks have been an important part of neo-con politics for more than thirty years now; who knows how thick their playbook has gotten or what might routinely be done to individuals not protected by churches, party affiliation or corporate contributions?

He said it bothers him to think in terms of 'we' versus 'you'. That after all this time--in his own head--he's still a 'you'. He was sure he would grow out of it and become one of us by now.

--"Doesn't he know if you're not with us, you're against us? How simple and necessary it is to identify with those in power? ... Is he brain damaged?"

"'Know that joy is rarer, more difficult and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.'"
---"Is that one of yours?"
"Hell no."

"Cringe-worthy?"
---"Gloat-worthy!"
"Eeesh."
---"Simp."

"Don't look at him, they don't like that. Don't be fooled by his uniform, he's feral."

"He has this weird idea that people who drive hummers and SUVs can't see him. Even when they're no longer in their cars he's sure they look right through him. Their investment in such an expensive form of transportation has affected their perception: 'SUV and hummer owners are blind to the people and things that don't reflect the consumer choices to which they've become habituated'--his words, more or less."
---"Consumer choices to which they've become habituated and indebted. ... My brother-in-law's nieces in Iraq have a humvee phobia. He says they scream, run and hide whenever they see one."

"This week my mantra's 'the farthest sound'. It made me laugh when I was meditating."
---"Mine mantra's 'the curve of her lips' or is it 'the curve of her hips'?... Either way I can't stop thinking about Naomi and driving."

He seemed to imply that having sex with the women they provided was my birthright. ... Nobody ever told me I had a birthright."
---"Seemed to imply?"
"I never learned to be comfortable with servants."
---"That's a shame."
"Then he said, 'You've lost your birthright'."
---"Who was this guy?"
"I think he expected me to get angry."
---"With who--with whom?"
"Later I wondered about others' birthrights. Does everybody have them: do my neighbors? When do they first learn about them? How do they claim and maintain them?"
---"Nobody's ever told me about birthrights either. ... My grandparents have a cabin and twenty acres in Cheboygan which my parents, aunts and uncles argue over."
"Sheboygan Wisconsin?"
---"Cheboygan Michigan."

"Besides him she only slept with whatever men he wanted her to sleep with. At first he would drive her to their rooms or apartments and wait in the car or in a nearby bar. Later she could tell by the way he talked about someone--the tone of his voice, the look on his face--which of his friends or acquaintances he had in mind and she'ld arrange the dates and go by herself. She never told him what she did with them and he never asked. He loved her that much."

Lately I've noticed there're more blacks--more African-Americans--in tv commercials."
---"Oreo cookies, cough syrup, hair products?"
"No I'm talking about insurance companies, banks, pharmaceuticals and department stores."
---"Not WalMart."
"Even an automobile commercial-- I can't remember which car, whether it was American or Japanese--and I'm almost certain it was a local spot, the production values weren't that great."
---"No tinted film stock, long-legged blonds in designer dresses and rock and roll sound track?"
"I think these commercials signify that America's advertisers are no longer afraid of white-backlash. That Americans now recognize Arabs--Muslims--as their most feared and scapegoated other."
---"It probably has more to do with advances in marketing demographics than new bigotry.
...

Which state do you think gets the most daily e-mails from miltary personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
"The District of Columbia...Texas."
---"If you correct for population?"
"Gotta be somewhere in the south."

[police cars with flashing lights pull up to the store across the street] "Is that light for me?"
---"No Stephanie it's not your time to cross over. ...You have to finish those reports."

"Coming out of rehab, college and the military they drifted until they found work ruining other's marriages, other people's lives. Steady work with medical insurance, cheap car payments and lots of free stuff: concert tickets, club memberships, clothes and meals. ... If they ever gave any thought that what they were doing was illegal--the drugging and stalking--their consciences were silenced by the secrecy the job required and the lifestyles of the bosses. Who knew that other's misery could be so profitable? Could be so politically right?"
---"Better than Mc-food or WalMart minimum wage."

"With so many mood altering pharmaceuticals available to doctors and druggies alike you ever wonder if religious organizations have found their own uses for those drugs?"
---"You mean like in Jonestown, Waco, Muslim suicide bombers or the polygamous Mormon wives?"
"Those are the extreme cases. I'm wondering what part if any pharmaceuticals might play in religious conversions: in being reborn, with individuals accepting Jesus as their personal savior, etc."
---"Not Jesus-juice-- a Jesus pill?"
"Is it possible the religious right owes the hippies and their drug experimentation more than hatred or forgiveness? Could the Republicans' Christian base have at its core a mass involuntary drug program? With thousands of true believers living off the afterglow and flashbacks of their think-tank designer-drug conversion experiences; promoted and managed this time by multi-billion dollar endowed churches, institutions and mainstream media?"
---"A stealth drug culture with government approval, mass appeal, and Biblical authority!?" (laughs)
"I'm not kidding."
---"Chill Felicity. Say a prayer or something: you get so serious."