Overheard Starbuck

"'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'."