Overheard Starbuck

"Listen up. I know you're convinced you've a unique perspective on the world and you're privy to perceptions and observations the rest of us busy making money and living can never in our haste and waste dream of having."
---"Hey! Privy?"
"I'm not putting you down. I'm not being cruel--you can be clever. I'm suggesting that instead of picturing everyone as happy to share your thoughts and observations---as being your standing-room-only audience-- you start seeing us as we really are. As people as much in our own worlds as you're in yours. ...Maybe as an exercise?"
---"Maybe the harder and more lifeless the materials in our environment--the steel, plastic, concrete and asphalt we come in contact with day-in-and-day-out--the more outlandish our day-dreams of smiling strangers and pliant crowds can become in response--or the opposite: armies of terrorists and criminal swarms?"
"That's what I'm talkin about. --Who cares? Who besides me would listen to that sentence, or for that matter everything you've said in the past months that led up to it?"
---"Isn't 'know your audience' the first rule of the theater? You're saying that's impossible."
"No I'm saying you're not a theater and we're not an audience. ...I'm wondering what would happen if you filtered what you see and prefaced your inner monologues with the understanding that first and foremost your concerns are not our concerns? ..What would happen if you began everything grounded in the premise that your concerns are no one's concerns?"
---"The world would be a less friendly place? --The world as I know it would no longer exist!"
"Precisely."
---"What would take its place?"
"Something else again. Maybe something closer to what the majority of us experience and in our own way've come to love."