Overheard Starbuck

"You don't need a crowd to be lonely in America."
---"For sure: it's easy, it's a tradition."
"We have a special kind of lonliness. ... A lonliness tied to the earth. The lonliness of empty horizons; of mountains, deserts, forests and plains that go on forever ."
---"Like the eskimos or Australia's aborigines....Patagonians."
"Since day-one conspiring nature was America's nemesis, not thieving neighbors."
---"For a while there were thieving Indians and runaway slaves."
"Something's gone wrong. How did we forget our spacious skies?"
---"Corporations don't require windows."
"Their CEOs do."
---"Corporate highrise headquarters rarely look upon high plains ..or wilderness."
"But McMansions sometimes do."
---"Buffalo grazing in the noonday sun."
"Huh?"

"Their terror is everyone's terror. Don't you feel it?"
---"I don't see what..."
"There're criminals, terrorists, illegal aliens, third world diseases and natural disasters attacking from all sides."
---"Dude."
"It's like a low hum, a drone, a generator running all day and all night. They need you, they need everyone to feel it, to understand how indispensible they are and in time live the fear like they do. --It's important. ...Don't laugh."

"Is it possible in America--the birthplace of feminism--teenagers who engage in age-inappropriate sexual behavior turnout to be more successful then those who don't?"
---"You're not talking about strippers? ...You're talking about girls and boys?"
"Where might 'sexual socialization' rank among family income, grades, awards, athletic prowess, or SAT scores as a predictor of adult achievement?"
---"Extra-curricular activities are important."

"Oh please, please, please!"
---"Does that ever work?"
"Well, God hears all prayers."
---"Homo sapiens: the only species that pleads?"
"If it's pleasing.

"I'll begin: it was essential to tear-out the foundations of her life'...."
---"...in order to prepare the ground for the new harvest."
"...in order to make room for their orchard of strange fruit."
---"...in order to erect another temple to Priapus."
"...because of rumors of a fountain of youth."
---"...in order to make sacrifices on newly consecrated ground most pleasing to the lord god on high."
"...in order to dig a well for water that might quench the unquenchable thirst which has afflicted and driven to madness both good and bad men alike."
---"'It was essential to tear out the foundations of her life to make her one of them."
"...to frighten away her husband and old friends."
---"...in order to scar her with the specialness of her new life and to discourage her from reflecting on what they removed."
"They left her Jesus, her respect for male authority, her innate willingness to do a good job and the stuffed animals she played with as a child."
---"Every last one."

"They're animals."
---"They found their pack early on. Look how energized they are. ...While you were left alone to your own misperceptions and misconceptions, they raised each other from pups. No need to finesse when there're always brothers and sisters around to smooth-over or pound-out the rough spots."
"No need to learn how to think."
---"They're the future. ... As interactive software gets more sophisticated & children are left less & less to their own devices, like you were, or to the brutalizing yet secure presence of others, like them--games and their on-line communities will become the primary socializing force in kids' lives. ... Soon you'll be able to differentiate the various gangs by the computer games their parents bought for them when they were preschoolers and the learning programs used by their school districts."
"I thought Goth kids were creepy."
---"On the contrary, these packs seemlessly morph into corporate or military hierarchies. ... More to the point no one's complaining to the point of investing in infrastructure that might pry kids from their computers. Not the churches, the Pentagon, corporations, or foundations."
"There's a war on."
---"There's always something on. ... There's nothing just for kids that can compete with the profits from interactive media."
"There's music & tv."
---"That's old school."

"Look at those two guys don't they look like hit-men?"
---"Mutt and Jeff over there?"
"Who?"
---"They do look like they just came from the grassy knoll."
"Where?"
---"They could be de-mobed gay soldiers."
"Them? -- They're practically invisible. No style at-tall."
---"'Don't ask don't tell' works for them."
"'One size does not fit all'."
"Square Pegs!" (in unison)
(laughter)

(reads from sketch-pad) "No man lives without other men. No weight is lifted by a single shoulder. No hope is carried in a single voice. Each man lives in another's debt. And the payment of that debt is justice.'"
---"Where'd you find that?"
"Books on tape."
---"History?"
"Mystery".
---"Do you believe it? Do you believe justice exists beyond law and order?"
"In my heart of heart of hearts."
---"But you're not so sure about the rest of us."
"Sad huh?"
---"Quaint."

"It was that part of the country where gays have to travel two hundred miles to the nearest town with a suitable downtown or strip to cruise...booklovers even further for a bookstore or decent library."
---"God's country."

"People are hungry for real."

"She's very competitive. She knows better than anyone that for her to have what she has--her place on the team; her desk near the window; her space in the parking lot; her home, her husband---it was essential to beat out someone as desirous of those things as her, but not as worthy and cunning. Her gains are someone's losses. ... All her accomplishments from the petty to the impressive are her triumphs and others' failures. ... She needs to picture the losers in defeat."
---"She's a bigot then?"
"Big time--but I don't see the connection."
---"I'm guessing."
"She's a shopaholic and a 'collector'."
---"Trophies?"

"I can understand in times of war that the state must take certain security measures..."
---"Even during 'wars without end.'?"
"So I'm not concerned when my mail comes with envelopes ripped, packages punched with holes and mangled obviously searched boxes."
---"Postal workers have to be the sorriest civil servants among the millions working in America today."
"They must have a rate of alcoholism almost double their tax-supported brethen."
---"Even greater than cops and firemen."
"...I forgot what I was talking about."
---"Someone's opening your mail?"
"Oh yeah.---I can see how my mail or anyone's mail might increase paranoia among the poor poops at the post office, where powdered sugar's a wmd, but it pisses me off when FedEx and UPS likewise go all postal on my envelopes and packages."
---"You think corporations are banned from Homeland Security's gravy train?"
"I never had a head for business."

"I'm authentically in the place I was meant to be."
---"Funny you should say that. I was talking to Jordan the other day--I don't remember about what exactly--and out of nowhere I blurted: 'the truth is revealed once and only once.' How freaky huh? ... I think it's from Bible studies class."

"Is it normal to feel like crying in the morning?"
---"Doesn't it depend on what you were doing the night before? Or what you're facing on that particular day? "
"In gothic & romance novels countless women & girls cry themselves to sleep, but crying first thing in the morning sounds more like the stuff of clinical reports than fiction."
---"We don't see much crying on tv & in the movies because advertisers and movie makers've learned today's audiences are more often confused or amused rather than moved and sympathetic to the weeping character's plight. ... I'm sure there are pills that specifically treat morning lacrimation. I imagine they're robin's egg blue and tear-drop shaped."
"At three bucks a pop, plus the side-effects, the costs for tests and the five minutes spent talking with the doctor every other month or so?"
---"Hey! Grievers can't be choosers."

"When people talk about truth I become uncomfortable."
---"When people talk about god, I get the urge to flee."

"Women in high heels make me want to applaud."
---"Men in kilts remind me that I don't have as many friends as most people."

"I like how bicycles look like skeletons or bent twigs on wheels."
---"A wicker bike."
"Cars are more like shiny rooms, or self-propelled carapaces."
---"Exo versus endo: vertebrate versus insect. ... I wonder if anyone ever put a bike inside a taxidermied animal?"
"Don't young bullfighters train with bicycles that have horns for handlebars?"
---"I think that's only in the movies."
"Bunuel?"
---"Are there any classic Japanese movies featuring bicycles?"
"The Japanese like the Brits are 'train people'. ... I bet bicycles are ubiquitous in Chinese movies."

---"As part of the oil conservation program being planned by the energy advisors for Mrs. Clinton's presidentcy, bicycles are set to be featured in a number of tv programs and major motion pictures. ...Within a year of the federal government's "Bike for Energy Freedom" campaign speed limits on streets and highways in every city and town in America will need to be lowered to cut down on the carnage from automobile and bicycle mishaps."

"You sit and drive a car but you pedal a bike. ---You can stand & pedal."
---"Pedal is such a flowery word."
"'Pedal to the metal'."
"On a bicycle?"
"What might be the bicycle equivalent of 'pedal to the metal'?"


"Every activity that requires a sizable investment of time and or money has unique words or phrases which practitioners use to describe its most intense moments?"
---"Broadcast sports & cable-tv have standardarized descriptions of intense physical and mental activity." ... I bet they got phrase books of acceptable modifiers."
"We could all use a 'dictionary of intensities'."
---"For sure."

"Sensations rule. What good are thoughts and feelings that come & go like a soft breeze without a rush of pleasure or pain."
---"So subtlety is not a sensation?"
"...a fart in a hurricane."

"More than your smiling face and genial manner; more than your opinions and sometimes witty observations; more then even your adequate lawn care skills--she needs you so she can reject you. If she had no one close to her to shut down and ignore at crucial moments, or whenever the mood strikes her, she'ld be lost."
--"I'm her antipode?"
"'You don't know what you're talking about.' ... She may not know what's going on, but once you put your two cents in, she's at least sure it can't be that."
---"Love is strange."

"She was the youngest of eight. Her mother had been a widow raising two step-children as well as three of her own by the time she married her father."
---"Like the Brady Bunch".
"Yeah just like that. She was the favorite of the crazier of the two older sisters."

"Let's not play 'Top or Bottom'."
---"How 'bout 'Christian or Pagan'?"
"Ok."
...
"Jews are what again?"
---"Jews and Mormons are more often 'Christian', while Muslims, Hindus, Taoists and Buddhists tend to be 'Pagan'. Remember the idea is to identify those individuals who place higher value on their place in the cosmos---as reborn or chosen or whatever their programming demands---then their place here among fellow living creatures in line for coffee."
"So the game is biased."
---"Where did you get the idea I was putting one group above the other?"
"I know you."
---"It depends on your point-of-view. ... Maybe we should call the game 'Wheat or Chaff'?"
"'Saved or Unsaved'?"
---"'Sanctified or Putrified'?"

"I picture it as no place to go and nothing to see and you're not there to see it. ... Or if you were a different man: no women to kiss and you're no longer there to want to kiss them."
---"Kiss?"
"No money to be made and you're not there to sweat over it."
---"No more windows to squeegee, no cars to dodge. ...if I were a 'different man'."
"You'll no longer be a target."
---"They'll look and look and I'll be nowhere to be found!"
"They won't look all that long: within a few days the swarm will've changed its pattern as if you never existed. That insect mind of theirs has little use for memory."
---"Buzz kill."

"They're indispensable for control not because of how they worship or, and this may surprise you, what they believe--what their values are---they're courted and rewarded by the leaders simply because they are believers. The teachings are never as significant as the subjugate's surrender."
---"You mean because of who they believe. It's not as if the religious left has their lawyers working at the Department of Justice."
"Sometimes I think politics are influenced less by greed, avarice and bigotry or as the religious right preaches --by the forces of good versus evil--sometimes I imagine there're microbes, viruses, which bypass reason and make individuals more or less susceptable to belief itself."
---"I think I've heard something like that before, so what? The results are the same whether it's biological, chemical or divine intervention influencing the individuals in these groups."
"Wouldn't you like to know what the viruses are up to? What evolutionary advantage they gain by having millions of Americans willing to kill and die for the men and women that best exemplify their values?"
---"You mean millions of Americans willing to imagine, watch & celebrate others killing and dying for those cherished so-called god-given beliefs."
"I forgot. You like to think your neighbors' depression could never erupt into wholesale murderous rage. That only a few, the proud, are capable of real violence. ..You should talk to some non-bigoted cops someday. ...Or read about Serbia."

"...promised a death as uneventful as my life."
---"You lucky dog."