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?"