Overheard Starbuck

"While watching tv the other night it dawned on me, 'I'm not an American anymore'."
---"What are you then?"
"I don't know! I just know I can't afford to live like most Americans want to live and I don't want to."
---"TV will do that to you."
"Yeah, who doesn't hate all those smiling people selling things, selling themselves-- but it's more then that. You've ever been around people speaking in a language you don't understand? Sometimes you feel you're getting the gist of the conversation, picking up a word, a name, here and there; maybe even laughing or frowning a few times right along with everyone else, but inevitably, depending upon how much you drank, you realize you don't have a clue what anyone's talking about?"
---"I hate being odd-man-out. I carry a miniature bible for occasions like that."
"The thing is Americans are talking and I should understand, but I don't and what's weird I probably haven't been able to follow their conversations for years."
---"Something like that happened to my Grandma the same time she broke her hip."
"Stranger still I don't care what everyone's jabbering over. I'm sure they're saying nothing I need to hear. ... But the thing is: I don't know anywhere else. I've never lived more then ten miles from where I was born. I'm too white for Mexico and not white enough for Canada. And Enid doesn't want to move, even if we could without maxing out our credit cards and hitting up our parents for loans."
---"'Exiles on Main Street?' ... If you were homeless you wouldn't have this problem."

...

"Maybe the homeless are America's refugees but without status. Refugees who haven't fulfilled the minimum requirements set by the UN and NGOs of stepping across a border then rounded up by government agencies into camps."
---"How can you say that? Refugees are forced en masse from their homes at gunpoint, fleeing genocide, wars, drought and famine. America's homeless are mostly individuals or families who choose to run from creditors, their families, gangs or the law."
"So the difference is in the numbers?"
---"Forget it. You're making me angry."