Overheard Starbuck

"Everything ascends."

"After Jason's ex-con cousin moved in his cat disappeared, his fish died and Jennifer won't go over there anymore."
---"How long is he going to stay?"
"Jason says Brad has a number of outstanding warrants and plans to turn himself in as soon as the producers of the reality-show 'Bounty Girls' set the date for the filming of his capture and arrest. ...Brad said they might even film the raid in Jason's apartment."
---"Jason doesn't mind?"
"You know how star-struck he gets. Brad says TV-Guide magazine plans to use his name and photo in an article about 'Bounty Girls' scheduled for their Christmas issue. His manager claims offers for commercials, public appearances and a book are already coming in."
---"He has a manager?"
"Brad promised Jason he'll soon buy him a car and put on the payroll as his personal assistant. Jason says he's looking forward to moving to LA and a new career in show business--he hopes to produce someday. ..He never knew there were so many different things you can do with a sharpened piece of metal."

"Since whatever I got moved in and took over the spare room, the remotes, the closets and most of the refrigerator with its egotistical pain, it's been a struggle to give the better part of my attention to the things that make life matter."
---"Can doctors prescribe pain-killers for mystery diseases?"
"I don't know but I soon may wish I had a more moderate history with alcohol: treating it less as a social lubricant and more like an anodyne. ...I don't know if I can learn to drink just enough to take the edge off.. I don't want to walk around half-in-the bag, until it becomes necessary. Alcohol is expensive and why add the dull twilight thud of a hang-over onto the other stuff? "
---"I see how the criminalization of pot and other DIY-type herbal pain relievers becomes this whole other thing for you. It becomes personal."

"He's not looking for a friend. He's already forgotten your name and if there's a woman nearby you're nothing more than furniture. You don't have any sisters; your wife's tied up with prior committments. There's no insult intended."
---"Funny, very funny.."
"Embrace him or more to the point what he stands for-- a reminder that sex between a man and a woman is more basic then gift economies, sexual servitude, currency or fashioned transactions. He/it is a force of nature, the last of a dying breed....Stay out of his way, lock up the livestock and keep the younguns indoors until his testosterone storm runs its course. ...Can you sense the women stirring? It'll be over soon."

"Two brothers molested by priests..." ---"There is that."

"I need a cool, aloof blonde to defile."
---"Doesn't everyone? Even blondes sometimes need cool blondes to violate."

"Just because for the past 30 years a brick of heroin a week has been flown via Lufthansa into O'Hare, where a Federal Express driver under the auspices of US Customs and the Chicago Police Dept. makes sure it finds its way to an office in Bensenville--that doesn't make the baggy of pot you accidentally packed with your soiled clothes from your four days and five nights in Jamaica any more legal does it? Two wrongs don't make a right, Anarchist."

"How can you not be in awe of the networks which allow us to ignore 99% of the people we come in contact with everyday? Imagine if we were required to give most everyyone we meet the modicum of respect any human being is do--father, brother, mother, sister, cousin, friend-- we'ld never get anything done. We'ld never get to work. Every commute, every public transaction, every walk down the street--a mosh-pit of meet and greet."
---"I'm imprinted on morning coffee, a steady paycheck, the company car and lately women's volleyball events on tv."
"Imagine if our loyalties were more fixated on human beings then tools like money and possessions?"
---"No one could live that way. We would all perish."

"I can' t leave all of this behind. --it needs me."

"Wow is he depressed. What happened?"
---"He hasn't seen his father for years and this morning before work he turns on the tv and there's his Dad's name scrolling across the bottom of the screen under a video from a heliocopter of a house in Arizona, California or Florida while the voice-over explains there's a massive man-hunt for a federal fugitive wanted on multiple warrants for non-payment of child support and the production, possession and distribution of counterfeit beany-babies. The voice-over said the fugitive was considered armed and dangerous."
"Well that sucks."

"Do you need to see more? Do you really have to get closer to them to know where Abu Ghraib, renditions and detainees come from? ...Let's get out of here."

"Is a casino a 'hard target' or a 'soft target'?"
---"I'm not sure..."
"Is a church a 'hard target' or a 'soft target'? The National Cathedral? A synagogue? The church in DC where the Opus Dei Supreme Court judges worship?"
---"I'm not sure I'm comfortable talking about hard and soft targets."
"But every place in America is either one or the other. Homeland Security's got a massive list. When people are arrested for demonstrating, the DA will bring out the list to add to the unlawful assembly or disturbing the peace charges... Is a shopping mall a hard target? If it's on or near a US military base? How near?"
---"I don't like talking about subjects that can get me arrested in airports or on airplanes. It's a rule I made up since I saw a guy dragged off a plane after a fellow passenger asked him what was the title of the book he was reading and another passenger 'distinctly' heard him say, 'Bombed in New Haven' . It happened while boarding a flight from LAX to Atlanta."

"Who decides who's a 'high value' terrorist suspect? Are 'low value' terrorist prisoners treated that much differently? --Is there even a 'low value terrorist suspect' CIA classification?"--Do 'low value' detainees get to watch an extra hour of tv every night? Have a choice between the pudding cup or the fruit cup? Are given an extra pillow? Often have the cells with a window in which the sky is visible? Spend half the time on the dunking board as 'high value' suspects? Are only stripped naked for doctor's visits and showers? Are sometimes on a first name basis with their guards? Are allowed packages, photos and letters from home? Are permitted to sleep with lights out? Are given other books than the Koran to read? Sometimes get to choose the music the guards blare into their cells?"
---"Go ahead make jokes, but not around me --please."

"Funny, as I grow older and more comfortable with myself, I see there are more and more people with whom I have nothing in common, nothing to say."
---"A club of one."
"Am I the only one who's noticed this growing chasm: otherwise ordinary people who've become as inexplicable as men from Mars, or head-hunters from Borneo?"
---"Ahh once you get to know their ways, they're not so strange. ..You're probably a little behind the curve. Most people have already barricaded their doors against the epidemic of inexplicableness with neo-racist political activism, old fashioned book burning bigotry and a refound committment to some ancient desert faiths' paranoid notions of chosen people. ...Maybe it's time you're reborn."
"But I don't want to be crazy like that! Not like that...not like them."
---"Then keep your mouth shut. You're a minority of one among the persecuted masses. It's not safe. When newly elected President Clinton shuts down Bush's 'faith-based' initiatives, a lot of newly unemployed faithful will have their faith tested like never before. Things might get ugly. The various incarnations of the one true god may instruct them to make new again the sacrifices of Abraham."

"They're not as ignorant as they're corrupt."

"It always comes back to this: he could've had a chance at happiness he he hadn't married a girl from Hadleysburg."
---"Life is not a novel."

"What were you two talking about?"
---"We were trying to decide if abortions were cheaper and not a social stigma--or state and AMA sponsored murder-- when our mothers were pregnant with us, would we have been aborted babies?
"If abortions were as glamorous or at least as mundane as cosmetic plastic surgery?"
---"If there was no anti-abortion movement... would we be here to see the sunrise through Starbucks'window?"
"Did you talk about what your mothers now know about how much time and energy it takes to care for an infant?"
---"That and how much time companies now demand from their managers and executives in training."
(Both sit and silently stare at nothing for a long minute.)
"I'm pretty sure my mother would've been an aborted baby."

"I call this one (hands-over print), 'The Artist as Hot-House Flower: Rare, Strange--A Sound Investment Opportunity'."
---"The plants around the edge look menacing."
"They're weeds."
---"Are these wallets and purses?"
"Or seed pods."

"So I'm here Tuesday for my lunch break--you know they only give us 20 minutes-- and I'm standing in line wearing my Calvin Klein 'Severe' suit and he walks in clutching in his big hands a bouquet of flowers. Well. Without a moment's hesitation he walks up to me in front of everybody and says, 'here I bought you some dead flowers.' You coulda floored me. I think it was the first time I heard him use 'I' and 'you' in the same sentence...He's starting to think of us...as an us!"
---"He's a keeper for sure. ...How long have you two been going together? A month?"
"Six weeks."
---"Email and or text message each other everyday? Phone calls every other day? Spend weekends together? Home cooked meals and late night tv? Has he met your best friend and or parents?"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!"
---"I know a good caterer and one of my friends prepares pre-nuptial agreements for women who have more money then sense."

"Even the extinctions of plant, animal and insect species we're now witnessing are part of God's plan."
---"Didn't God give man dominion over all the creatures of the earth great and small?"
"By directing multinational corporations to obliterate living creatures species by species, eco-system by ecosystem, God's saving them from the tribulations and horrors of the coming end times."
---"Yea god?"

"Have you noticed how everyone on tv has more money then you...and me?"
---"They look like they do. ...Except for the stars of Cops, crowds in news videos, audiences for game shows and fictional criminals."

"Do you know anyone who's been on tv?"
---"I once recognized a guy playing a non-speaking role of a loving father with a wife, kids, and a dog in an insurance company's commercial. I never found out how much he earned or if the commercial was for local as well as national broadcast.
... I met him before this good fortune, around the time he went gay in a big way. He was love sick--dizzy and overwhelmed--with problems with his family--I'm not sure--and all I remember about him now is 'how did I not see what a transformation he was going through'? --I mean talk about being naked and exposed."
"Like a snake shedding its skin?"
---"Like a twenty-something year-old man being born without a mother. Everywhere he went the world he knew had fallen aside. Had dissolved and disappeared. Was swept, snatched, kicked or blown away and proven a lie. While his new world, of which he knew next to nothing--except that it was new and supposed to be more true-- came into being not baby-comfort, mother's caring hands-sized but fully formed adult and male."
"Where does the 'lifestyle' come in?"
---"I only now noticed how existential 'coming out' can be."

"We were fighting for a better world and when we came back nothing had changed."
---"But you had. ...Didn't they warn you? Didn't they tell you, it was a job? And while it was the best job in the world as part of the greatest fighting machine the world's ever seen, the media, your family and even you will never know how your dedication and attention helped keep America safe and free?"
"Tell that to the men and women who came back missing limbs, organs or parts of their brains. Better yet tell the families of those who came back, neatly packaged, wrapped in flags: 'your son, daughter, wife, husband, father, mother, brother or sister was doing the best job they could, under the circumstances --a model employee--right up until the point..."
---"They became heroes?
"I was gonna say, '...they had their on-the job accident'."

"Let me undress you with my robot. ...I want my robot to kiss you all over."
---"'And over and over again'?"

"They don't have inquiring minds...they have acquiring eyes. ...They're not puzzle makers or puzzle solvers. ...What can't be held or touched is difficult for them to perceive, let alone value."
---"Things stand out under the spotlight."
"Don't you mean kleig lights? ..As I get old and my lights start to dim, I can see myself turning into them. ...Things I never bothered with: the latest cars, electronics, lean bodies and fine clothes, will grow--loom--in importance, while what I've been using as reason fades into shadow. I'll probably die clutching some fancy rag I pulled from the garbage."
---"The world goes on whether we're dreaming it or not."

"It happened so fast, I didn't have time to get to my gun."
---"Where was it?"
"Locked in the glove compartment."
---"Didn't you say there were about two dozen people standing around?"
"Right before all hell broke loose."
---"Did you see who starting shooting?"
"Oh yeah, I'll never forget his face. ...Maybe I'll install a spring-loaded holster under the dashboard closer to the steering wheel."
---"Wouldn't've waving a gun around made you a target?"
"Maybe I'll buy a smaller weapon that'll fit in the console between the seats."
---That's right Travis, you'll get the bad-guys next time."

"That so many people are consumed with envy and not hate for the people who appear in magazines, on tv and in the movies must be one of the greatest feats of advertising and America's public relations industry."
---"What makes you think it's more envy then hate?"
"Because celebrity translucent for public consumption, press agent rewritten lives are all over the media."
---"Your assuming celebrity news is the promotion of a brand or a response to consumer demands and not also a means to shape how we look and what we think about them, their lifestyles and most importantly their attitudes towards the luxury products and services they enjoy. ...Nathaniel West was wrong."
"Who?"

"If I didn't have a good job and all my cool stuff, living alone would be a hardship."
---"Family and other people are what the poor have instead of I-pods, I-phones and clubs."

"It's not 'mission impossible', it's his baby's bath."
---"Makes a big thing out of it, huh?"
"Once he's focused and locks onto the completion of a goal or a task, no matter how mundane--look out. ..I've seen him get this way over some pretty stupid things, things people wouldn't think twice about. He becomes like a force of nature."
---"You got you're own wild beast in your duplex there on Oak Hill Ridge Lane."
"It's amazing, sometimes exciting or surreal to watch but before it passes I always worry he won't come out of it. ...I don't think his job challenges him anymore."

"It takes tough men to make tough decisions."
---"Not more lay-offs!?"
"No I'm talking about America's rendition and detainee secret prisoner programs."
---"Whew. You had me going there for awhile."