Posted 1:35 PM by Alfred

Do you ever feel like you’re the only sane one in a land full of lunatics? Flowing forth from that thought, isn’t it ironic, nah fuck that, not ironic, just interesting, how close that feeling can be to that of the sense of self awareness of being the only crazy-ass in a land full of strait-laced starbucks kwaffers?

Not that starbucks is overly mainstream and therefore uncool or anything like that. just that at least in my mind it’s something of a symbol of a) corporate America, b) legitimized drugs, ie caffeine, c) our modern society’s demented and disturbing response or paean to the beat generation’s coffee house ideal, places where people like ginsberg, kerouac, et al including their various offshoots and inspirees spat violent and sexually offensive (vis a vis the time’s subjective parameters) poems, stories, music, ideas, and other outlandish type shit.

It’s like, before starbucks, it was cool to go get a cup of coffee and chill out and watch some hack ass long hair talk in monosylabbic tones about his angst over nuclear Armageddon and Jerry Garcia’s beard, but nowadays, it’s like it’s cool in the anti-cool sense, uber muzak chiming away, college students clicking away at their laptops, orders of triple strawberry lattes with a lemon twist or whatever the fuck and people just droning away, myself included, like there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this picture.

I remember this little back alley coffee house called the e-bar in Pasadena, I mean, half the people in there hadn’t bathed for over 3 days and they had open mike nite on Tuesday when any and all freaks of nature would come out and blab some kind of bullshit, and it was beautiful, and this was like 90 to 93 or some shit like that, and now it’s only ten years later and starbucks crushes all competition or at the very least allows for modest revenues as long as you stay in your corner of the yard, with no promises of the monolith not moving in next door on an appropriate Wednesday to destroy the hopes and dreams and ducket spicket of joe small business person's alterna-fantasy.

Yes, um, I started out on a topic about feeling crazy in a land of correctly pegged individuals, and its link to sanity type egos amid the delusional looney bin sector, and i wonder if somehow all the crap I just said puts me in one of those categories, or maybe squarely in between, or maybe on the planet Jupiter. You decide. I’m going to lunch.

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