I had some Starbucks today, which, as a rule, I tend to stay from unless I am in an airport, which I almost never am due to an active and profound terror of flying. This terror, which to me is clearly rational and not at all vague, stems from a deep understanding of exactly what it would be like to get cavity searched, then locked up with a hundred strangers and a few snotty "air servers" and a possibly demented or drunk or food-poisoned or aneurysm-prone pilot and hurling myself in a metal tube far too many feet above the earth to make it down safely if something went wrong. I know what this would be like. I know how the air would smell, I know the sounds the engines would make. I know what it would feel like when the nose dips down and we start to plunge to the Earth where we should have been all along. I can see the expressions on the faces of the people around me, and I believe I know the things that will go through our minds when we first understand that we are going to crash. I can picture my family members playing and replaying my last cell phone message, my daughters doing their own hair for their proms and my son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, being globally misunderstood for the rest of his life.
Just to prove how absurd I am let me tell you this: my obscene, adventure-squelching fear of flying can't keep me from putting people I love on an airplane, such as my bifurcated children, who are hurled very far away in stranger-filled metal tubes to visit their father several times per year. You'd think, since it is so frightening to me, that I would want to keep my children from it, but I don't. Actually, I can't. They have to go, even when they cry and ask not to, so I sit in the airport with them, missing them in advance, sneaking a nuzzle of a thin little neck, squeezing a bony little shoulder, watching the airport light play off of their perfect features, and trying to teach them my love of people watching to pass the anxiety-riddled time. Essentially, I am consumed with emotion and fake everything, clutching a hot Starbucks to try and take take my mind off the fact that I am putting my young children in a metal tube going in a direction that is away from me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: I don't, as a rule, consume Starbucks products. For one thing, Starbucks coffee, when ingested by me, drives my heart to sing with such a feral syncopation that it makes me want to call a cardiologist. And second: Sarbucks is a virus. Starbucks, like many other massive retail businesses that selfishly repopulate themselves at the expense of small businesses around the world, is the economic equivalent of the Asian Carp.
Someone once thought the Asian Carp was a good idea. Someone, without foresight thought it would be beneficial to bring the Asian carp, a fish that can grow to 100 pounds and still eat 40 percent of its body weight in plankton per day, to catfish farms in the US to put a damper on the algae overgrowth. What it did was put a damper on native fish species, becoming a plague of the North American tributaries, eventually putting smaller fish out of business all over the continent. Sound familiar?
I did once give a Starbucks card to my father as a gift, as I thought it might help him pick up better chicks than one can find in Eastern Pennsylvanian bars, but under nearly all other circumstances -- I can't abide a Starbucks. I don't want a cappi-frappi anything, and I don't want to pay $4.50 for something that put Ma and Pa's Coffee shop out of business and left Ma and Pa with nothing but days filled with the Game Show Network, SHARE food, and bus trips to the library.
Here is something else I'll reveal: It is hard to live as an idealist. I'm all about yearning for things to be as they should be, not as they are, which makes it hard to embrace progress, technology, and "the moment." I can't live in the moment, standing in line at Starbucks and forking over what could be tuition money for one of my children, when I could be having a cup of plain coffee in Lester's, the diner I used to go to before it changed to try and act more like Starbucks, or at home at the kitchen table with my own children, when they are with me. I can't be blase about putting my children on a plane to visit their own father for nearly every day of every vacation, whether they want to or not. Constantly packing suitcases and saying goodbye to friends who can't include them in their summer or Christmas plans, travel during the holidays without their parents, and constant texting and phone calls when they are gone is not a good way to live. It's just not right. There is a lifelong burden that comes with living as an idealist, and living as a divorced idealist is a special kind of hell. Things should always be better, people can always be better, I could always have have done better, and although I am no longer surprised when people don't do the best that they can, it still hurts to experience it.
Change does not always equal progress. Someone once thought that expanding Starbucks past Seattle was a good idea. Someone once brought a barrel of Asian Carp over on a boat. Someone one thought divorce was something kids could just "get over."
Comments