Starstruck Cafe

A legal drug in America can wake us up and cure our delusions.

Venice Beach, CA -- This early in the morning only the seagulls keep me company. The air still holds sea mist. This coffee shop opens at daybreak. Though, nobody shows up until the seagulls have eaten up all the crumbs left on the street from the Saturday night pizza and beer parties.

Soon the regulars will arrive. The first of them is a lady who scoots around in a wheelchair, whispering to herself and asking for spare change so she can buy a cup of Starbuck’s strategically revived Pike’s Peek brand. Past her prime, she seems to use the wheelchair to keep her increasing weight off her feet. What she may not realize, though, the more she uses her wheelchair, the heavier she’ll become and eventually bound to it, entrapped by her own convenience.

I suppose other reasons motivate her self-imposed slow ride into captivity. Wheeling around like that might make the charitable more inclined to hand her their spare change. She rolls into this coffee shop and out again at regular intervals, at least once every half hour. Passers-by rush to help her maneuver through the door, but they’re not regulars here. They haven’t seen her walking around on her own two feet, and they don’t know that she’s probably fallen into that habit just to attract attention. Her eyes flash like bright neon lights saying, “I’m lonely. Pay attention.”

That might also serve as a great sign for the bar down the street,”The Galley” one of Charles Bukowski’s old haunts. The heavy drinkers become who they are in noble attempts to escape their troubles. Not knowing that by drinking more heavily, it only gets worse. Eventually they, too, become bound to their own mental prisons. At the break of dawn, I ask a woman, sitting on a bench why she’s crying.

“I spent my whole week’s wages on booze,” she sobs. “I drank all night.”

By the time the wheelchair lady, no, I won’t tell you her name and, yes, I talk to her, has made enough to buy what Starbucks calls a coffee, the younger local Yuppie types show up. They were out at their usual pizza parties last night, blowing out on beer and pepperoni. Blow-out…a term Martin Amis uses in his novel “Money,” about how bad habits can ruin the best of us. I remember it from years ago. The term fits for how these young, college educated office workers toss off the frustrations of working in cube farms and for bosses who want to optimize returns on their backs. I know. You’re thinking that the term yuppie is so dated. Like, dude, who says that anymore?

Well, it just seems fitting. The “new” line of Yuppies, the Generation Xers or the Generation Yers. Their differences are only nuances apart, just a tattoo, video game, and a skateboard apart. Labels like these are useful mostly for marketing departments for consumer goods. The comfort zones apply from one generation to the next. You get stuck in a routine, you imprison yourself. You let your mind think the same way for too long, it’ll handicap you. Make you wheelchair bound, mentally or physically or both.

That’s the message I received this weekend. The nice thing about going to the movies in a city like LA, you get to step out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol of American movies. You know, the movies produced first from the perspective of careful psychographic and demographic research, the ones that break down the needs of market niches, like the Generation X, or Y… Independent movies, especially the European variety, tend to break those static rules taught in business schools. A good story is often the one that helps to break us out of our own comfort zones. They help us to see the world in new eyes.

“Reprise” is a chic flick with hip looking 20-something Norwegians who grew up in Oslo, hang out with the same circle of friends and maintain the same sort of dependencies in their comfortable relationships. Two or three of these buddies become famous for their first novels. It’s not until one of them discovers that, by going to a foreign country, he’s able to break out of the rut. This dissolves the old comfort zones through his old circle of friends. It shakes things up. His closest friend even learns to love a woman when she snips his mental chains by finally telling him, “Stop.”

“Roman de Gare”is a cool French movie. None of the fast action, flying in the sky comic book adventure as, say, “Iron Man”, but it does offer glimpses of human warmth and relationships, some that grow and thrive, others that whither. It’s only when the protagonist realizes he’s not the man everyone taught him to be that he discovers his own life and identity by stepping out of trails he’d beaten down throughout his life. A woman of a most unlikely occupation helps him to change his eye glasses and so too his perspectives.

In a similar story of recent American history, our anointed religious and saintly political leaders tend to want us to stay the course. From one miserably failed President to McCain, they want us to keep doing the same thing while expecting new results. Human spirit isn’t made for this type of mental absurdity and living, though. We naturally follow an instinct to break away from delusions once unveiled. It’s in our genetics. Drinking new brands of coffee is necessary for our survival.