The icons I grew up with are disappearing along with the American middle class family. The amusements of Salisbury Beach are gone. The carouselle, the roller coaster and the bumper cars and the water slide are gone. I am left to wonder if we have forgotten how to enjoy ourselves, is it too expensive or has the typical American family changed too much.
My family has camped in the Maine woods for twenty seven years now. We swim in energizing mountain stream water, breathe air that doesn’t smell like a cesspool and get the benefit of returning to simple honest pleasures of photographing Maine wildlife and collecting wood for the evening campfire. I don’t care what time it is or even what day. It is just that relaxing.
This time though the second rest stop on the Maine pike featured a Starbucks instead of what we will always call the second Burger King. Starbucks is of course the epitomy of Satanism in my book. Coffee is after all coffee and all Starbucks does is paint lipstick on a pig in order to “offer” it at a highly inflated price. It is after all a marketing effort and lot’s of people market lots of things and we like chumps buy them. It even changes our language.
“Extraordinary rendition”
“Depleted uranium”
“Troop surge”.
The only good part? Moose, 24 sightings, deer 4, bear one. Plus we are learning how long our batteries last. Could we survive out here? We might have to someday.
Yes, coming back, I can definitely smell the cesspool like Massachusetts air already.
Lewis Black said in one of his comedy routines that seeing a Starbucks at both ends of a block meant the world was at an end for sure…of course he said it a hell of a lot funnier than I just did.
I love the smell of rank capitalist expansionism in the morning. Smells like defeat….
My mother purchased a couple of hundred acres in Maine a few years back. We (my brothers and I) jokingly refer to it as The Compound because she thinks she can retreat to it when this turkey comes crashing down around our ankles. My problem is that my own nukular family is estranged from her and that could leave us on the outside looking in when the post apocalyptic roving bands of armed yuppies begin assaulting each other over that last pot of cafe au lait.
Here’s a handy guide to all the fancy names Starbucks has put in place for, you know, coffee, for all of those who are not up to speed on 21st century Yuppyisms.
Excellent! Oh, and is the “compound” for sale?
I am currently looking for potential David Koresh style survivalist properties, but yes keeping the family together is the real problem.
I do though have this aversion to certain things. One of them is diet soda, for that matter diet anything. It leaves an aftertaste in my mouth not unlike battery acid. I take this as my body telling me something is wrong and I get the same aftertaste effect with some of these flavored coffees like french vanilla and others. All in all my point is that I think our country allows way too many chemical addidtives into our food system thus contributing to many ill health effects.
I couldn’t tell you if it’s for sale but I kind of doubt it since she’s as serious as you seem to be about having somewhere to retreat to. I think it’s just as well that I’m on the outs with her because, knowing her, it could be more dangerous on the inside than on the outside!
I agree about the added chemicals. There’s little to buy these days that isn’t polluted in one way or another. As far as Starbucks goes, I watched a short report about that company’s rising success not long ago and one of it’s big execs was flat out honest about the products they sell, what they really are and how they develope marketing strategies in order to charge such high prices. They actually researched using round tables over square or rectangular ones because a single person sitting at a round table somehow doesn’t appear so alone! Well, they’re not alone because they’re accompanied by the Starbucks aura LOL! And it really is nothing more than decent coffee with fancy names. And people pay because it makes them feel superior or with the in crowd, like wearing a $30 white t-shirt from the Gap that’s no better quality wise than a $5 or $6 Fruit of the Loom t-shirt. It’s a lotta wanna be uppityness.
It’s pitiful.
LHM – Burger King is also part of corporate America and the Maine Pike is part of the national interstate system.
Now maybe forty years ago you and your family would have only driven part of the way on the pike and stopped for coffee at Bert and Ethel’s Cafe.
Very correct. There was Jimmy’s, a gas station and restaurant we stopped at for many years. That very location closed years agoand has never opened since.
True. I know Burger King is also a part of corpo-world but at the very least a part of their business requires that they devote at least some of their energy towards kids while Starbucks is devoid totally of any recognition that kids even exist.
It is sort of like the yuppie swimming pool my kids where at in Munich. They wanted to splash and play like kids do but it was too upscale and we were disturbing the fat cat business assholes in the next room getting a massage.
One day I was shopping for someone else at a big box grocery store. She wanted a special type of Colgate toothpaste. (I use natural stuff on my teeth, so hadn’t shopped for toothpaste for years.)
My good gawd. There were five shelves filled with just the different kinds of COLGATE toothpaste alone, and along with all the other brand names, there was entire aisle of toothpaste nearly a block long! What the HELL??? This is insane. Just freakin insane!! It took me 20 minutes of reading small print to finally find what she wanted.
As far as fancy coffee shops go, I avoid them like the plague now, after being traumatized by innocently ordering “a cup of coffee”, only to be stared at I was seriously developmentally delayed or totally senile. I didn’t WANT THIRTY CHOICES DAMMIT..I JUST WANTED A PLAIN DAMNED CUP OF COFFEE!
It also freaks me out badly to go into chain restaurants where the wait people all look alike, sound alike and say exactly the same words to all the customers, as if they were all trained in Stepford, USA! What have they done with my beloved Millies and Angies and Dorises, those unique, funny, powerful, compassionate tough beautiful breed of women who made one feel so at home, and more often than not knew exactly what you were going to order??
I better shut up…while I still can.
your choices as a person are of value. The choice involves rejecting the things in life which you decide have zero value to you but bring in huge profits for a handful of CEOs. Doing that I believe will bring value to a greater mass of people. The question is which one of the 19 flavors of Colgate contain the least quanitites of manufactured synthethic compounds. And if perchance you did find the “fountain of youth” would anyone take you seriously.
Two women friends of ours are opening an independent coffee shop and spa where we live. They’re naming it “Muddy Boots Cafe” ie: its ok to kick back and put your feet on the furniture. Local musical talent is planned as well. I think they’re going for the anti-corporate model. Thank FSM, a place to hang out with friends again!
It’s the corporatization of America. Personally, I find Starbucks needlessly strong and needlessly expensive. But I guess that making it strong makes poeple feel that they are getting something for all their money. I usually buy my $1.17 cup at the gas station where I fill up.
in Germany involved the acquisition of two cups of coffee from a kliene knipe across the street from my apartment. I was surprised at the volume of the cups and the price, eleven deutchmarks and it was not even “take out”, so I had to yell up to my wife to get down here if she wanted her coffee. That was our first experience as Americans that yes indeed, life could be different, and life indeed could be better!