December 26, 2007
The Starbucks Man
I saw him through the window as I walked by. Poser. 21st century valley trash pretending to work on a screenplay that no one will ever read, straining to look both busy and cool as he sips his ridiculously specific latte; an out-of-work actor who also has "comedian" written on his pretentious business card, as though all that's required to legitimately call yourself a comedian is having stood on a coffeehouse stage for five minutes bitching about how fake everyone is in L.A.; a wannabe rebel who tries to dress the part with expensively ragged jeans and a two dollar shirt from the thrift store that he hopes says, "I'm a struggling artist" even though all it really says is, "I have extraordinarily bad taste"; a dim-witted dork who fancies himself a latter-day Jack Kerouak and claims to do whatever it takes to stay pure in the creation of his art, even though he leaps at the chance to wrap his lips around the fat, throbbing cock of corporate greed whenever his sleazy, hack Hollywood agent calls with an audition for a Del Taco commercial; a tragically transparent, woefully uninformed oaf, eager to belch out garbled interpretations of left-wing dogma but ill-equiped to expound on any single position beyond the domestic clichés of television pundits.
Oh, I saw him, that sad little dweeb in horn-rimmed glasses who says he's read Rand and Mailer and Vonnegut even though the only quotes he can produce are from his favorite episodes of Family Guy. He's a java-sipping sham, a wheezing organ that can imitate the notes but never make the music. His thoughts are like cotton candy, puffed-up and full of promise but ultimately disappointing and comprised of almost nothing. He's a poet without words, a sculptor without fingers. He may have even read On The Road at one point in his life but he never really got the grit of it. He likes to tell you about when he "roughed it" backpacking across Europe but he never tells you that he did it with a credit card and sometimes stayed at a decent hotel when it actually got too real for him. He has no idea what it's like to sit under a bridge with a junkie trumpet player talking about God for three hours while sharing a giant can of cheap beer. He has no idea what it's like to live in a bleak, Amsterdam squat with real punks and real anarchists and real nihilists, spending the day hustling change and stealing fruit and then arguing about the merits of revolution until you fall asleep on your sheet-less, beat-up, musty, semen-stained mattress, hoping you won't have to pee during the night because the shit-filled toilet doesn't flush.
He's a mock enfant terrible whose skulking is all for show, a parade of misery to make himself look tortured and misunderstood, as though if he were to die today we would all discover his genius and never forgive ourselves for not appreciating him when we had the chance, for not basking in the glow of his creative brilliance when he was within our grasp, for not kneeling at the alter of his defiant superiority and singing hosanna to his hallowed throne of rebellion.
He's a parody of his own dreams, a carelessly crayoned caricature, a wildly disfigured lampoon of truth that doesn't get its own joke, a growling cramp in the belly of candor, a tool chest of experience that rings hollow to the thump. And although the stench of his vacancy would make a man of salted worth vomit blood, he nonetheless strolls through Hollywood with his headshot, oblivious and unscathed and chronically full of shit.
He is...the Starbucks Man.
Copyright 2007 John Bizarre
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