I only go to Starbucks on professional matters, that is, to meet with a client. I have never been to any of the Starbucks locations for sheer enjoyment and leisure, except perhaps for when they were just starting in this city back in 1987, or so, and their only location in Vancouver was a tiny coffee bar at the Waterfront Station. I liked the staff there. They were friendly and personable. And they basically helped educate me about good coffee, and the various grinds and roasts and what countries or regions they were grown in, be it Sumatra, Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, and elsewhere. But as they grew, expanded, and basically took over and came to define the local coffee culture, making it something oh so middle class, bland and and insipid, by 1988 or so, I simply no longer went. I also became educated about the exploitation of farm workers on coffee plantations and I became more interested in buying fair trade, until I could no longer afford the higher costs. For years afterward I would stubbornly refuse to set foot in a Starbucks, until, working with clients out in the community, at times it became completely unavoidable. So, that is the only time I go. One still has to maintain standards, after all. And self-respect.
Yesterday, a client and I were each nursing a coffee in the comfort of some huge armchairs that adorned the front window of a Starbucks on Cambie Street. I soon noticed that of some thirty customers, or so, we were the only ones not drinking out of paper cups. That's right, Gentle Reader, no one was drinking from reusable ceramic coffee mugs, except for just us two. I only drink from ceramic or glass containers, no matter where I might happen to be, and I reckon that I have probably spared the landfill some four to five thousand paper and plastic beverage containers over the past twelve years or so. Not really much of a dent when you consider that every week here in dumb-blonde Vancouver, some 2.6 million paper cups end up in the garbage, unrecycled.
Even now, when we have been given just another ten years before global warming has got out of control and we might be pushed to the brink of extinction as a viable species on this earth, almost everyone still wants to chuck more paper and plastic in the landfill. Every bit as rational as the mouth-breathers in Alberta who insist on carrying on with the oil industry, climate change and species' extinctions be damned. Yesterday in Starbucks, there were perhaps two people actually having a conversation with each other. Everyone else was completely absorbed in their tech toys, be they laptops or smartphones. Now, at a time when we really need to learn to pull together and start to really value community, I commented to my client that there has probably never been a time in our human history that people have been so close, yet so not together.
Of course, no one was doing art in the Starbucks. I have in the past, while waiting for my client. I often feel like I'm doing something subversive or revolutionary by making art in public places Instead of separating me from others, the way that texting on my darling little phone would (I still don't, and still refuse to have a smartphone), making art connects me to other people, because I am not consuming, I am creating, and the very act of creating releases in each one of us that God presence that is latent in all of us. God is love, and when we are making srt, when we're making anything that is not purposed to do hrm, we are participating in the whole divine plan, and this is why people are attracted to artists when we are at work. We are connecting with others at the highest possible level. I have had so many beautiful and interesting conversations with strangers while doing my art in coffee shops. I don't reckon this would happen if I was just dumbly texting away on my phone or laptop.
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