It's Never Too Late

When I make a cup of coffee I change the world.

― Jean-Paul Sartre

The smart money's on Starbucks: its stock, which bolsters the leading hedge-fund portfolios, returned nearly 19% this month, despite a global drop in same-store sales.

But, I'm sorry, I've had it with Starbucks. Not the stock. The store.

I just paid $3 for a single cup of drip coffee―only a buck less than the price I pay for a whole pound of ground at Safeway (the equivalent of 27 cups of brew).  

Coffee is my water, as singer Becky G says; and though many Americans will gladly fork over three bills for a bottle of water, I won't pay that for a cup of coffee―not even a cup of kopi luwak, the coffee made from civet doodie.

I guess I'll be making my own coffee now. It's still the cheapest way―and has been for a century. A home-brewed cup in 1920 cost only 24 cents (adjusted for inflation). Today it costs a drop less―just 18 cents.

The sad thing is, I used to love Starbucks. 

I'd spend hours of my time there, even though the chairs were tippy and the stores looped the same Bob Marley record over and over again. I sat drinking coffee and reading philosophy books, yakking with fellow caffeine addicts about movies and politics, and writing marketing copy (my sole source of income for years).

But at some point the romance forsook our marriage.

The reasons escape me. 

Were I to consult Dr. Phil, I'm sure he'd say it was my fault our marriage turned ugly (or as he'd put it, "It's because of you your marriage looks like the dogs keep it under the porch").

And he'd be right. I demeaned Starbucks, complaining when the bathrooms hadn't been cleaned. I hid expenditures for restaurants, clothes, and movie tickets. I was neglectful. And I had a wandering eye: more than once I fantasized about visiting Peet's.

But Dr. Phil would be quick also to point out that marriage is a proverbial "two-way street" and at least some of the blame for the chill in our relationship falls on Starbucks.

Starbucks was simply too needy. It begrudged me for sitting hours on end with my nose in a book. It turned angry over the the fact that I ignored important chores, like taking out the garbage. And it resented that we never went anywhere.

But it's never too late to remove the strains on our marriage, Dr. Phil would add. 

Starbucks and I could still sit down and reach an understanding about what we each need, what we each deserve, and what we can realistically give one another. 

Starbucks only needs to affirm that our commitment and loyalty to each other are deep.

And drop the price of a Grande Drip.

In the Year 2525

Customer service is the new marketing.

— Derek Sivers

Mind if I make a prediction? 

I last predicted Hillary would win in a landslide; but here's my prediction anyway: 

Before the year 2525, for once a CSR won't blame me for her company's mistake.

Blaming customers for her company's mistakes has become every customer service representative's default response to problems.

I'm unsure when the practice began, and unsure why.

It truly vexes me. 

Maybe I'm in an unwitting member of a customer-rewards program designed by Lex Luthor. Maybe I'm on a shared list of losers. Maybe in a prior life I was Stalin's sous chef and this is payback.

I don't know the reason, I only know it happens to me repeatedly. Just this month:

• A CSR for Cloudburst (a lawn-sprinkler company), when I called to ask why I hadn't heard from the firm, insisted I never mailed back the reply form from its direct mail solicitation. But I did; I remember, because I resented needing a stamp.

• A CSR for Michaels (an art supplies retailer) told me I was a dodo to arrive at its door for a curbside pickup before the company's app advised me to do so. Telling her I don't have the app on my phone earned me an exaggerated eye-roll.

• A CSR for Young Explorers (an e-retailer of toys) said I was to blame for the fact the company shipped a talking laptop to me and billed my grandson's credit card. When I informed the rep that I'm 66 and don't need a talking My First Tablet, I was still blamed for the mistake; and when I said my grandson was 2 and didn't have a credit card, I was blamed once more.

• A CSR for M & T (a bank) told me it was clearly my fault the bank didn't receive my online application for a new checking account; the fact that Russian hackers had hijacked the bank's website a few days before was immaterial. (I immediately hung up and called the three credit bureaus to set up a fraud alert, FYI.)

If indeed customer service is the new marketing, your marketing sucks.

Sorta like my ability to predict.

A Me Too Far

One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness.
It is sudden. It pounces.

— Teju Cole

Woody Allen's new autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, nearly never was. 

That's because Allen's son, famed investigative reporter and father of the #MeToo Movement Ronan Farrow, strong-armed Hachette, the book's would-be publisher, into dropping it. 

Fortunately, Allen's book was rushed out by a competing house.

Ronan Farrow objected to Hachette publishing Apropos of Nothing due to its savage portrayal of his mother, actress Mia Farrow, who three decades ago alleged that Woody Allen had sexually abused their adopted daughter (the case was twice dismissed by the courts). 

Farrow threatened to sever his own ties with Hachette and egged the publisher's mostly-female staff to walk off their jobs in protest.

I just read Apropos of Nothing—I love memoirs by aging rock stars and Hollywood people—and am glad to have Allen's account of his three marriages, first to Harlene Rosen; then to Louise Lasser; and then to Mia Farrow's and his adopted daughter, Sun-Yi Previn. Allen clearly loves all three of his wives and has done his best by them.

His girlfriend Mia Farrow—herself the victim of an abusive, alcoholic father—is quite another matter. Allen admits he was foolish ever to become involved with such a crackpot, but Mia Farrow was a pretty, cultured, award-winning actress on the hunt for a new husband when they met (Farrow's ex-husband, Andre Previn, had dumped her the year before).

If Woody Allen was guilty of anything, he was guilty of being a schlimazel—a dupe and a patsy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Which brings me to #MeToo. (Me to #MeToo. Confusing, huh?)

#MeToo is grounded on the idea that no tomcat should be immune from justice. 

I don't agree.

Some men are tomcats who deserve caging. Think of predators like Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly and Larry Nasser.

But some men are tomcats who don't. Think of Romeos like Chico Marx, Louis C. K., Al Franken, Melvil Dewey—the librarian and inventor of the Dewey Decimal System—and, yes, Woody Allen, the sultan of schlimazelhood.

Don't get me wrong. 

#MeToo is among the most urgent political movements of our time. And it isn't just hashtag feminism, as leftist critics say; nor McCarthyism, as right-wing critics say. It's really all about truth, justice and the American way.

But in the hands of angry mobs, #MeToo promotes a radioactive Cancel Culture that suppresses the sort of honest talk you'll find in Apropos of Nothing.

In the hands of angry mobs, #MeToo pounces, weaponizing virtue against schlimazels.

And that's not fair.

Note to readers: As a rule, links embedded in my posts provide my sources and frequently "fun facts" omitted for brevity's sake.

Paranoid

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

― William S. Burroughs

Political rancor is fine, when informed; it's uniformed partisanship that makes me cringe.

As we speak, Republicans ad nauseam are socializing this palaver:

No one should be allowed to drive again until there are no fatal accidents for 14 consecutive days. Then we can slowly begin to phase in certain classes of people who can begin driving again, but at half the posted speed limit and while wearing helmets.

This chestnut is rooted in ignorance and denial of the lethal nature of Covid-19. Two statistics and one calculation reveal how vacuous it is:

• 38,800 Americans died in car crashes last year, according to the National Safety Council; but 130,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 since its appearance four months ago.
  
  
• Annualized that's 390,000 dead from Covid-19―10 times the number killed in car crashes.

From the standpoint of body counts, equating infectious people to bad drivers is specious. Covid-19 is 10 times more deadly.

But know-nothing Republicans stand by this myth nonetheless.

Another myth they're peddling: 

Joe Biden molested a junior aide in the 1990s.

Again, a few facts should give any thoughtful person pause:

• Over 200 of his former staffers have told PBS then-Senator Biden never spoke to low-level employees, nor did he harass women. One called the accusations "surreal."
  
  
• The accuser didn't quit her job on the Hill, as she claims, "to pursue an acting career;" she was fired because she couldn't sort the mail. And Antioch University says the accuser never taught there, nor receive the law degree she claims to hold.
  
  
• As recently as January, she still practiced an obsessive hobby: posting pro-Russian propaganda on the Internet.

• The accuser also runs up expensive bills and skips on them; never pays her rent; lets her dogs poop throughout her landlords' houses; once she stole money from an animal-rescue nonprofit; and, worst of all, borrows books and doesn't return them.

The accuser is a whack-job. But Republicans know nothing of her background and insist her accusations are true (while those made by Christine Blasey Ford were, of course, false).

William S. Burroughs was right: paranoids know a little of what's going on. 

But never, it seems, enough.

NOTE: I'm grateful to followers for their many kind notes of encouragement. Goodly has now been read by over 385,000 people.

Plan to be Spontaneous

I opened a fortune cookie Saturday night and was told I should engineer some serendipity.

Easier said than done when the garage needs cleaning and your wife's complaining the women in her compassion class are fusspots.

But nobody said Buddhafication would be easy.

“Guess what?" says mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn. "When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are."

Whatever has happened to you has already happened.

Wait. What? There's more?

Yes. That's only the penultimate McMindfulness nugget. 

Make room for eternity.

Because matter is finite but time is not, according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, we should embrace wholeheartedly the ineluctable "Eternal Recurrence of the Same."

Eternity is nothing less that the endless and identical repetition of all the physical events in the universe, in all their odious detail.

So not only has whatever has happened to you already happened, it will happen to you again—and again and again and again ad infinitum.

So you'd better not only live your life, but love it, Nietzsche says; avow what he calls amor fati—love of fate.

And, what the hell, plan to be spontaneous, too.