Posthuman Blues

Today I addressed a bunch of review copies of "After the Martian Apocalypse," finished Benford's "In the Ocean of Night" over coffee at LatteLand and -- as an afterthought -- read the first few pages of Robert Silverberg's "The Alien Years" at Starbucks.

I feel an absurd affinity for Starbucks, an ersatz nostalgia. I'm drawn to simulations, lured by attempts to reproduce authentic experience that deftly exclude the very humanity they're designed to commemorate. Starbucks franchises are like tiny bubble universes where the rigors of reality are temporarily suspended and dissolved. All is plush furniture, shimmering, overpriced merchandise, yuppies intent in front of color-coordinated laptops, and the omnipresent sursurration of cellphone conversation.

Of course, the entire production is synthetic, up to and including the brittle smiles of the baristas, who almost invariably screw up my order. But I don't mind; Starbucks lulls me into an uncharacteristically accepting stupor. I want so direly to sit in those absorbing, womb-like chairs savoring the smell of espresso, categorizing the faces behind their inscrutable flatscreens. I sometimes find myself ordering coffee simply as an excuse to linger, entranced by the almost library-like hush that predominates between outbursts of anonymous laughter.

Starbucks straddles the zone between crass commercialization and authenticity, or at least pretends to. Like an airport or a hotel room, a Starbucks is reassuring because it's implicitly transitional, an easily discarded prop stripped of sentiment. I walk into a Starbucks and find my own alienation abruptly justified, my ego severed and allowed to float, disembodied, amidst the canned music and aromatic steam.