Sorry to hear about your friend. Here in the SF Bay Area we seem to be
having those kinds of train deaths daily now. Must be a lot of
depressed people out there. The cost of living keeps getting higher and
we hear about the impending doom of the drought, possibly the worst in
recorded history and people just don't know what to do. Oldsters are
shut out of making a living regardless of their experience. And Dubya
once said we were supposed work until we dropped dead. Even then I
shouted "at what?"
One of the reasons I got to Starbucks over a locally owned place is I
know the staff at the downtown one. There's one woman who has been
there since it opened and when I wondered why she wasn't made manager
was told she didn't want the job though she is the most experienced
there. We've had some bad managers come through there too.
On 03/18/2015 05:46 PM, s3raph...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
In my local Starbucks this evening I asked one of the staff where one
of the regular customers had gone. Peter - a Scot who was there almost
every night - was always very boisterous and friendly so his absence
was noticeable. I was expecting to be told that he had decided to move
back to Edinburgh. Instead I learned that he'd killed himself by
throwing himself in front of a train at Ealing Broadway station (right
next door to the Starbucks). Naturally enough I was thunderstruck. You
then start to think if you had been as welcoming to him as maybe you
should have been. We all owe each other a certain acknowledgment and
respect and I was thinking back to my own nodded greetings and
occasional exchanges with Peter and judging that perhaps I'd fallen
short of giving him his due. R.I.P.
Anyway, there was a staff member I'd noticed who always struck me as
being a bright young chap. I thought that maybe he was one of those
over-qualified graduates one reads about who are so desperate for work
experience that cleaning up at a coffee shop has people queuing up
around the block whenever a vacancy arises. Tonight I'd been sitting
there reading Sam Harris's Waking Up (many thanks to those FFLifers
who recommended the title - I'd probably not have bought it without
your thumbs up). This staffer said to me that it seemed an interesting
topic - "Spirituality without Religion". What was it about? So I
summed it up by saying that Sam Harris was hostile to religion - and I
meanreally hostile - but he approved of meditation and wanted to
encourage its use while ditching all the metaphysical baggage. My
staffer then responded by saying that he never read books. I tell you
that his reply was more shocking to me than the news of Peter's
suicide. It really hit me that someone who never reads books must have
an overall view of life utterly remote from my own. How can an
obviously bright and personable young man have gone through our
educational system and ended up deciding that books have nothing
worthwhile for him? Imagine what it must be like to have your
worldview formed by television, the internet and your friends' chat.
What a confined space you must live in.
