Another installment from Joe Spelczek...

Here is a typical Naples magazine that features an average woman on a 56 foot yacht wearing a matronly bathing suit. The publication promotes the simplicity and understatement of the Naples lifestyle by offering helpful tips like where to have your Bentley Continental Flying Spur serviced or finding a good family plastic surgeon. A little local publication for the run of the mill folks who manage to scratch out a living here at the tip of Southwest Florida. This is the second edition and while it is an eye catcher, I couldn't help but notice that right next to this girl's average, pale, unsexy stomach...just to the left ( hard to see on this photo) is a headline that reads "tropical tastes waterfront dinning". We drive Bentley's but we can't spell. A preview for the upcoming edition: "Enjoy our wite, sandy beeches and expeeriunce the Naples lifestile...." Maybe as the spelling gets worse the models get better, we'll see next month.

Coffee Schmoffee.....

Thanks to Starbucks, coffee has gone from a common beverage to a socially important accessory. The “Starbuckian” masses cannot walk, talk, work, raise a family or socialize without a paper cup full of latte mocha half decaf skim in their hand. Toting around a cup of coffee has become an accouterment- like wearing a watch- and it is a signal to all of the Starbuckian culture that you are one of the tribe – it is a mark of your hipness, being plugged in, cooler than the average schmo. You’re an achiever and coffee is your fuel as you bleat about big oil companies charging you $3.00 a gallon to fill up your beemer, yet you have no problem spending $5.50 for a 12 ounce cup of social status. People are like sheep as they ingest whatever Madison Avenue tells them is cool, youthful and leading edge. Even the word “coffee” has been replaced with the word Starbucks. “ Do you wanna get some Starbucks?” “I cannot function in the morning without my Starbucks.” Were we all that caffeine deprived 20 years ago? I used to function fine without my “Starbucks”; why is it in the last few years people cannot get through their day without shelling out five dead presidents for a cup of joe?

The irony is that as much as coffee can be a social lubricant, most of the bean-fiends are recluses. The true Starbucks Rats hunker down in the cafes behind their laptops while strapped into their Ipods and Blackberrys and stare into their computer screens engaging in on-line chats all while sitting in a huge room of actual living, breathing people who want nothing more than to see and be seen. Why go through the effort to lug all that equipment from your home, spend half a day’s salary on a cup of coffee, just to cocoon yourself from the outside world while sitting in a room full of people? It seems like a tremendous waste of energy. It’s like driving a Hummer to Golds Gym – a remarkable squandering of energy, time and money. Go outside and run around the block 10 times and it’ll save you commute time, gas, and money otherwise spent on a gym membership- and would keep a hugely stupid and irresponsible car off the road.

But we've got to have our stuff – non-verbal extensions of our personalities that tells people who we are and where we fit into the social stratum. Sitting in a Starbucks, ball cap, day’s growth of beard, electronics plugged into nearly every orifice and wired on overpriced coffee – 20 years ago, that guy would probably be arrested. Nowadays, that guy is in every city and every town - a prototypical “Starbuckian” defining “cool” right down to his Abercrombie and Fitch Cargo shorts. It is a uniform, no doubt, but they would never admit it. Starbucks - the accessory to the crime of blind social compliance.

I’m so tired of all of this…maybe I’ll run down to Starbucks and get me a little pick me up. What’s with this bottled water craze………?