Laptops and caffeine

The Starbucks is in San Jose, close to the buildings that house such icons of the new economy as PayPal and Ebay. The floor is a bit grimy. It is probably due to the rain. It never rains in California and the floor probably has no experience with grime.

It is, this Starbucks, understaffed. One young lady smiling falsely on register and one young man cranking out fancy caffeinated drinks on bar. No breaks for them. The line ebbs and flows with the tide of customers out towards the door.

Laptops glow on the wooden tables. They are the source of business plans and pitch decks no doubt. Young, eager technologists who have flocked in from all over the world to run head long and bright eyed into a full tsunami of venture capital. Dreams of Teslas and ring-side UFC seats dancing in their heads.

It’s a different crowd. On the other side of the continent , maybe in Concord Massachusetts., in doppelganger Starbucks with the same decor and a similar harried staff the clientele is different. Harried housewives hunch to writing their novels after dropping their two perfect children off at gymnastics. Prep-school professors work on radicalizing the youth of the old-rich with leftist lesson plans. Grad students push through piles of academic work despite the lack of sleep.

That’s the East coast.

Here on the West coast it’s different. It is a young, earnest crowd. It is a predominantly Asian crowd. The accents are California not Delhi or Singapore. They are cloaked in flannel shirts and T-shirts and jeans with thicker coats bundled against the unbearable near-40 degree weather. What would be a fine April day in Boston is a cataclysmic traffic event in Silicon Valley.

Something reminds me of the Great Gatsby. This dance of power and money and fear with technology being the latest commodity to be danced about. I suppose it’s mostly morally cleaner than slaves and less destructive than bootleg liquor.

And at the next table an off-site meeting. The conversations lilt with well worn syllables; terms sheets, action items and issue lists. The lingua universal of capital in motion. In motion like thousands of little fish frantically paddling in a garden pond.

Thumbing smart phone screens for the latest updates, they fiddle at them like rosary beads of penitent Irish grandmothers. Bowing to their Mecca, before they rise to leave, shouldering backpacks, marching back to headquarters and their destiny. It is a place with a sense of destiny. Maybe even manifest.

A painfully skinny man sips ironically at a bottle of Vitamin Water. I wonder what his story is. A constant parade of pedestrians sneaks in the door and through to the restroom. Starbucks being the hopeful repository of so much nervous urine. In Roman baths, the Starbucks of their time, the urine was saved to tan hides with. I wonder if there is an app for that.

Generations are born and bred on the innovation culture. It is a great chaos of striving. Of new things. Of things only imagined in the fever dreams of entrepreneurs. Haunted and driven they flock here like so many demented swallows to find some peace. To lose themselves, to burn themselves, to be immolated in the the start up.

It is a drug. It is a stout veil to be pulled over reality. To give purpose to the purposeless. To give an infinite horizon to the dreams of the faithful. It is a purposeful incubation of a kind of madness.

Like any other drug or obsession it consumes. Out the other end of the whirlpool are spat youthful millionaires. The trip and the coin bags justifying whatever jaded view of the world they happen to find in their pockets at the end.

Is not progress and truth and real knowledge found at the boundaries? At the edge? And isn’t it found by those driven and unafraid and, yes, a bit demented? Isn’t this the virus of seeking that has driven the human race always forward?

This Starbucks is a microcosm of the frontier. Of lunar bases and far reached galaxies seeded with explorers far from the savanna of our ancient trees.

It is a song of hope they sing. Not so much a song of triumph as it is a song of unbridled and unabashed striving. A refreshingly unbounded hopefulness to carve something from the nothingness with only the sharp tools of their mind and the hot, white fire of their passion.

We need a place like this to foster these people. This race of Don Quixotes tilting at their windmills in the clouds. It is a wonderful blessing to be able to draw the tilting and wild-eyed to our bosom and let them spin their webs of fanciful places. They are Alice in the wonderland and Dorothy in Oz. A testing ground where imagination can run wild and take form and fly.

How dry a crusty place it would be without our dreamers, our workers, for a dream.

Jazz trickles down from speakers high in the corners of the store. Improvisation within the form. A music with no beginning, no middle and no end tickling the sky with improvisation. A fitting metaphor for the glow of laptops.

And the sun sets on a rainy San Jose day. Thousands of entrepreneurs are kept awake by their dreams like gossamer fishes just out of reach in clear, fast flowing streams.