Thanks for all the free coffee, but Thank Almighty God that I'm done with you, Starbucks

(listening to a cd that Blakeman made for me)
Yes, it's done. I worked my last shift at the coffee mines. They had cake for me and everything! That was cool. I said goodbye to many good customers. It was busy today. I was hired by a very different company in 1995, that's for damned sure. It's so corporate now. I don't know who's going to read this, but I feel no need to candy-coat my feelings. I just worked 11 months at a North Carolina Starbucks after working over 7 years in half a dozen Southern California Starbucks. The verdict: What a backwater bunch of slackass amateurs (with a few exceptions, you know who you are). If you paid half as much attention to the customers as you do to those fucking checklists and pastry case schematics, you might almost be able to move a line through the store. The least of my SoCal crews would plow you into the ground without breaking a sweat, if this were some sort of a competition. The people in the California stores never seemed to be so brainwashed and terrorized.

But it's over. It never really mattered, anyway. Nobody really gives a shit. My best memories are of drinking or hanging out with various Starbuckers after work. Marc Dedario. Morty Aguilar. Paz Salvador, my former roommate. Cathy Jacoby. Rosemary. Katie Saltzman. Stacy Haddix. Billy Walters. Sean Perry (The Fridge). Brendan Klein. Milo Martinez. Bill Rushing, my brother-in-law. Janet Von Rusten. Dara Dealy. Valerie Brann. Dave Roberts. Brandon Cole (Stone Cole!) Ali McCartie, the mother of my daughter. Jen Brown, ugh. Jeremy Jones, a great and highly esteemed man (the only one who didn't drink). I've omitted so many from absent mindedness. Sometimes we even drank during work. Starbucks people drink.

Blakeman is the first person I've worked with in many years who actually cares about coffee. Freddy Ansari and Asher Engel trained me on the bar at Del Mar Highlands (store 553) in 1995. Stoners, beer lovers, and lovably irreverent. as coffee gurus, I never met their equal.

I feel more emotion about being done with that fucking job than I felt when I graduated from college. How disgraceful. I need to get down to business and live a real life, rather than just making coffee and smalltalk.

Nostalgia. I want to get drunk and mope now.