Under the Shadow of this Red Rock

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

- Ezra Pound, H. S. Mauberley

A stranger in a strange land, I have recently spent an ungodly amount of time hanging out at Red Rock Café in Mountain View at the very heart of the Silicon Valley. Starved for company during the day, I have taken to eavesdropping on my fellow imbibers as a way of finding some clue as to useful conversational gambits and possibly to gain an insight into the Californian soul. In this last regard, my research has been pretty fruitless - one searches for the essence of the onion by pulling away layers of skin, but find nothing but more skin. However, I have come to one, distinctly alarming conclusion: I am undoubtedly the sanest person here.

Not surprisingly given the area, the conversations are normally depressingly software-related.  For example, It seems that the man on my right is working on 'an awesome user experience'. He repeats this phrase some four or five times in a conversation with what I presume to be a potential client or backer.  I find myself gnashing my teeth and contemplating my study English brogues while considering giving him an experience he won't forget in a hurry.  The man on my left is selling customer relationship software.  Inanities follow inanities and everything is laced with the latest business clichés.

'Awesome' is the vogue word. A couple seem to be getting on rather well behind me and reach the point where the man tells the woman that his wife doesn't understand him.  She grips his hand sympathetically and tells him that his revelation is "an awesome coincidence" because her husband doesn't understand her either.

When the conversation does deviate from software or relationship management of one kind or another, it almost invariably turns to holidays, but this is just as dispiriting. The folk here are on absurdly high salaries and can afford to travel to the most distant and exotic of climes. However, travel seems to bring them little benefit and one is reminded of William Hazlitt's axiom that "It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse".  A man announced that he had 'done' Europe in five days.  I couldn't quite work out exactly what he had done to Europe or what the experience had done to him as his female companion immediately trumped him by saying that she had spent an equally long sojourn doing Europe herself and found it a "romantic, relationship-based culture" and she had just done India too. It seems that the 'vibe had been like awesome".

Is this lack of articulacy testimony to the ineffable substratum of existence?  If rendered speechless  by the exotic, Californians have an inordinate amount to say on the trivial.  Indeed one sometimes feels that Yamamoto Tsunetomo would feel perfectly at home here:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master lttei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."

On the subject of coffee, matters of small concern are treated with immense seriousness and the descriptions by the urns take on the very purplest of hues.  It seems I am drinking something that should "yield an experience reminiscent of key lime pie".   If I bore of this, I could ravish my senses with a brew which provides a "vibrant blueberry and lemony acidity ahead of an earl grey finish" or in another which introduces " a flavour profile of pink lemonade and marzipan".  I find it hard to resist hurling myself on the floor and moaning with orgasmic ecstasy about the awesome user experience I am receiving.

Hamlet could be bounded in as nutshell yet count himself a king of infinite space.  Here, in America on the edge of the Pacific, I am in a land of mind boggling distances and vast immensities, yet in many ways the place seems infinitesimally small.  In a self-proclaimed land of opportunities, those who have reached the top have nothing to spend their cash on..  Buy a Ferrari and spend a few extra weeks in tawdry, glitzy Vegas or Disneyland or escape to an awesome, relationship based culture?   If one is raised in a milieu that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing there seems little to choose and nowhere to go.