Why I Started Going To McDonald's Instead Of Starbucks For My Coffee -- October 31, 2015; Halloween: A Good Day To Be Thinking About Demons

Updates

Later, 12:13 p.m. Cenral Time: two seniors, grandparents, no doubt, have just sat down across from me in McDonald's with their grandson (no doubt), who appears to be about 12 years old. They have all ordered a pancake and sausage breakfast.

When I came in, a bit after 11:00 a.m., I also ordered off the breakfast menu. Very interesting.

Saturday mornings in north Texas belong to "other" breakfast restaurants, but we seldom go any more: the lines are way too long, and the waits are upwards of 90 minutes. Yes, the Texas breakfasts are that good. But now McDonald's has added a new wrinkle.

Something tells me that we will be reading articles at the end of this business quarter about the decision made by McDonald's to offer breakfast all day long.

It's very possible someone is going to look like a genius.

It would have been fun to sit in on the focus groups and the PowerPoint Presentations when the idea of "all-day breakfast" was being pitched at McDonald's.

Original Post 

Okay, this makes my day.

I slept in a bit late this morning. I did some early morning blogging at home, but wanted to go out for coffee.

I'm now sitting in McDonald's -- it's a short bike ride -- and the north Texas torrential rains have dissipated, making it a beautiful day, albeit a bit cool for an  old man riding a bicycle in cut-offs and a blue Hawaiian shirt. But I digress.

I find myself in McDonald's because I quit going to Starbucks about four months ago when Starbucks announced a fairly healthy increase in the price of their coffee. So, on principle alone, I won't go to Starbucks except when there are no reasonable alternatives.

So, here I am -- having just sat down, and almost ready to sip my McDonald's coffee, but I have to wait -- it is wait too hot. But I can nibble on the hash brown now that McDonald's serves breakfast all day long. The hash brown is on the dollar menu, I think. The coffee is 50 cents for seniors, but I think they generally charge me full price -- $1.00 -- I never quibble. The service is outstanding at this particular McDonalds, as it is at the other McDonald's at the other end of the street that I also visit periodically -- the thing they both have in common: the managers are women and Hispanic. But I digress.

But here I am -- having just sat down, and almost read to sip my McDonald's coffee, so I set the cup down and log on. Wi-fi in McDonald's comes on immediately. Sip of coffee.

I check my mail. First e-mail comes from my daughter who sent me this story, saying it reminded her of me: Why I Started Going To McDonald's Instead of Starbucks For My Coffee.

I haven't read the article yet. After I do, I might come back and complete this post. Or not.

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It was a short article. I'm back. The writer had three reasons: cost, convenience, and calories. Okay, the third "c" was a stretch: it had to do with McDonald's much more expansive menu which I alluded to above.

Cost, of course, is a no brainer.

That second one, convenience is very, very interesting. At this time of day, the line at Starbucks would be nearly out the door and it would be several minutes of waiting, which in the big scheme of things never bothered me. I read a book while standing in line. But if one has a life and needs to be somewhere, McDonald's will get you there faster.

The writer mentions that it is not uncommon for orders -- especially food orders -- to be mixed up at Starbucks. Yes, that is a problem at the busier Starbucks at the busier times. I have experienced it more times than I care to remember.

But the biggest reason I no longer go to Starbucks (now that price / principle have been addressed) is I could never get any work done there or any reading done there (except while standing in line). I would always try to find a comfortable couch or easy chair and invariably everyone around me would want to talk politics (in Massachusetts) or the housing market (in Grapevine, in the DFW metroplex).

Now I can blog and still have some time to read. The books in front of me today: The Wooden Horse by Keld Zeruneith; and, Memoirs of Hecate County, by Edmund Wilson.

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Notes To The Granddaughters

This is really, really cool. I am reading a most difficult book, The Daemon Knows, Harold Bloom, c. 2015. This is Harold Bloom's most recent, and perhaps his last (except for what his estate publishes posthumously). On the surface it is a re-hash of all he has written before, simply packaged with a different theme. It doesn't take long for someone who didn't study literature in an Ivy League college to figure out what Bloom means by "daemon" but it's amazing how difficult it is to explain what he's trying to say.

I read bits and pieces of it periodically. It's too challenging to read more than a few pages at a time every few days or so.

I am also re-reading Zeruneith's The Wooden Horse, and today, coincidentally, I connect the background of Bloom's "daemon" to its origin. The following is taking out of context, so it might be hard to understand but the message is there. From page 372, Aeschylus' Orestes:

In particular, this innocence appears when the chorus resists relating its knowledge of the daimon curse that has ravaged the Atreid family to Kassandra's prophesies in which she gathers together and presents the sins of the past and the horrific deeds to come. In short, the chorus refuses in its own present to couple the past and the future together. That this inevitable sequence of events occurs completely on it own means that hte chorus' insight becomes its fate. It is gradually forced to look the facts in the face, which is why the hmn on the doctrine of suffering assumes a tone of tragicirony, because when it utters these words, the chorus has not yet learned this lesson.

Later in the book, the author notes that Plato argues that Socrates received his knowledge from the gods. Socrates, was, in other words, a daemonic man, page 508.

Later, page 509, daemonic refers to a human being who, touched by the divine (as Odysseus was by Athene), becomes incomprehensible to those around him. And it is very much the case for Socrates that the daimonic aspect applies to his doctrine, works, and life.

The section concludes with a paragraph that out of context will be very hard to understand, but it's worth posting for the archives:

Socrates/Plato takes yet another step in the dialogue's etymological explanation of the content of the words heros and eros, which Socrates/Plato believes have the same roots. His point is that heroes are demigods (either on the paternal or maternal side), who know how to ask questions (erotan, Cr. 398 d) and thus constitute a class of seekers of wisdom. 

A syllogism connecting these statements might be:

• Socrates is a good man, so he is a daemon
• he has achieved this goodness by questioning, that is to say by the virtue of eros, 
• which makes him into a heros, a demigod, placed as a daimonic mediator between heaven and earth.

Wow.

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Daemon

I am adding this on August 28, 2016.

The word daemon, introduced to me by Harold Bloom, has always fascinated me. Today while reading Leon Edel's introduction to The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition, c. 1987, this passage:

The Demon of Patience: There came a moment in James's notebooks when he began to speak of his "good angel" and to invoke his attendant Genius, using the word in its original Greek sense as a protecting spirit. The Greeks called such tutelary spirits δαίμων -- daimon -- and the poets described them as dwelling on earth, unseen by mortals, ministers of the gods, guardians of men and justice.

Daimons, the Greek philosophers taught, were allotted from birth and for life.

Henry James accepted this Graeco-Roman mythology for himself, as we can read in a note he sets down while staying at the Coronado Beach Hotel in California in 1905:

I sit here after long weeks ... in front of my arrears ... and can only invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn't he?

Wow, for me a better understand of daimon, and the mention of the Coronado Beach Hotel takes me back to the first time ever that I visited San Diego. Hmmm.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Roberta Flack