My wife has always been immune to fads—the sort of person who can scroll past influencer hysteria without so much as a pulse flutter. So when she announced yesterday that she had to have a Starbucks Honey Bear Straw Cup, I thought she was joking. “A cup?” I asked, as though she’d confessed a crush on a cartoon mascot. She showed me the photo. There it was: a cherubic bear with a straw sticking out of its head, beaming with the smug innocence of a cult leader. My daughters chimed in, voices rising in unison. Clearly, I was outnumbered.
So at six in the morning, I trudged to our local Starbucks, noble fool that I am, hoping to secure the sacred totem. The barista, barely conscious, looked up with eyes that had seen too much. “Sold out at three a.m.,” he murmured, his voice the verbal equivalent of burnt espresso. “Ten minutes. Line out the door.” He added that a new shipment would arrive Monday—but those too would vanish at three a.m., devoured by the same nocturnal zealots. When I asked if people were scalping them on eBay, he sighed. “That’s part of it. Also… limited edition.”
This wasn’t my first brush with late-capitalist hysteria. Just two weeks earlier, I’d witnessed a pre-dawn mob outside Trader Joe’s clawing for Halloween Mini Canvas Tote Bags as if they contained the blood of youth. They sold out in an hour. Civilization, I concluded, now runs on collectible anxiety.
Perhaps our daily routines have become so numbing that people need the ritual thrill of scarcity to feel alive. A talisman, a honey bear, a tote bag—anything to simulate transcendence for ten blessed minutes. It’s the new spiritual economy: redemption through limited edition.
Empty-handed, I returned home from Starbuck’s this morning, brewed my own dark roast, and read Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure—his autopsy of ambition and futility—while reflecting on my own lifelong hunt for literary honey bears: the bright, unattainable chimeras that promise meaning but mostly sell out before dawn.
Cinemorphosis 
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