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I think you would be even a bigger asshole if you had Stipe's fame and fortune, Adam. I think most of us probably would.
But, to make light of this inanity, here's something you might like thinking about.
In Tourfilm, it begins with Michael addressing the audience. He says to one guy, "that better not be styrofoam." Well, as if that sort of thing isn't silly enough, consider this. R.E.M. named Automatic For the People after the slogan of a soul food restaurant in Athens named Weaver D's. Thing is, Weaver D's uses styrofoam cups, bowls and those sectional styrofoam food boxes that close up. All of them have eaten lunch to go from this place many times. Stipe has a couple of vegetarian restaurants; I imagine Michael gets steamed veggies only or something if he ever drops in on Weaver anymore. And, of course, Peter has lived in Seattle post-Barrie since the early '90s.
It's but one of my many, many residences when I was in Athens, but I used to live in the house directly next door to this eatery and enjoyed the food lots and lots of times. Usually Weaver would say, "automatic" right after you placed an order. I suppose Stipe might have been friendly with him in spite of his moratorium on all things styrofoam (haha) because Weaver is a gay man. He's also an old and, incidentally, a black man; suffice it to say, Weaver is not attractive, so I'm not implying that he and Michael ever got together. And truth be told, I try to avoid styrofoam myself.
As a somewhat extraneous postscript, when I lived in that house, one of my roommates was from Virginia. I now live in Virginia, but that's besides the point really. Some friends of his came down from Virginia to visit and these awestruck-R.E.M. fans vandalized Weaver D's by stealing the "Automatic for the People" sign. I knew about it the next day, but I did not rat them out. Anyway, after a about a year or so when I was no longer living there, the sign got returned to Weaver.
In a decidedly even more unrelated postscript, I had a girlfriend once that went out to toilet paper roll Stipe's Grady Street house on Halloween. I'm someone that is no stranger to doing crazy, absurd stuff, and she and everyone else urged me to go, but I flat-out refused to take part.
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