Douglas Coupland - Generation A
«There was no TV, no computer, no thermostat, no medical apparatus, no light switches, no bed controls, no fridge, no books - it was like being in the future and the past at the same time.»
«When I was growing up, Mother Nature was this reasonably hot woman who looked a lot like the actress Glenn Close wearing a pale blue nightie. When you weren’t looking, she was dancing around the fields and the barns and the yard, patting the squirrels and French kissing butterflies. After the bees left and the plants started failing, it was like she’d returned from a Mossad boot camp with a shaved head, steel-trap abs and commando boots, and man, was she pissed. After the bees left, the most you could ask of her was that she not go totally apeshit on your ass.»
“What did you eat today?”
I had to think this over. “What do you mean by ‘today’?”
“Excuse me?”
“I think I have been up for twenty-six hours now. I don’t think the word ‘today’ applies to me.”
“What were you doing for twenty-six hours?”
“Playing World of Warcraft at this place on rue Claude Decaen.”
«The moment I said hello to Dr. Rick, he nicknamed me Apu, and I knew there was no pint in fighting it, so for my great adventure I became Apu. I believe Americans can only absorb one foreign-sounding word or name per year. Past examples include Haagen-Dazs, Nadia Comaneci and Al Jazeera. I am too humble to ask these Americans to make “Harj” their official foreign word for the year.»
«Q)
He sounds like a character.
A)
He is. When I was a kid, he took me to Sea World in San Diego, and he got a four-week suspended sentence for trying to throw pennies into the blowholes of dolphins. Now he’s found God and he’s not as much fun.»
«Celine asked what my month had been like. I told her it had been boring - and yet at the same time not. “It was like being in a dentist’s chair. You’re not doing anything, but at the same time you are doing something.»
«The thing I like about scientists is that they don’t judge you, or if the do, never to your face. I talked about my father’s meth hut, my mother’s love of meeting a new uncle every week, my own exuberant drug use, and they just made notes and asked me to continue.»
«Switzerland was like the worst drug on earth. I might as well have stayed in the neutral chamber, which at least had the benefit of narcotizing mist to help time pass more quickly. The Genevans have these plump, we-still-eat-like-we-did-before-the-pollination-crisis faces. Dark secrets? They must all surely be keeping near-dead sex slaves locked in their basements, with those rubber balls in their mouths, or something else shameful and diseased.»
«I had no laptop in Geneva, and no hand unit. I wanted to use my father’s machine, but he was intently visiting Martian space mission discussion sites, specifically a site touting one-way “colonizing” flights. I asked him, “They can’t be serious - sending an astronaut to Mars, knowing that he’ll never come back? That’s a suicide mission.”
“No, it’s colonization.»
«Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.»
«He hadn’t packed very much because, while happy to be escaping his life however briefly, he was too angry and worried to pack - and because he was young enough that he could still sleep in his clothes and, when he woke up, look rumpled and sexy rather than squished and homeless. So he was on this train and he had no laptop - his first holiday from information ever.»