Douglas Coupland - Generation A

ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND

FICTION

Generation X

Shampoo Planet

Life After God

Microserfs

Girlfriend in a Coma

Miss Wyoming

All Families Are Psychotic

Hey Nostradamus!

Eleanor Rigby

JPod

The Gum Thief

NONFICTION

Polaroids from the Dead

City of Glass

Souvenir of Canada

Souvenir of Canada 2

Terry

Douglas Coupland

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Copyright 2009 by Douglas Coupland

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ISBN 978-1-4391-5701-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-6037-4 (ebook)

To Anne Collins

Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. Suddenly youve become a novel idea and youve got people wanting to join in. Youve gained credibility from nothing. Youre the talk of the town. Develop this as a story you can sell.

Malcolm McLaren

Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.

Kurt Vonnegut
Syracuse University commencement address
May 8, 1994

Generation A

TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. Its a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

Imagine a tropical sky, ten miles high and a thousand years off on the horizon. Imagine air that feels like honey on your forehead; imagine air that comes out of your lungs cooler than when it entered.

Imagine hearing a dry hiss outside your office buildings window. Imagine walking to the windows louvered shutters and looking out and seeing the entire contents of the world you know flow past you in a surprisingly soothing, quiet sluice of gray mud: palm fronds, donkeys, the local Fanta bottlers Jeep, unlocked bicycles, dead dogs, beer crates, shrimpers skiffs, barbed wire fences, garbage, ginger flowers, oil sheds, Mercedes tour buses, chicken delivery vans.

corpses

plywood sheets

dolphins

a moped

a tennis net

laundry baskets

a baby

baseball caps

more dead dogs

corrugated zinc

Imagine a space alien is standing with you there in the room as you read these words. What do you say to him? Her? It? What was once alive is now dead. Would aliens even know the difference between life and death? Perhaps aliens experience something else just as unexpected as life. And what would that be? What would they say to themselves to plaster over the unexplainable cracks of everyday existence, let alone a tsunami? What myths or lies do they hold true? How do they tell stories?

Now look back out your windowlook at what the gods have barfed out of your subconscious and into the worldthe warm, muddy river of dead cats, old women cauled in moist saris, aluminum propane canisters, a dead goat, flies that buzz unharmed just above the fray.

picnic coolers

clumps of grass

a sunburnt Scandinavian pederast

white plastic stacking chairs

drowned soldiers tangled in gun straps

And then what do you dodo you pray? What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a storysomething that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

And so I pray.

MAHASKA COUNTY, IOWA

Cornfields are the scariest things on the entire fucking face of the planet. I dont mean that in a Joe-Pesci-being-clubbed-to-death-with-an-aluminum-baseball-bat kind of way, and I dont mean it in an alien-crop-circles kind of way, and I dont mean it in a butchering-hitchhikers kind of way. I dont even mean it in an alien-autopsy-remains-used-as-fertilizer kind of way. I mean it in a Big-Corn-Archer Daniels Midland/Cargill/Monsanto-genetically-modified-high-fructose-ethanol kind of way. Corn is a fucking nightmare. A thousand years ago it was a stem of grass with one scuzzy little kernel; now its a bloated, foot-long, buttery carb dildo. And get this: cornstarch molecules are a mile long. Back in the seventies, Big Corn patented some new enzyme that chops those miles into a trillion discrete blips of fructose. A few years later these newly liberated fructose molecules assault the national food chain. Blammo! An entire nation becomes morbidly obese. Fact is, the human body isnt built to withstand high-dose assaults of fructose. It enters your body and your body says, Hmmm do I turn this into shit or do I turn it into blubber? Blubber it is! Corn turns off the shit switch. The corn industrys response to this? Whous? Contributing to the obesity epidemic? No way, man. People simply started to snack more in the eighties. Now be quiet and keep drinking all that New Formula Coke.

Man, humans are a nightmare fucking species. We deserve everything we do to ourselves.

But who the fuck gets stung by a bee in a combine tractor in the middle of a cornfield in Mahaska County, Iowa? Me, fucking me.

By the way, welcome to Oskaloosa and all the many features that make Oskaloosa a terrific place to visit. Theres something for everyone here, from the historic city square with its bandstand to the George Daily Auditorium, the award-winning Oskaloosa Public Library, William Penn University and three golf courses.

I stole most of that last paragraph from the Internet. What the towns home page forgot to mention was my fathers meth distillery (lab makes it sound so Cletus-&-Brandine), which got busted by the DEA a few years back. Dad and the DEA never got along too well.