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71a0884
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Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.
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hockey
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Douglas Coupland |
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13adf74
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I don't understand the human heart. Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it.
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Douglas Coupland |
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3704e4c
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And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse - the sun will start shining down in the middle of the night, imagine that! - and when I see this sunlight it will be my signal to go running out into the streets, and I'll shout over and over, "Awake! Awake! The son of mine who once was lost has now been found!" I'll pound on every door in the city, and my cry will ..
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Douglas Coupland |
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43dbc58
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Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment--that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
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life
possibility
wishful-thinking
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Douglas Coupland |
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57fa5fb
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It's hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total fucking stupidity.
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Douglas Coupland |
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f4ab92e
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You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.
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Douglas Coupland |
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997041d
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Anna-Louise leans over and whispers in my ear. "This is so surreal," she says, "I think I'm turning into a melting clock."
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Douglas Coupland |
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df7c00f
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I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain -- his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
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Douglas Coupland |
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1bad489
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I then return to my seat and something happens to me-- something inside me is exhausted and worn and stops spinning and I break down and cry. I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and grown a million times larger. And I cry because... of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages-- back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to..
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Douglas Coupland |
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27cd553
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and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.
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Douglas Coupland |
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c31a6f4
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The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.
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humor-inspirational
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Douglas Coupland |
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0db708a
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I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather...Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't hep but suffer in comparison.
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Douglas Coupland |
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6e4ae08
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Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends.
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Douglas Coupland |
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37e6ac2
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I don't remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?
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Douglas Coupland |
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2261544
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And for a while they were happy in their own manner; they had the animal confidence money affords.
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Douglas Coupland |
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e745e4e
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There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're i..
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future
modern-life
today
work
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Douglas Coupland |
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c1a62ff
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I thought I was going to see God or reach an epiphany or to levitate or something. But I never did. I prayed so long for that to happen. I think maybe I didn't surrender myself enough - I think that's the term: surrender. I still wanted to keep a foot in both worlds. And then this past year I've still been waiting for the same big cosmic moments, and still nothing's happened...
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Douglas Coupland |
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60a1f9a
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I think this is an alarming trend, Bethany, this whole 'passionate' thing. I'm guessing it started about four years ago, and it's driving me nuts. Let's be practical: Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about twenty million people foraging for roots and grubs. [...] My hunch is that there was some self-help bestseller a few years back that told people to fo..
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life
passion
wisdom
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Douglas Coupland |
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77e1da9
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Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
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architecture
computers
nerds
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Douglas Coupland |
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70d96d1
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Lonely people want to be dead, yet we're still not quite ready to go--we don't want to miss the action; we want to see who wins next year's Academy Awards.
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Douglas Coupland |
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ebce98c
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Kaitlin said, "I'm so sick of that 'Greatest Generation' crap. We finally drove a silver nail through the heart of Generation X, only to have this new monster rear its head. And I'm soooooo sick of Tom Hanks looking earnest all the time. They should make a Tom Hanks movie where Tom kills off Greatest Generation figureheads one by one." Bree arrived on cue: "And then he starts killing other generations. He becomes this supernova of hate--all..
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humor
tom-hanks
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Douglas Coupland |
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a72a209
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What I notice is that everybody's kind of accusing everybody else of actingthese days. Know what I mean? Kind of, uh, not being genuine. Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
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Douglas Coupland |
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2cfa372
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To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.
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human-condition
sorrow
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Douglas Coupland |
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1f02deb
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I imagine I sow cuttings of Anna-Louise's hair, like the fine stems of dried flowers, and watch sunflowers grow from the cuttings. I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts. 'We should open up a seafood house together,' Anna-Louise says when she wants to torture me. Now that's love.
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Douglas Coupland |
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0fbb82e
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Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.
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Douglas Coupland |
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4b954dd
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Do you realize, Tyler,' says Anna-Louise, 'the entire time we were in the forest it rained steadily and not once did we approach a state of moistness? There was a storm and we didn't even know.
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Douglas Coupland |
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bb4066c
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We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.
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Douglas Coupland |
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86820c5
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One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, ..
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excitement
fear
ocean
whale
wild
world
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Douglas Coupland |
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861998e
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Jason's father, Reg, always said "Love what God loves and hate what God hates," but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant "Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates."
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Douglas Coupland |
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3b73792
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Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear - that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
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Douglas Coupland |
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bd5ad66
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I called Mom from the hotel during the period of peace, I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was Black and sensationless. All There was in the room was my voice and mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me-this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this fam..
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Douglas Coupland |
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df8e303
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Keep your treasure to yourself.
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Douglas Coupland |
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af43b19
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The new world lies before her eyes like an opened chest of treasure, a flock of birds over Africa, a thousand TVs all playing at once.
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Douglas Coupland |
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d1d7aff
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Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped--
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Douglas Coupland |
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a3299f5
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But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents' generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.
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Douglas Coupland |
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d3d56e0
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The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.
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Douglas Coupland |
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fd96761
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Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that fu..
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Douglas Coupland |
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2ec8dda
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Mphhh... What did you say Tyler?' Anna-Louise mumbles on the bed above me. I stand up, and a tame blue bird lands on my shoulder and tries to nibble my earlobe. I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. 'Anna-Louise, wake-up,' I say. 'Wake up--the world is alive.
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Douglas Coupland |
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a1e45f1
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Solo el individuo que vive en soledad es una criatura sujeta a leyes profundas y si sale al empezar la manana, o mira hacia la tarde que esta vibrante de vida y comprende lo que le rodea, entonces todo se desprende de el, como si de un cadaver se tratara, aunque siga en la plenitud de la vida.
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vida
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Douglas Coupland |
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72d0130
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It's what makes us different from every other creature in the world - we have time. And we have choices
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Douglas Coupland |
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1f2f09a
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John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it-a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never s..
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Douglas Coupland |
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fc35c1a
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In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a drywall list of keyboard buttons we would like to see: PLEASE, THANK YOU, FUCK OFF, DIE, OOPS...MY MISTAKE, DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME .
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lists
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Douglas Coupland |
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c033f70
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These were citizens who, never having bothered to awaken to the technological and psychic changes in their world, hadn't bothered to defend themselves, hadn't bothered to build walls or plan counterattacks or build weapons-- asleep inside their collective dream, thinking for all the world that the unthinkable would never happen. Thinking they were safe.
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Douglas Coupland |
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cc82764
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Ho fatto delle cazzate e delle cose buone nella vita, ma tutto e svanito da se, ed eticamente credo di essere una persona abbastanza ordinaria, uno come gli altri. Le tue Giovanna d'Arco e i tuoi Superman non si vedono speso in giro. Il mondo e fatto perlopiu di quelli come me, che arrancano. Ecco cosa fa la gente - arranca, arranca, arranca. Anche se venire a patti con il fatto che sono come tutti gli altri mi deprime, il dolore e alleviat..
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isbn-edizioni
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Douglas Coupland |