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889ab36
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In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.
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canadian
water
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Douglas Coupland |
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bb5a5fd
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Look, Neal, Hawaii is not some magical pixie wonderland; it's an American state populated by atomic weapons, a remnant native population and people too stupid to spell their way out of a paper bag. Most of them came here to escape pathetic lives in the forty nine other states, so in some sense, Hawaii is a scenic cul-de-sac filled with people who want to drink themselves to death without feeling judged.
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humor
ugly-truths
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Douglas Coupland |
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05bbdc4
|
Those were big years, big times.
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Douglas Coupland |
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6e17afe
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Always keep your mouth shut with a drunk. You can never win with piss tanks. The most you can hope for is to break even.
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Douglas Coupland |
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234502c
|
the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me, go check for yourself.
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Douglas Coupland |
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0e111a3
|
The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.
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Douglas Coupland |
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ae8f717
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But that's what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
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Douglas Coupland |
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a3a8fb4
|
Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." "...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head?"
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generation-a
narrator
universal
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Douglas Coupland |
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dcc59e4
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When you get an e-mail and reply to the sender, you simply obliterate everything they sent you and then, in small square brackets, write: [deletia] It stands for everything that's been lost.
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Douglas Coupland |
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4b2d99f
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But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question?
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Douglas Coupland |
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d73ae64
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It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness.
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Douglas Coupland |
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f72bbf0
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How cruel that mankind was forced to conform to the global electronic experience. But all other options had vanished. There no longer existed a country to escape to ("country"--also, what a quaint notion) where people read books and had lives that became stories."
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Douglas Coupland |
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c3ac1e3
|
I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.
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Douglas Coupland |
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b1271f6
|
I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups--how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities--to clarify just who it is we really are?
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Douglas Coupland |
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2b098ee
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I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.
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Douglas Coupland |
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2135984
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Personne n'est emotionnellement vide.
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Douglas Coupland |
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67b59be
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He said, "A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one."
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Douglas Coupland |
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be13c0e
|
God, I wish he and I had been genuinely close as opposed to the "Don't-they-look-nice-together-in-the-airbrushed-family-portrait close."
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sibling-relationships
brothers
siblings
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Douglas Coupland |
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400a7ee
|
I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again. This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my Windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.
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Douglas Coupland |
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64d7c00
|
I'd change you bandages for you, but you don't have any and that's a big issue here.
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Douglas Coupland |
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a67e5e3
|
I'm going to see tonight at the Ridge -- and you're coming with me.
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Douglas Coupland |
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6f3b07f
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And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I've come to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly and the faces of children may be achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and the food we share, there will always be darkness in the world.
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Douglas Coupland |
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2a3f933
|
Her hair was totally Indian Woolworth perfume clerk. You know - sweet but dumb - she'll marry her way out of the trailer park some day soon. But the dress was early '60s Aeroflot stewardess - you know - that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect '70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral applique earrings that looked lik..
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generation-x
soviet
hollywood
style
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Douglas Coupland |
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1ab3636
|
The store is also lit to the point of painfulness by a ceiling loaded with more fluorescent bulbs than a landing mothership. Shielding my headachey eyes, I make my consumer choices, then head to the counter, where the clerk is wearing sunglasses. I pay the clerk with a five-dollar bill on which I have felt-penned the words: I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES.
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Douglas Coupland |
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28a47ae
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And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then--that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I'd be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.
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Douglas Coupland |
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d70d50e
|
MID TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.
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Douglas Coupland |
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25cf793
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To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre" Marshall McLuhan"
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Douglas Coupland |
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ca91719
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When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, "Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too." But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened."
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Douglas Coupland |
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bad94e7
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He knew that the fuel his brain craved could only be found in a proper university.
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Douglas Coupland |
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7f29265
|
Marshall alone his room with a comically tall stack of books, methodically absorbing their contents as though they were drugs...
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Douglas Coupland |
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40c2957
|
Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. "If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing."
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Douglas Coupland |
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a5aadf7
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After playing Halo 2 for 3 hours, I went out and mowed down a Red Cross blood bank, raped anything with a pulse, and trashed the local mall. Then I toasted the gods of destruction with a goblet of blood stolen from a Girl Guide's body.
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Douglas Coupland |
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ef34118
|
The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are.
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Douglas Coupland |
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f61054f
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How many of us have a love so true it spans eternity? A purity of need so clear it can remain strong in the face of all that the world throws at us? This is Karen Ann McNeil, the woman who fell to Earth, the woman for whom the people in her life never gave up waiting.
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Douglas Coupland |
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ff4a5b2
|
Rick, I'm holding a do-I-give-a-shit-ometer in my hand, and the needle's not moving. Shut up.
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swearing
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Douglas Coupland |
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51bf9d8
|
Chronotropic Drugs: Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.
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time
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Douglas Coupland |
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ce48bb4
|
A rich man is always simply a rich man, but a rich woman is only a poor woman who just happens to have money.
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Douglas Coupland |
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62acf07
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This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no ..
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nature
future
collective-action
environment
humans
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Douglas Coupland |
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b6c79f6
|
Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It's like having locked-in syndrome, except you're still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you're limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren't. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how ..
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Douglas Coupland |
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892a8ee
|
Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.
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Douglas Coupland |
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ff2b22e
|
the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images." --
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Douglas Coupland |
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7897d5d
|
In quel preciso momento, Karla e entrata nella stanza. Ha spento la televisione, ha guardato Todd fisso negli occhi e ha detto: "Todd, tu esisti non soltanto come membro di una famiglia o di una compagnia o di una nazione, ma come membro di una ... sei un essere umano. Sei parte dell' . Attualmente la nostra specie ha problemi profondi e stiamo cercando di sognare un modo per uscirne e stiamo usando i computer per cavarcela. La costruzione..
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life
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Douglas Coupland |
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a0cdce3
|
But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.
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Douglas Coupland |
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83651de
|
we lost money at church bingos and ate catfish deep-fried in lard.
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Douglas Coupland |