The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [18]
Here’s something that happened to me last summer. I was visiting Katie in the house beside our condo building— the Divorcée Who Got the House—and she’d installed a fish pond where the barbecue used to be. Katie, despite her bimbo demeanour, is tough as nails, and smart. She said, “A pond needs to be an ecosystem, and it has to be able to take care of itself in case I have to fly to Cabo for a week or something.” So she had these jumbo snails put into the pond to balance the ecosystem. I’d never spent much time looking at snails, so I lay down on my stomach and put my head close to the water’s surface and looked deep into the water—it was dark but not too dark, like decaf coffee— and I saw the snails sliming their way over rocks and across the pond’s rounded concrete bottom.
And that was that.
And then, for the next five nights, I had snail dreams— snails crawling over everything—not in a gross way but in a natural “that’s what snails do” way.
I mention this because in total I’ve watched maybe five years of TV in my life and I don’t remember once having a TV dream, and yet I look at snails for five minutes and I’m having snail dreams all over the place.
So I guess the point is that our brains are rigged to respond to what’s natural, not what’s man-made. Snails will always win over sitcoms. And the dead will always win over the living.
And that’s why I am the way I am. It’s why I shun the sun, wear my black lipstick and don’t give a shit if my weight exceeds norms established by the government.
And guess who got reprimanded for the dust all over the cardboard mechanical pen display? Yes, that’s correct, me, even though it was technically Shawn’s job to fix it.
My voice is shot today—a cold or flu—and it sounds so damaged, but I like the sound of damage. It’s like Patty and Selma from The Simpsons.
I love Glove Pond more than ever.
Hey—again, what happened with your family?
Roger
I’m sitting in my car in the parking lot, and the weather is changing outside; the sky’s going from dry, crazy thrashing in all directions to something slow and wet, and my eyes are wet, and where did that come from?
My Hyundai got keyed this afternoon, and I know who did it. I didn’t get their licence plate number because I was too busy cutting them off in traffic. I guess they followed me to the lot here at work, which is all to say that I deserved it, but at the same time I’d like to kill the bastard. My Hyundai is —was—the only unflawed thing in my life. I’m actually more sad than I am pissed.
No, I could kill.
Death.
Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. I’m so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey paw curse attached. All those Hollywood people are always saying to be careful what you wish for, yeah, but at least they first had a wish come true.
Hang on, I’m venting here.
One more breath.
I imagine myself sitting in a glade surrounded by woodland creatures that rest on my arms and shoulders, sleeping, utterly comforted by existence.
Breathe once more.
Who am I fooling? I merely did whatever everyone else seemed to be doing. It’d be nice if we had a course in school called Real Life. Forget don’t-drink-and-drive videos and plastic models of the uterus. Imagine a class where they sit you down and spell everything out, deploying all of that information delivered to us by our ever-growing army of wise, surviving ninetysomethings . . .
. . . Falling out of love happens as quickly as falling in.
. . . Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.
. . . Animals spend time with you only if you feed them.
. . . People armed with shopping carts who know what they want and where they’re going will always cream clueless people standing in the middle of aisles holding vague shopping lists.
. . . Time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid- thirties.
My Theory of the Day is that the moment your brain locks into its permanent age, whoosh, it flips a time switch