The myth

Witness Elimination Program
The myth is that witness relocation exists, whereas people who "enter the program" are simply shot.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

mean to vanquish nature

Unchecked
"Unchecked, science and monotheism both mean to vanquish nature" - a lovely quote from Christopher Potter in You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

the events of 9/11

Ninetenicillin
A pill that makes one feel as if the events of 9/11 had never occurred. A variation of Millennial Tristesse, a longing for the twentieth century.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

instant itness

Itness
The ability of one agent to create the perception of an object, person, or event as possessing "it" - for example, not wanting to be "it" in a game of tag - or even the ability of a dog owner to create instant itness when choosing a stick to be thrown for retrieval.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

a "me day."

The Future of Labour
The fact that there is no word in the Chinese language for a "me day."

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

ego by plastering

Deselfing
Willingly diluting one's sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

unlike one's dog

Chronocanine Envy
Sadness experienced when one realizes that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward."

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

if cats were double their usual size

Rachel's father says that if cats were double their usual size, they'd probably be illegal and you'd have to shoot them, but even if dogs were three times as big, they'd still be good friends to people. Rachel sees that as a good way of comparing the two species.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

A dull day is a triumph

So remember, stay halfway between coincidence and entropy and you'll always be safe. Take my word for it, a day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle - it's a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong failed to go wrong. A dull day is a triumph of the human spirit; boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

the opportunity to be hurt by other people

Luke is afraid of getting hurt, but he also knows that if too much time passes you miss out on the opportunity to be hurt by other people. To a younger Luke this sounded like luck; to an older Luke this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

equally on the brink

Luke still believes that we are all, at every moment of our lives, equally on the brink of all sins, except that now, in a world without faith, sin has no ramifications; it's just something humans do.

-- Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

I have the hardcover, and on the dust jacket's front cover book flap there is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, from his Syracuse University commencement address on May 8, 1994:

"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."

This is a story about stories, or as put on Coupland's website: "Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991's Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world."

There were many wonderful scenes and moments in the story, and the surprise of my parents' hometown as a key setting was tops among them for me.

Generation A on BookCrossing.

when the humans read books

One day the lieutenant made the observation that human beings who read large numbers of books tended to taste better than humans who didn't. This intrigued the commander: "I'm listening, Lieutenant."

"Sir, when the humans read books, it gives them a sense of individuality, a sense of being unique - a sense that something about their existence is special or, as they like to say, 'magical.' Reading seems to generate microproteins in their bloodstreams, and those eons give them that extra-juicy flavour."

-- Generation A by Douglas Coupland

masturbation of the brain

"Jeez, Harj, could you be any more depressing?"

"Zack, to create a happy ending for its own sake is no different than masturbation of the brain."

!!!

Okay.

Sometimes you're travelling along through this wacky thing we call life, when you're assaulted by an idea so potent that it obliterates all other forms of stimulus. The notion of neuromasturbation was precisely one of those ideas.

Harj and the others kept on talking, but I'll never know about what. I was trying to figure out what would be the brain's equivalent of lube or movies of Croatian nurses engaged in fourgies.

-- Generation A by Douglas Coupland

pennies into the blowholes of dolphins

Q)
He sounds like a character.
A)
He is. When I was a kid, he took me to SeaWorld 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.

-- Generation A by Douglas Coupland

That sounds like someone I know, though we never did anything quite like that. We've both always been fond of animals and never intentionally harmed them.

Excellent question.

Thing is, I'd taken a slice of boring white bread from its bakery bag and had slapped it onto a small patch of yellow sandy dirt. I was standing up to photograph the slice of bread using my mobile phone. Why would you have been doing this? I hear you wonder. Excellent question. I was making an "Earth sandwich."

-- Generation A by Douglas Coupland

I love love love where this takes place. Douglas Coupland is one of my favourite authors, and the discovery of this one of the five important locations was tremendously exciting for me.

with today in my eyes

Douglas Coupland writes good books. Fiction and non-fiction alike, I get completely entranced when reading his work. The very first book of his I read, some ten years ago now, was Polaroids from the Dead, a mix of fiction and non-fiction. For a year or so after reading it a passage would cross my mind and I would go back and read that section again. Today, many years since last cracking open the book's cover, a small portion of the book came to me. It took mere seconds to find it when I got home:

I made notes in my notebook - casual voices and things we had heard and seen over the past day that made more sense than other things, and this is what I wrote in my book:

• I could happily die right now with nothing but today in my eyes. (A line written by Truman Capote I had read in a book the night before.)
  

...
For a souvenir I gave the German reporter an old white T-shirt that I asked him to put on. Then, with a thick Sharpie permanent black felt-tip marker I wrote in it the corrected wording of the Truman Capote quote I had written incorrectly earlier in my note pad. I wrote:

As for me
I could leave the world
with today
in my eyes.
-t.c.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

Reading a Douglas Coupland book makes you think. By you I mean me. His books make me think, and the thoughts are usually sad - thoughts about meaninglessness, about loneliness. There is humor in his books; not in-your-face punch-lines type humor, more of a subtle dark-humor type humor. But the humor, I find, is overwhelmed by sadness. The main character in The Gum Thief, Roger, has nothing going for him and he is working the aisles at the local Staples. He his attempting to write a book, titled Glove Pond. One of the characters in Glove Pond, Kyle, is in the middle of writing a book. The setting of Kyle's book: an office superstore. That is delicious.

The Gum Thief on BookCrossing.

anecdote from my youth

Here's an amusing anecdote from my youth. I used to like playing with green plastic soldiers, but my mom was anti-war (odd, considering what a battle-axe she was) and wouldn't buy me the soldiers. I was too young for a paper route to make my own money, and our house was miles away from a store. My father brought me home a bag of soldiers one night, and I was out of my mind with happiness. I began to play with them, but then my mom came into the room, holding a phone with an extension cord, and she sat down and said, "Okay, you can play with your soldiers, fine. But I'm going to sit here, and every time one of them gets killed or injured, I'm going to telephone their mother. Ready? One, two three, play ..." Well, you can imagine how much fun that was.
-- The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

Imagine feeling more powerful...

Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

-- The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland