Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  I’ve known a lot of suicides in my life. I’d say twenty. In each instance drugs were involved as direct or indirect triggers, except for one time when it was ambiguous: Brian Rath, the high school shroomer and pothead, was so high he passed out in his van and died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the heater. He was a nice guy, but he was paranoid and could only live in a van by himself. I don’t think it was suicide. I have no idea.

  One thing I have seen many times over the years is guys who smoke a lot of pot when they’re young activate (I’m guessing) a genetic predilection for paranoia, which under assault from high volumes of THC, triggers late-adolescent THC-induced paranoia. For the next decade these guys (and it really does seem to be guys only) make random and strange life choices, and then, by thirty, their brains cool down, but by then they have to live with the decisions they made while being paranoid, and it’s almost never easy.

  Here’s a Vancouver story: In the spring of 1997, some kids in downtown Vancouver gave me three pot seeds, like Jack and the Beanstalk. I went home, planted them in little pots and watered them, and they sprouted like a third-grade class project on growing beans. A visiting friend of mine, Ian, looked at the sprouts and said, “Doug, that’s not how you grow it. Pot is very social, and you can’t just keep it by itself. It needs to be around other plants.”

  This was before an extended trip to England, and so I put the three sprouts, each in their own pot, down on a rock beside the creek at the bottom end of the property, surrounded by a cedar tree, sweet-scented astilbe, vine maples, moss and a few other regional plants. Two months later I returned to Vancouver and walked in the front door to learn that Princess Diana had died in a car crash, and this sucked up all of my attention. Then around sunset I looked out over the deck and into the creek area to see that my three little sprouts had morphed into dense, shaggy THC monsters. It was a real shocker. I mean, these plants were like plush mink coats of dope.

  In the absence of any other plan, I continued to let them grow, and by mid-September I harvested them, cutting them off at the base and hanging them upside down (thank you, Internet, for these instructions), and then…and then I tried to find someone in my universe who’d want a huge supply of monster killer pot for free. I didn’t smoke the stuff, but nobody else in my universe seemed to smoke pot either. I went through my phone book and everyone declined, one by one.

  “…just had a kid.”

  “…doing a cleanse.”

  “…too old for that shit.”

  “…more into mountain biking these days.”

  “…pot? Seriously? You?”

  Basically I couldn’t give away a five-grand trove of kick-ass weed. Donating it to hospices was too weird for technical reasons, and in the end I took it to my parents’ house, incinerated it in the family fireplace and watched it go up the chimney. Buyers’ market.

  We all know what gaydar is, but there is also something called drugdar, and I don’t have it. To this day I can walk into any social situation and have no idea of the quantity and quality of drugs everyone is taking. I just take everyone at face value, while they must look at me and say, “Doug has no drugdar,” and they move on to the next person more likely to map onto their drug wants and needs. It makes me feel foolish not to know what the signals and cues are.

  I drink a lot. At the moment it’s still charming, but I’ll probably have to quit someday. I like drinking because it’s predictable. Regardless of the source, I know exactly how to nurse a buzz along for hours. It’s wonderful. In the dozen times I smoked pot, it made me feel different every time—why would I want that? Besides, who knows how strong it’s going to be, and who knows what synthetic agrotoxins are, or aren’t, mixed in with it?

  I smoked cigarettes from 1979 to 1988 and I loved it. I was a good smoker, but I blew out my left lung cliff jumping in Howe Sound during my senior high school year, and when I die, it’ll probably be because of something to do with my lungs. They’re just not the best lungs (lung and a half, really), so I quit smoking on Halloween 1988, and I have several slip-up dreams a week. I still smoke; I just haven’t had a cigarette since October 31, 1988. Dear tobacco: I miss you.

  This piece isn’t a gratuitous drug tell-all on my part. I’m illustrating that everybody has their own drug stories that play out across their lives. You have one too, and it will expand as you age.

  I fly a lot, and for years I’d fly over the United States and look below at the roads and buildings and think, Ski hill? Shopping mall? Golf course? Industrial park? And…and then there were always these strange things down below that looked like electron microscope images of viruses, but they were…I had no idea. Poultry farms? Amazon distribution centres? University campuses?

  They were prisons.

  People seem to love pot. That can’t be denied, and legalized pot is obviously at the tipping point in the United States and Canada, but why did it take so long? Everyone touts how much tax money can be made from regulating the stuff, and they’re obviously correct. But I think a cofactor in the current pot-legalization warp is that Americans are seeing that 1.5 percent of their population is currently living in a jail cell, and the citizenry is understanding that this is madness. Remember, Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s wasn’t so much about booze being evil; it was more of a simple solution to the complex problem of domestic violence, to make life safer for women. To look at booze by itself is not the most useful way to look at Prohibition, and ditto for pot.

  The sick thing about prisons is that, to a point, incarcerated people are very good for the economy: prison jobs, legal fees, construction contracts and political pork. As a bonus, when a government criminalizes you, they then have a permanent, excellent tool for controlling you. From an evil point of view, criminalizing as many people as possible is good for capitalism and for those in power. Until it unravels.

  In 2015 taxpayers woke up to the fact that industrial-grade incarceration is too expensive. Too many people in jail, too many people about to go into, or back into, jail…and the tax base can’t support it anymore. There’s a finite limit to how many citizens you can incarcerate before the system falls apart—and that magic number would appear to be about 1.5 percent. Many of these 1.5-percenters are incarcerated on pot charges. Decriminalize pot and suddenly you empty your prisons. Your tax bill is lowered, and many of your people are freed, and once again their lives become useful and meaningful.

  Odd that the war on drugs is ending up being cured by drugs.

  There’s another cofactor in the legalization of pot, and this factor is called Dow. Or Cargill. Or DuPont. Or Bayer. Pot became as potent as it now is because of hybridization, but hybridization has probably reached its limits—but then what about genetically modified pot? Think about it. I’ll bet you a hundred trillion dollars that at this very moment, Dow, Monsanto, Dole, Coca-Cola, BASF and Archer Daniels Midland are throwing every spare dollar in their budget at maxing out some super new GM pot that has so much THC, it drips like a chocolate fountain, but that’s not necessarily why they’d be GM’ing pot. They’d be GM’ing pot so that it requires less refrigeration during shipping. Or maybe it’ll be pot you can irrigate with salt water. Or maybe it’ll be pot that’s resistant to Roundup and glycophosphates, or pot that grows a hundred feet tall. But the moment they come up with the right combo is the moment pot goes legal in holdout states like Nebraska, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Imagine: GM pot that can sit in freight containers for up to 180 days without refrigeration with no noticeable decomposition. GM pot is most definitely waiting in the wings to take over from GM corn.

  I just Googled GMO pot and the first hit was a blog saying that another news article elsewhere that stated Monsanto had created GM pot was a hoax. Genuine LOL.

  It also occurs to me that the days of pot being sold through dispensaries is soon to vanish. Pot will become more of a daily consumer item, and so right now all of these GMO firms must also be lawyering up on every level and lobbying like crazy as they prepare for the inevitable. Th
ey’re likely at the point of creating names and brands of pot that have yet to actually be GM’d. I’m curious to see if the names they go for are grocery-like (Ranch Dressing) or if they go scientific (Wellbutrin). This makes me think that in-house marketing teams are probably already on the case, identifying discrete segments within the pot user base, as well as trying to locate new ones. Old-school hippies. Moms. Emos. Country-and-western listeners. Superpatriots. Jocks. Hipsters. PTSD sufferers. Telemundo viewers. Rapper wannabes. Young professionals. Jimmy Buffett fans. Deadheads—now there’s a superbrand just waiting to happen. Of course, not everyone’s going to want the same packaging, and remember, whoever gets market share first is probably going to be the most successful and endure the longest. Think Marlboro. It’s a Klondike just waiting to start, and it’s going to be brutal.

  Smoking is actually a pretty clumsy THC delivery system; we use it simply because we’re familiar with it. Even pot brownies seem hokey in 2015. All sorts of new aesthetics and product categories are likely to emerge. I suspect the future of pot is probably in spritzed pot, like I had in the plane from Toronto to Vancouver, or in THC taste strips, like breath-freshening strips. Or vaping. What will legalized pot packaging look like? The first wave of pot products will probably resemble borderline medical products currently existing, like the tubs of creatine or protein that weight-lifters buy at protein shops. The next wave will resemble packaging and labelling in the style of craft beer breweries. The third and long-term packaging may look like Wrigley’s gum or Pepto-Bismol. Boring. Quotidian. Part of the landscape. “Hi, I’ll get two Gatorades, a pack of peppermint Chiclets and a pack of Parrot Head Spritz vials.”

  Eighteen years ago I was in a second-hand store in Chile and saw a really strange-looking metal vase—quite low-slung and unlike something you’d put roses into. I asked about it and was told it was a spittoon.

  A spittoon.

  I’d heard the word used before, but I’d never thought about it much, let alone visualized what a spittoon looks like. But up into the middle of the twentieth century, when American men in both public and private spaces felt the need to spit, they would look at a spittoon and say, “Good. A spittoon. Now I will expel the combination of mucus and tobacco residue inside my mouth into a receptacle on the floor, and I may or may not hit the mark.” And then they’d do it.

  Like many things from the twentieth century, spittoons seem not just barbaric, but they also tax the level of credulity of what a reasonably civilized society might consider okay and not okay (apartheid, bathing suits for women, gay anything).

  I think pot is at the magic spittoon moment where suddenly we’ve realized it’s too hard and too wilfully clueless to pretend that reality isn’t reality—whether it’s fiscal reality or social reality. I dislike pot. It has literally left me scarred. It’s permanently damaged people I care for.

  But then so has booze. And gambling. And greed. And genetics. And cars. And psycho​pharma​ceuti​cals. And gravity. And aging. And the law.

  I think people are more smart than they are stupid. If they can handle everything else, then they can probably handle pot—it’s a very small leaf to throw into the salad of life. Everything will be just fine.

  Got a Life

  Last month I had lunch with a YouTube friend, and I asked her what the most boring thing she’d ever seen on YouTube was, and she said, “That’s easy: elevators.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, you know how there are trainspotters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there are people who spot elevators.”

  “Surely not.”

  “No, I’m serious. Check it out. The numbers are huge.”

  I was unsure if she was putting me on, so when I got home I looked it up and quickly found, on one video (along with 1,012,773 viewers*), that in 2007 all elevators in the New York Marriott Marquis were replaced by Schindler Miconic 10 Traction elevators. I went on to learn that, “Rather than a traditional call-station and car operating panel (COP) configuration, the Miconic 10 system ‘assigns an elevator based on destinations requested on a keypad in the elevator bank. Elevators are alphabetically labeled and are assigned based on location and demand.’ ”

  So there you go.

  I think boredom has to be some sort of natural selection process. If it weren’t for boredom, our ancestors would have spent all their days in their caves, with no hunting or gathering, and then no wheels or fire or mathematics or HBO.

  Some people never get bored. For them, every moment of life is like a piece of yarn being dangled in front of a kitten’s face, as if for the first time. I’m not one of these people. Yes, I know it’s a miracle to be alive and possess sentience—but there’s also a lot to be said for things like booze and YouTube. And cigarettes. I quit twenty-seven years ago but I could start at any moment. I always wonder what it would be like to smoke while being online—pure happiness, I imagine. And yes, drinking online can be a blast, but the most amazing eBay packages arrive at your doorstep a week later. And then your Visa bill comes in.

  Apparently most adult men make their largest purchases of the day between 11 p.m. and midnight. The kids are asleep. You have the house to yourself. Add a bit of booze and…“Why yes, I think I will buy that rowing machine that, deep in my heart, I know will be used two or three times and then end up on Craigslist after gathering dust for three years in the garage.” And once on Craigslist it will find fierce competition from similarly purchased rowing machines.

  Boredom is different than it used to be. I actually used to like being bored: walking down a street, not connected to anything, not speaking to anyone, wondering what lay behind those trees or shop fronts or clouds. Similar behaviour these days would have the cops pulling over and questioning me. Who do I think I am, taking a stroll without interruptions, just looking at the scenery. We like ourselves, don’t we? No music or Bluetooth or navigation systems or other devices for you.

  Today I was wondering if I generate enough data during my days. I’m not quite sure what kind of data. Just data in general. It seems like a modern thing to do. How to max it out? How could I create a data storm? In a few years data creation will be the new frequent flyer points.

  Part of our new boredom is that our brain doesn’t have any downtime. Even the smallest amount of time not being engaged creates a spooky sensation that maybe you’re on the wrong track. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment. Gosh, maybe I’ll read a book. Or go for a walk.

  Sorry.

  Probably not going to happen. Hey, is that the new trailer for Ex Machina?

  In the 1990s there was that expression, “Get a life!” You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, “Get a life,” you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time, but it’s been years since I’ve heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, “getting a life”? Did we all get one? Or maybe we’ve all not got lives anymore, and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutia, details and tangential idea threads.

  “The system also boasts its intelligence by reserving cars for certain areas. For example, Car A and Car B are now exclusive to the upper levels, so when I type in ‘45,’ I will get Car A or Car B. If the system is overwhelmed, it will adjust accordingly, but this update increases the dispatching efficiency even more.”

  Makes you think.

  * * *

  * “Schindler Miconic 10 Traction Elevators—New York Marriott Marquis—New York, NY,” YouTube video, 8:11, posted by CBE9120, August 4, 2013, https://www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​NWT3TNV​jqK4. />
  Peace

  There’s a reason libraries are presumed to be quiet places. We’re taught to think it’s because there’s a scolding schoolmarm perpetually lurking just out of sight, itching to pounce on us for the slightest sonic infraction. The real reason is more prosaic: irregularly protruding book spines coming out of their shelves are terrific for dispersing sound and creating environments that are mildly free of echoes.

  Three years ago I had the borderline orgasmic experience of spending a few minutes alone in one of the technically quietest rooms on earth. No, it wasn’t in a salt mine four thousand feet beneath the surface of Chelyabinsk-70. Rather, it was in suburban New Jersey, at the Bell Laboratories Murray Hill anechoic chamber. The chamber, built in 1940, measures thirty feet by twenty-eight feet by thirty-two feet and has three-feet-thick cement and brick walls. Its inner walls are lined with alternating clusters of biscuit-shaped wedges of yellow fibreglass household insulation. This formation absorbs over 99.995 percent of the incidental acoustic energy above two hundred hertz. At one time the Murray Hill chamber was cited in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s quietest room.