Generation X

by Douglas Coupland

  recovered yet from having been fed cocktails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party. It was pissing rain outside, and the water was drizzling down the windows, but inside the air was as dry as the Sahara from being recirculated. The staff were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office's fashion victims, sneez

  EMOTIONAL KETCHUP

  BURST: The bottling up of

  opinions and emotions inside

  onself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends—most of whom thought things were fine.

  BLEEDING PONYTAIL: An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or presellout days.

  BOOMER ENVY: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.

  CLIQUE MAINTENANCE: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: "Kids today do nothing. They're so

  apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain."

  CONSENSUS

  TERRORISM: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

  ing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time -shares in Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous. I felt cynical, and the room matched my mood. At the coffee machine next to the sink, I grabbed a cup, while Margaret, who worked at the other end of the office, was waiting for her herbal tea to steep and informing me of the ramifications of my letting off of steam a few minutes earlier.

  ' 'What did you just say to Martin, Dag?' she says to me. 'He's just having kittens in his office—cursing your name up and down. Did the health inspector declare this place a Bhopal or something?'

  22 GENERATION X

  QUIT YOUR JOB

  "I deflected her question. I like Margaret. She tries hard. She's older,

  and attractive in a hair-spray-and-shoulder-pads-twice-divorced survivor

  of way. A real bulldozer. She's like one of those little rooms you only in Chicago or New York in superexpensive downtown apartments—small rooms painted intense, flaring colors like emerald or

  raw beef to hide the fact that they're so small. She told me my season

  once , too: I'm a summer. " 'God, Margaret. You really have to wonder

  why we even bother to get

  mean, really: Why work? stuff? That's just not What's the common as fromhere to here? What

  cream and running shoes have? I mean, I see all of up in the morning. I Simply to buy more enough. Look at us all. sumption that got us all makes us deserve the ice and wool Italian suits we us trying so hard to ac

  quire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it, that.. ." 'But Margaret cooled me right there. Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised Young Man states, I should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morn ing is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped. We're not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren't.' Then she began almost talking to herself. I'd gotten her going, She was saying that most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting

  SICK BUILDING

  MIGRATION: The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office

  environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome.

  RECURVING: Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

  moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.

  "Well. You can see that morbid and self-destructive impulses were overtaking me that morning and that Margaret was more than willing to sweep her floor into my fireplace. So we sat there watching tea steep (never a fun thing to do, I might add) and in a shared moment listened to the office proles discuss whether a certain game show host had or had not had cosmetic surgery recently.

  " 'Hey, Margaret,' I said, 'I bet you can't think of one person in the entire history of the world who became famous without a whole lot of cash changing hands along the way.'

  "She wanted to know what this meant, so I elaborated. I told her that people simply don't . . . can't become famous in this world unless a lot of people make a lot of money. The cynicism of this took her aback, but she answered my challenge at face value. 'That's a bit harsh, Dag. What about Abraham Lincoln?'

  " 'No go. That was all about slavery and land. Tons-o'-cash happening there.'

  "So she says, 'Leonardo da Vinci,' to which I could only state that he was a businessman like Shakespeare or any of those old boys and that all of his work was purely on a commission basis and even worse, his research was used to support the military.

  " 'Well, Dag, this is just the stupidest argument I've ever heard,' she starts saying, getting desperate. 'Of course people become famous without people making money out of it.' ' 'So name one, then.'

  "I could see Margaret's thinking flail, her features dissolving and reforming, and I was feeling just a little too full of myself, knowing that other people in the cafeteria had started to listen in on the conversation. I was the boy in the baseball cap driving the convertible again, high on his own cleverness and ascribing darkness and greed to all human endeavors. That was me.

  ' 'Oh, all right, you win,' she says, conceding me a pyrrhic victory, and I was about to walk out of the room with my coffee (now the Perfect-ButSomewhat-Smug Young Man), when I heard a little voice at the back of the coffee room say 'Anne Frank.' "Well.

  "I pivoted around on the ball of my foot, and who did I see, looking quietly defiant but dreadfully dull and tubby, but Charlene sitting next to the megatub of office acetaminophen tablets. Charlene with her trailerpark bleached perm, meat-extension recipes culled from Family Circle magazine, and neglect from her boyfriend; the sort of person who when you draw their name out of the hat for the office Christmas party gift, you say, 'Who?'

  ' 'Anne Frank?' I bellowed, 'Why of course there was money there, why . . .' but, of course, there was no money there. I had unwittingly declared a moral battle that she had deftly won. I felt awfully silly and awfully mean.

  "The staff, of course, sided with Charlene—no one sides with scuzzballs. They were wearing their 'you-got-your-comeuppance' smiles, and there was a lull while the cafeteria audience waited for me to dig my hole deeper, with Charlene in particular looking righteous. But I just stood there unspeaking; all they got to watch instead was my fluffy white karma instantly converting into iron-black cannon balls accelerating to the bottom of a cold and deep Swiss lake. I felt like turning into a plant—a comatose, nonbreathing, nonthinking entity, right there and then. But, of course, plants in offices get scalding hot coffee poured into their soil by copier machine repair people, don't they? So what was I to do? I wrote off the psychic wreckage of that job, before it got any worse. I walked out of that kitchen, out the office doors, and never bothered to come back. Nor did I ever bother to gather my belongings from my veal-fattening pen.

  "I figure in retrospect, though, that if they had any wisdom at all at the company (which I doubt), they would have made Charlene clean out my desk for me. Only because in my mind's eye I like to see her standing there, wastepaper basket in her plump sausage-fingered hands, sifting through my rubble of documents. There she would come across my framed photo of the whaling ship crushed and stuck, possibly forever, in the glassy Antarctic ice. I see her staring at this photo in mild confusion, wondering in that moment what sort of young man I am and possibly finding me not unlovable.

  "But inevitably she would wonder why I would want to frame such a strange image and then, I imagine, she would wonder whether it has any financial value. I then see her counting her lucky stars that she doesn't understand such unorthodox impulses, and then I see her throw

  0 Z M 0 SIS: The inability of one's job t
o live up to one's selfimage.

  POWER MIST: The

  tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

  ing the picture, already forgotten, into the trash. But in that brief moment of confusion . . . that brief moment before she'd decided to throw the photo out, well ... I think I could almost love Charlene then.

  "And it was this thought of loving that sustained me for a long while when, after quitting, I turned into a Basement Person and never went in to work in an office again."

  OVERBOARDING: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs. . . .

  EARTH TONES: A youthful subgroup interested in

  vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment.

  Earnest, frequently lacking in humor.

  ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic

  neighborhoods: "You wouldn't understand it there, mother— they hug where I live now."

  "Now: when you become a Basement Person, you drop out of the system. You have to give up, as I did, your above-ground apartment and all of the silly black matte objects inside as well as the meaningless rectangles of minimalist art above the oatmeal-colored sofa and the semidisposable furniture from Sweden. Basement People rent basement suites; the air above is too middle class.

  "I stopped cutting my hair. I began drinking too many little baby coffees as strong as heroin in small cafes where sixteen-year-old boys and girls with nose rings daily invented new salad dressings by selecting spices with the most exotic names ('Oooh! Cardamom! Let's try a teaspoon of that!'). I developed new friends who yapped endlessly about South American novelists never getting enough attention. I ate lentils. I wore llama motif serapes, smoked brave little cigarettes (Nazionali's, from Italy, I remember). In short, I was earnest.

  "Basement subculture was strictly codified: wardrobes consisted primarily of tie-dyed and faded T-shirts bearing images of Schopenhauer or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, all accessorized with Rasta doohickeys and badges. The girls all seemed to be ferocious dykey redheads, and the boys were untanned and sullen. No one ever seemed to have sex, saving their intensity instead for discussions of social work and generating the best idea for the most obscure and politically correct travel destination (the Nama Valley in Namibia—but only to see the daisies). Movies were black and white and frequently Brazilian.

  "And after a while of living the Basement life -style, I began to adopt more of its attitudes. I began occupational slumming: taking jobs so beneath my abilities that people would have to look at me and say, 'Well of course he could do better.' I also got into cult employment, the best form of which was tree planting in the interior of British Columbia one summer in a not unpleasant blitz of pot and crab lice and drag races in beat up spray painted old Chevelles and Biscaynes.

  "All of this was to try and shake the taint that marketing had given me, that had indulged my need for control too bloodlessly, that had, in some way, taught me to not really like myself. Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food. It's not creation, really, but theft, and no one ever feels good about stealing.

  "But basically, my life -style escape wasn't working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends—no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs. I was an imposter, and in the end my situation got so bad that I finally had my Mid -twenties Breakdown. That's when things got pharmaceutical, when they hit bottom, and when all voices of comfort began to fail."

  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.

  Ever notice how hard it is to talk after you've eaten lunch outside on a super-hot day? A real scorcher? Shimmying palm trees melt in the

  distance; I absentmindedly stare at the ridges in my fingernails and wonder if I'm receiving sufficient dietary calcium. Dag's story continues.

  I runs in my head while the three of us eat lunch. "By then it was

  winter. I moved in with my brother, Matthew, the jingle writer. That

  res in Buffalo, New York, an hour south of Toronto, and a city which

  • once read had been la

  first 'ghost city' since

  core businesses had just

  1970s day. "I remem

  freeze over a period of

  apartment window and

  apt the sight was. Mat beled North America's a sizable chunk of its up and left one fine ber watching Lake Erie days from Matthew's thinking how corny but thew was out of town fre quently on business, and I'd sit by myself in the middle of his living room floor with stacks of pornography and bottles of Blue Sapphire gin and the stereo going full blast and I'd be thinking to myself, 'Hey! I'm having a party!' I was on a depressive's diet then—a total salad bar of downers and antidepressants. I needed them to fight my black thoughts, was convinced that all of the people I'd ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and that I wasn't. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life. I couldn't answer the telephone; I

  SUCCESSOPHOBIA: The fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs

  catered to.

  seemed unable to achieve the animal happiness of people on TV, so I had to stop watching it; mirrors freaked me out; I read every Agatha Christie book; I once thought I'd lost my shadow. I was on automatic pilot.

  "I became nonsexual and my body felt inside -out —covered with ice and carbon and plywood like the abandoned mini-malls, flour mills, and oil refineries of Tonawanda and Niagara Falls. Sexual signals became omnipresent and remained repulsive. Accidental eye eye Eleven grocery clerks became charged with vile meaning. All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, 'Are you the stranger who will rescue me?' Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

  "I started to find humanity repulsive, reducing it to hormones, flanks, mounds, secretions, and compelling methanous stinks. At least in this state I felt that there was no possibility of being the ideal target market any mo re. If, back in Toronto, I had tried to have life both ways by considering myself unfettered and creative, while also playing the patsy corporate drone, I was certainly paying a price.

  "But what really got me was the way young people can look into your eyes, curious but without a trace of bodily hunger. Early teens and younger, who I'd see looking envy-makingly happy during my brief agoraphobia -filled forays into the local Buffalo malls that were still open. That guileless look had been erased forever in me, so I felt, and I was convinced that I would walk around the next forty years hollowly acting out life's motions, while listening to the rustling, taunting maracas of youthful mummy dust bounce about inside me.

  "Okay, okay. We all go through a certain crisis point, or, I suppose, or we're not complete. I can't tell you how many people I know who claim to have had their midlife crisis early in life. But there invariably comes a certain point where our youth fails us; where college fails us; where Mom and Dad fail us. Me, I'd never be able to find refuge again in Saturday mornings spent in rumpus rooms, itchy with fiberglass in sulation, listening to Mel Blanc's voice on the TV, unwittingly breathing xenon vapors from cinder blocks, snacking on chewable vitamin C tablets, and tormenting my sister's Barbies.

  "But my crisis wasn't just the failure of youth but also a failure of class and of sex and the future and I still
don't know what. I began to pee this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantasize about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf to the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir. All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

  "So the point of all of this was that I needed a clean slate with no one to read it. I needed to drop out even further. My life had become a series of scary incidents that simply weren't stringing together to make an interesting book, and God, you get old so quickly! Time was (and is) running out. So I split to where the weather is hot and dry and where the cigarettes are cheap. Like you and Claire. And now I'm here."

  So now you know a bit more about Dag (skewed as his narrative pre sentation of his life may be). But meanwhile, back at our picnic on this throbbing desert day, Claire is just finishing her mesquite chicken, wiping off her sunglasses, and replacing them with authority on the bridge of her nose indicating that she's getting ready to tell us a story. HA bit about Claire here: she has scrawl handwriting like a taxi driver. She knows how to fold Japanese paper cranes and she actually likes the taste of soya in Palm Springs on the weekend that Nostradainterpretations) had pre of the world. HI was

  ng the poolside bar at La Spa de Luxembourg place than lowly Larry's burgers. She arrived hot, windy Mother's Day mus (according t o some dieted would be the end

  tendi a far more lofty a resort complete

  then,

  and

  with nine bubbling health pools and patterned imitation silver knives and forks for outdoor use. Weighty stuff, and it always impressed the guests. Anyhow, I remember watching Claire's incalculably numerous and noisy siblings, half-siblings, step-siblings chatter incessantly out in the sun by the pools, like parakeets in an aviary while a sullen, hungry tomcat prowls outside the cage's mesh. For lunch they would only eat fish, and only tiny fish at that. As one of them said, "The big fish have been in the water a bit too long, and God only knows what they've had