Douglas Coupland: Generation X

From: The sun is your enemy

You know, Dag and Claire smile a lot, as do many people I know. But I have always wandered if there is something either mechanical or malignant to their smiles, for the way they keep their outer lips propped up seems a bit, not false, but protective. A minor realization hits me as I sit with the two of them. It is the realization that the smiles that they wear in their daily lives are the same as the smiles worn by people who have been good-naturedly fleeced, but fleeced nonetheless, in public and on a New York sidewalk by card sharks, and who are unable because of social convention to show their anger, who don't want to look like poor sports. the thought is fleeting.

The first chink of sun rises over the lavender mountain of Joshua, but three of us are just a bit too cool for our own good; we can't just let the moment happen. Dag must greet this flare with a question for us, a gloomy aubade: "What do you think of when you see the sun? Quick. Before you think about it too much and kill your response. Be honest. Be gruesome. Claire, you go first."

Claire understand the drift: "Well, Dag. I see a farmer in Russia, and he's driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight's gone bad on him-- like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine. And another strange phenomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life magazines instead, and the odor is killing his crops. The wheat is thinning as we speak. He's slumped over the wheel of his tractor and he's crying. His wheat is dying of history posioning."

"Good, Claire. Very weird. And Andy? How about you?"

"Let me think a second."

"Okay, I'll go instead. When I think of the sun, I think of an Australian surf bunny, eighteen years old, maybe, somewhere on Bondi Beach, and discovering her first keratosis lesion on her shin. She's screaming inside her brain and already plotting how she's going to steal Valiums from her mother. Now you tell me, Andy, what do you think of when you see the sun?"

I refuse to participate in this awfulness. I refuse to put people in my vision. "I think of this place in Antarctica called Lake Vanda, where the rain hasn't fallen in more than two million years."

"Fair enough. That's all?"

"Yes, that's all."

There is a pause. And what I don't say is this: that this is also the same sun that makes me think of regal tangerines and dimwitted butterflies and lazy carp. And the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next door-- drops that hang like rubies from thir old brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside.

The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."

I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert-- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.