Coupland Archives

"There you have it, Cowboy."
"Have what?"
"What you have is the fact that if you don't have a character to begin with, everything and nothing is in character."
"That's really fucking depressing."
"And what if it is?"
"It's like Melrose Place."
"Melrose?" said Bree. "That was a hundred years ago."
John Doe got excited. "I watched the whole series on DVD. Remember when the script writers couldn't come up with personalities or characteristics for the characters? They simply made them all go psycho, one by one."
Bree nodded. "It worked didn't it?"
Evil Mark added, "I liked that show."
I said, "I never watched it. It felt target-marketed."
"Aaron Spelling made so much money with it," said Kaitlin. "But didn't you notice that, when they started, they were all twenty-something slackers looking for meaning in life, living in a motel-like complex with a swimming pool in the center?"
Bree said, "That's exactly like the characters in Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X."
"Exactly."
"So they ripped Coupland off?"
"That's harsh and actionable. But who are we to say?"
"Sounds fishy to me."
"If I were Douglas Coupland, I'd have sured the pants off of Aaron Spelling."
"Me, too."
"So would I."
Finally something we all agreed on.

- From jPod, written by Douglas Coupland

PS - Sounds familiar.

I have this theory about life and its shortness. I think that in order for us to take in everything there is for us to learn as human beings on this planet, we'd have to be alive for 750 years. Don't ask me how I came up with that number; it simply feels about right. As most of us only make it to 70, we're left with a deficit of 680 years' worth of experience. We can be empathetic, we can read every biography ever written, we can keep the TV locked onto the History Channel, we can swab the sores of the lepers-but there always remain those annoying 680 years we'll never know about. I think that's why we believe in ideas bigger than ourselves: our short lifespan shortchanges us of knowledge of the profound.

- Written by Douglas Coupland, taken from his book Eleanor Rigby.

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