“Somebody bought a glue gun.”
“How much?”
“It was $1.29.”
“Cash?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone else in the mall sell anything else today?”
(Everyone shakes their heads dismally.)
“Capitalism. It works.”
Malls used to be cool. Malls were the Internet shopping of 1968. Malls seemed to try harder back then. No more. You can take dead-mall tours on YouTube, or you can drive around most American cities and find a few dead malls yourself, or, if you find a living mall, it’s on steroids and is scary from being too congested and too mega-mega. Where is the gracious Muzak’ed trance of yore? Where is the civility? The calm? Covered with plywood sheeting and graffiti and filled with dead tropical plants and shopping carts with missing wheels, malls have basically entered the realm of backdrops for science fiction novels and movies, and I’m okay with that. Change happens.
I have this game I play with myself. Several times a year in London, I end up in a taxi and I ask the driver to take me wherever by going through Pall Mall. This is usually met with four seconds of silence, after which the driver says, “Oh right. Pell Mell.” I then say, “That’s right, “Pell Mell,” to which he replies with a whiff of huffiness, “Right…Pell Mell,” the implication being I’m butchering his language. I will go to my grave wondering how to pronounce those two words. I’ve also noticed that continental European friends ask me specifically how to pronounce mall, and I tell them that it rhymes with call and ball and fall, and then they go ahead and pronounce it “mole,” so I think malls need a new word. It should be something easy to pronounce and fun, like, say, Jennifer. Or Trish. Or Evan. Mall seems as old fashioned as the idea itself. Change happens? Time for a change.
The Anti-ghosts
There was once a group of people whose souls had been warped and damaged and squeezed dry by the modern world. They lived close by where you live, and their jobs were very similar to yours.
One day the souls of these people rebelled. They did so by fleeing the bodies that had contained them. And once a soul leaves a body, it’s all over; there’s no going back inside.
The bodies that had created the souls remained alive, and they continued their everyday activities, such as balancing chequebooks, repairing screen doors, and comparison shopping for white terry-cotton socks online, but meanwhile their souls started meeting with each other. They’d gather in small groups at the intersections of roads or at gas station pumps or on the decks at the local bird sanctuary. Once there, they confirmed with each other that what had happened was real—and it was—and that it had been everyone’s individual decision to abandon the body they had been born into.
“So, are we ghosts?”
“I don’t think so—the bodies we came from are still alive.”
“Are we monsters?”
“No. Monsters are living forms without souls. Technically, the people we abandoned are the monsters.”
“So what are we to do? We can’t interact with the world anymore—we’re merely untethered souls. All we can do is drift around, pass through walls and live a life of perpetual mourning.”
“Are we the undead?”
“No, we are not. But we aren’t alive, either.”
The souls felt like house pets that had survived a hurricane only to find their homes and owners gone. They watched the world go onward, but they were unable to be a part of change or progress. They watched the bodies that had spawned them grow older. They were surprised by how cruel it is to grow older in the modern world when everything else seems to stay young.
The souls wondered why they weren’t going to heaven or hell or anywhere else. There was just endless drifting, navigating through the world like turkeys or chickens or swans with clipped wings—birds that can barely fly. And even though they’d fled their bodies in rebellion, the souls missed their bodies the way a parent misses its child.
Then one day the souls became so angry with their situation that they lashed out at the world and—surprise!—the gestures they made in anger allowed them to connect with the world again—vases tipped over, doors slammed, windows broke, data scrambled, light bulbs popped.
The souls were stoked. Their ability to manipulate their anger and to engage with the living world grew and grew. They began to jam car engines and trip alarms. They learned how to curdle milk and burn food. They crippled satellites and salted drinking water. They learned to hijack the power of electrical storms to set fire to landscapes. They learned that anger is beauty. They learned that the only way they could create was to destroy, that the only way to become real once more was to fight their way back into the world in anger.
And so they smashed all they could smash. They were at war without opponents. Their rage became their art. They no longer wondered if they were good enough to deserve their bodies—their life. Instead they challenged their bodies to deserve them.
This was not the end of the world, but it was the beginning of sorrows.
Little Black Ghost
Four years ago, following a dental procedure, I flew to New Orleans for the first time. Before takeoff I took a new and powerful antibiotic. By the time I was to hub through Denver, I could feel something going very wrong inside my head. At first I thought it was the weather. It was a stormy afternoon over Colorado, and the plane had to circle the airport for an hour, which was just far enough outside Denver proper to afford a view of all the countless subdivisions that had died in the crash of 2008, the plywood and two-by-fours long since turned from honey yellow to ash grey.
By the time I landed in New Orleans and was checking into my hotel, my brain was doing badly, and when I got to my room—an old-style hotel with tall wooden walls that reminded me of how Jim Morrison might have thought Paris would be—I wanted to kill myself. I say that in a scientific, clinical, unemotional way: I wanted to no longer be alive. It wasn’t so much wanting to be dead; it was no longer wanting to be living. Was there pain? No. Was there anything else? No. Just a need to no longer be living. I wasn’t panicked by this new need. I saw it for what it was: a psychological reaction to a potent new drug. My only worry was whether this new set of emotions would wash out of my system or whether I’d opened an uncloseable door in my mind.
Friends met me after I’d checked in, and they were entirely unaware of what was happening in my head.
“Have a drink?”
“Sure!” (Want to die.)
“Check out the place down the street?”
“Sure!” (But throw in some death.)
The thing about New Orleans is that it’s where Americans go to drink themselves to death without feeling like they’re being judged. So it was actually not a bad place to be feeling the way I was feeling. I pretty much drank myself to sleep that night, and when I woke up, magically hangover-free, the need to no longer be living had passed, and it’s never returned. So then, what did I gain from the experience? Empathy. When anyone has mentioned suicide to me since then, I listen and I don’t judge. I’m highly respectful of people with suicidal tendencies who don’t kill themselves, because the impetus is all too real and extremely specific. I wonder how anyone manages to continue living in such a state for weeks, let alone years, feeling as they do.
In 1984 I won a scholarship to a Milanese design school where the term started in October. After three weeks, the earth fell out from beneath me and I entered what took me twenty-five years to figure out was merely seasonal depression. I’ve always called it “The Curse of My Brother’s Birthday” (which is on November 5). Every few years or so, if my nutrition lapses or I don’t go to the gym or I travel too much, I fall into The Pit. It doesn’t end for months, and even then it tapers off gradually. In 2012 I crashed big-time: a trip to Germany, two trips to China (all from Vancouver) and then a trip to Toronto mixed with a crap diet and whaam! The Pit.
Depression’s weird. If you don’t get it, then you don’t get it, but if you do, then you do. And if you
do, you know how it can strip life of all colour—all those blank days that vanish without hope or cheer; the absence of all spirit. I figure I’ve probably lost almost four years of my life to depression—four years utterly flushed down the toilet, with the only benefit being, as with my suicide evening, increased empathy for the human condition.
Psychoactive drugs of any sort spook me, so I’m not the world’s best depressive patient pill-wise, but in late 2012 I had to fly to Stockholm—on December 6—and I really needed to be there in good form. So, in lieu of pharmaceuticals, as a last resort, I bought a light box for $199 at a local drugstore on December 2–150 bright light-blue LEDs arranged in a grid. I plugged it in, looked at it for three seconds and…boop…my depression was gone. Completely. Like that. Yes, like that. Over in three seconds. Those three seconds remain the single oddest medical moment in my life. I lugged that light box in my carry-on luggage for years, superstitiously waiting for depression to reappear. It has yet to do so. Go figure.
What is the larger point here? The point is: Which of the above-mentioned head states was really me, and when was I not me? To what extent can we medicalize personality? I have a religious friend who’s never been drunk or taken any psychoactive medication…and, to be honest, he really, really needs something, because his life could easily be fixed with a few weeks on drugs. But that’s not going to happen, so he’s a reduced version of himself—or is he? At what point are we dishonouring the soul with medication? Should there be a new labelling system that not only indicates contraindications and side effects but also denotes soul-tampering? A new sort of spiritual E-number? What would be the subjective gradient for this new system? Aspirin? No. Codeine? Maybe. Pot? Maybe. Wellbutrin? Yes. What would the little warning symbol on the package look like—a little black ghost? And would my light box merit a soul-warning sticker?
New Moods
I remember when Prozac took the world by storm in the late 1980s. It was like “Gangnam Style,” except instead of one month, Prozac as a meme took five years to burn itself out. I remember it was hard to believe that a new psychotropic drug other than diazepines or primitive antidepressants like tricyclics could exist. It was as if science had invented a new mood.
Prozac was the first drug from the new generation of drug naming. These days we have Abilify, Celexa, Zoloft and…all those other bafflingly named pills I learn about mostly while I’m fast-forwarding through TV ads on TiVo. Mood-altering drugs seem to be advertised on TV a lot.
Someone in Los Angeles told me the true story about why Elizabeth Taylor made so much money from her perfumes. It wasn’t that her perfumes were or weren’t better than other fragrances. It was because in the weeks preceding Christmas and Mother’s Day, she bought up all the TV ad slots around children’s cartoon programming. So when it came time to get something for Mom, kids went right to the perfume counter and demanded White Diamonds, a perfume of reputed adult glamour. I think that’s what’s happening with TV ads for mood-altering drugs these days. They’re finding the right slot for the right sort of personality, with a level of accuracy that reminds me of the Gulf War and watching missiles fired directly into the elevator shafts of Iraqi public buildings.
The arguments that swirled around new drugs in the late 1980s were electric and stormy and vicious. You mean to say I can tailor my personality into something better than what I was born with? That’s an affront to all that’s decent in this universe! You don’t hear much of that anymore. It’s like the radioactively white teeth everybody in North America now sports. One day you woke up and everyone had teeth like game-show hosts. And then one day you woke up and everyone seemed a bit meds-y.
A few years back I tried that “Harvard drug,” Adderall, which gives you the power to read for twelve hours straight and internalize everything you read—and it was a total disaster. It gave me no clarity or focus, just an epic headache matched only by a hangover I once had after a night of drinking Red Bull and vodka at a ski resort two miles above sea level.
My father is a doctor whose own father died in 1936 of a heart inflammation that in 1956 you could fix with a few pills. As a result, he’s less suspicious of pills than younger generations. Growing up, my brothers and I all had acne, and in our bathroom we had a salad bowl filled with tetracycline, erythromycin and a host of other antibiotics. We ate them like they were candy, and if anyone is solely responsible for germinating an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria, he or she needs to look no farther than the Coupland children.
I like pills. I like the idea of pills; they confer a superpower on you: the ability to heal; the ability to feel new things; the ability to read Infinite Jest in one sitting. Unfortunately, I don’t take many pills because when I was in kindergarten, the school brought in an anti-drug woman who was…about twenty? She gave us an anti-drug lecture centred around her friend who took acid (they actually used the word acid in a West Vancouver kindergarten in 1967) and subsequently developed locked-in syndrome—which, of course, the counsellor went into luxuriant detail about. “No matter what you’re thinking and feeling, there’s no way to communicate with the world. Ever. No matter what. You can’t even blink. And it goes on forever. And ever.”
Of course it worked—I’ve never taken recreational anything—and I’m all for those “scared straight” drug lectures. The younger the better. Which reminds me of those anti-drug bumper stickers you see in the United States, the ones that say “D.A.R.E.” I asked an American friend what it stood for and he replied, “That’s easy: Drugs Are Really Expensive.” (Actually, it stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, an international education program founded in 1984 that seeks to prevent use of controlled drugs, gang membership and violent behaviour. Thank you, Wikipedia.)
I think the most successful pill one could invent would be one that instantly makes you unaddicted to whatever drug you’re addicted to. Think about it: you could binge like crazy on anything with total impunity, medical or moral. Meth? Game on. Crack? Deal me in. Cigarettes? Woo-hoo! Needless to say, this new drug would be more demonized than any other drug in history. I suppose, by the same token, if they were to invent table salt right now, it would be sold only by prescription (…causes high blood pressure and/or kidney damage in high doses…) and at an exorbitant price. But I do want a pill that gives me a superpower—say, flight, transparency or telepathy. In the meantime I’ll settle for something that makes me read online news articles past the first page. You could call it TwoPage. And you’d need one right now.
Beef Rock
The gourmet scout party from Gamalon-5 had pretty much given up on the planet Earth when it finally discovered rare mammals called human beings that were actually quite delicious. They’d tasted all the other animals, as well as pretty much everything in the ocean, but those very few humanoids hunkered in their caves were so rare that they had slipped under the tasting radar until the very end. Yes: people were undeniably…scrumptious.
“Commander, we’ve got to figure out some way of making these things multiply if we’re ever to secure a meaningful supply of meat.”
“Lieutenant, that’s your job, not mine. Have they discovered hunting yet? They’ll never learn to start farming until they kill all the big, easy meat around them. Those mammoths and moas. The low-hanging beef.”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you have your work cut out for you, don’t you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant and his squad went back down to Earth and basically handed the few scrawny humans they found some stone arrowheads and some flint and gave them hundreds of actual demonstrations of hunting and roasting before the humans could do it on their own.
And then the aliens sat back and waited for humans to wipe out all the megafauna—after which they turned their attention to smaller creatures like bears and buffalo. After they had all been hunted almost to extinction, humans were forced to adopt agriculture.
“Commander, sir, there really is nothing like agriculture to make a speci
es multiply, is there.”
“Indeed. It’s nice that the universe has at least some constants. What’s next in store for those tasty morsels?”
“We think they’re almost ready to learn to count and learn about zero—as well as metallurgy. But they’re still pretty primitive.”
“All in good time, lieutenant.”
And so humanity was given mathematics and knives and ploughshares, and human numbers grew, but not quickly enough to please the hungry aliens.
“Lieutenant, this is taking forever. Stop trying to foist chimps and gibbons on me. I want humans. I want humans to multiply and I want them to multiply now.”
“Yes, sir.” He suggested the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. “That way they can at least stockpile their intellectual ideas so that they don’t always have to start from scratch all the time.”
“Let’s try that, lieutenant.”
Printing presses—and hence books—accumulated. The Industrial Revolution became inevitable, and finally, humans went spawn crazy. Lo, the citizens of Gamalon-5 began to truly gorge on massive quantities of rich, delicious, succulent human flesh. Life on Gamalon-5 became a gourmet nirvana.
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 proteins give them their extra juicy flavour.”
“Hmmm…Well, whatever it takes to get the job done. But for Pete’s sake, stop harvesting so many humans near Bermuda. They’re beginning to catch on. Also, could you get those humans to introduce more nicotine into their systems? My wife loves the flavour it gives them, but she’s sick of marinating them all the time.”
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