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Girlfriend in a Coma

Every single second of our lives we're crossing a finish line of some sort, with heaven's roaring cheers surrounding us as we win our way forward. Our smallest acts… are as though we are ripping through an Olympic ribbon to thunderous applause. The universe wants us to win. The universe makes sure we're winning even when we lose.

Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

Wow, how true!
(I want to add some caveats to that, but I won't, you can add your own if you feel the need).

Everyone should read Girlfriend in a Coma. It inspires the kind of counter-cultural response that ought to be a feature of the lives of Christians, socialists, environmentalists and those who crave social justice. It also attempts to re-ignite the sense of urgency that is so easy to lose, and it reminds me of The Vision

"Now it's going to be as if you've died and were reincarnated but you stay inside your own body… In your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation - that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it - and you're never going to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life…
  "Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need - the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us to beyond ourselves.
  "Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.
  "Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange and outside the Gap.
  "Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off of bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tyre treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar-codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place."

Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

posted by Paul @ 7:30 pm