Bit Rot Read online

  Also by Douglas Coupland

  Fiction

  Generation X

  Shampoo Planet

  Life After God

  Microserfs

  Girlfriend in a Coma

  Miss Wyoming

  All Families Are Psychotic

  Hey Nostradamus!

  Eleanor Rigby JPod

  The Gum Thief

  Generation A

  Player One

  Worst.Person.Ever

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 Douglas Coupland

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.​penguinra​ndomhouse.​ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Coupland, Douglas, author

  Bit rot / Douglas Coupland.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81214-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81216-2

  I. Title.

  PS8555.O8253B58 2016 C818’.54 C2016-903151-9

  Cover design by Douglas Coupland

  Author photo © Mark Peckmezian

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Douglas Coupland

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Before We Begin…

  Vietnam

  Black Goo

  The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team

  Nine Readers

  Nine Point Zero

  Smells

  Coffee & Cigarettes

  Public Speaking

  Shiny

  Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-first Century

  Fear of Windows

  Creep

  Stamped

  Future Blips

  Futurosity

  Worcest​ershis​tershire

  Bulk Memory

  The Mell

  The Anti-ghosts

  Little Black Ghost

  New Moods

  Beef Rock

  Globalization Is Fun!

  Unclassy

  Wonkr

  Yield: A Story about Cornfields

  The 2½th Dimension

  Living Big

  The End of the Golden Age of Payphones

  The Ones That Got Away

  666!

  Duelling Duels

  George Washington’s Extreme Makeover

  George Washington’s Extreme Makeover (pilot script)

  Pot

  Got a Life

  Peace

  iF-iW eerF

  Stuffed

  Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis

  McWage

  Lotto

  Frugal

  Zoë Hears the Truth

  IQ

  My TV

  The Preacher and His Mistress

  5,149 Days Ago: Air Travel Post-9/11

  Glide

  Klass Warfare

  3.14159265358

  The Great Money Flush of 2016

  Ick

  Grexit

  World War $

  The Man Who Lost His Story

  The Valley

  3½ Fingers

  Bit Rot

  Bartholomew Is Right There at the Dawn of Language

  Temp

  Retail

  Trivial

  Über That Red Dot

  361

  My Name

  Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown

  An App Called Yoo

  Afterword by Samuel Saelemakers

  Before We Begin…

  When the pioneers crossed North America from east to west, the first thing to be thrown off the family Conestoga wagon was the piano, somewhere around Ohio. Then, somewhere near the Mississippi River, went the bookcase, and by Nebraska off went the books…and by Wyoming, everything else. The pioneers arrived in the Promised Land owning only the wagon and the clothing on their backs. They may have missed their pianos, but in the hard work of homesteading, they didn’t have the time or energy to be nostalgic.

  There are many different sections of short works in this book, all written since 2005. Each section came about in a way that, at the time, felt random and one-off-ish—but now I look at them together and see they essentially vindicate all the furniture I’ve tossed from the back of my wagon, year by year, over the past decade. If you were to go on Google Maps and look down from the stratosphere at these pieces of shed weight, you could connect their dots and trace my odd voyage from the twentieth-century brain to the twenty-first. I may miss some of those pianos I threw off my wagon’s rear end, but if I hadn’t, then I’d be stranded somewhere back there, and that would be intolerable.

  —

  I’ve titled this collection Bit Rot—a term used in digital archiving that describes the way digital files of any sort spontaneously (and quickly) decompose. It also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and create and enhance new and unexpected ones.

  Some of the stories in this compendium come from the novel Generation A (2007), and I really scared myself when I was writing them. They flowed directly from spending two years deeply immersed in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, and they explore how language, literacy and numeracy feed the technologies we make, and then how those technologies feed back into language. In the novel these stories were integrated into the larger narrative and made a certain sense, but I think the stories work far better extracted from it. These stories capture the sense of being in a foreign country and losing your passport, credit cards and money—and the only thing you’re left with is limited Internet access at a small café that’s only rarely open and has a low-speed connection. The local people are indifferent to you and they speak as though from Finnegans Wake, and you know that, should you ever get home, home will be a very different place than when you left it.

  The pieces in this book also, to me, evince a shedding of all my twentieth-century notions of what the future is and could be. By 2007 I realized that the future that was once this far-off thing on the horizon was coming closer quite quickly, and then somewhere around 2011 or 2012, the future and the present merged and became the same thing—and it’s now always going to be this way, and we are now always going to be living in the future.

  —

  These days I express ideas through visual means to a great extent. My books have always contained unrealized ideas for art installations and works, particularly the novels dealing with tech, such as Microserfs (1995) and JPod (2006). A much shorter version of this book was created as a “catalogue” to coincide with a show in Rotterdam at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. (This show moved on to Munich’s Villa Stuck Museum in fall 2016.)

  My thanks go out to Defne Ayas of the Witte de With for her ideas and energy and hard work in taking any number of seemingly disparate ideas and weaving them together so that they reveal an overall pattern and logic—the true meaning of curation. Also my thanks go to the Witte de With’s Samuel Saelemakers for his time and energy and hard work helping to realize the exhibition. And thanks to my editor, Anne Collins, for always being in the helicopter in the sky above me, connecting all of my dots that I’
m too close to the ground to see.

  Douglas Coupland

  Paris, 2016

  Vietnam

  I am Private Donald R. Garland from Bakersfield, California, as nice a place to grow up in as you can imagine—good folk, and California was booming. My mother used to put sour cherry pies out on the lower edge of the Dutch door, just the way they cool down pies in cartoons, and it was pleasant that way. Please call me Don. On August 5, 1968, I was on an unarmed film reconnaissance mission of rivers in the Bong Son region, and I was killed when my Huey Cobra’s pilot got shot by a sniper from I don’t know where. The rear blade snagged the remains of a napalmed tree, and the tail boom severed. It took maybe seven seconds in all. The last thing I saw was an orange explosion approaching my face like lava flying down a Hawaiian slope.

  I’m thinking about what I just said and how Nam it sounded. That was the thing about Nam. Everything about it was so alien that all you had to do was say a few place names with a few military flourishes and boom! It was like I was describing life on Mars, not something real that was actually happening to me, and closer to my parent’s house than, say, Vienna or Sweden. For people back in Bakersfield, reading about Nam was…I don’t know…like forcing them at gunpoint to read a Chinese menu closely, and no matter what you asked for, all they’d bring you was machine guns and dog soup.

  My death in Bong Son was expensive. Aside from the costs of raising an American child born in 1949, there were the added costs of my attending San Diego Military Academy—it probably set my old man back thirty grand—plus all the US government money it cost to start a war overseas and then pay to fly me over, peel my potatoes, wash my laundry, buy me weapons, and put me in helicopters with pilots like my pal Len Bailor, taking off in a Huey filled with canisters of film that were to have been processed and shown on CBS TV. Len always got off on that—maybe our footage would be shown right before Red Skelton or Bewitched. It cost the Vietnamese way less money to send one of their nineteen-year-olds to war. The math’s not hard: grow up on a rice paddy, get a Soviet-made AK-47 (for free) and bingo, it’s wartime. That’s what Len called asymmetrical warfare.

  I often wonder if someone in Washington looked at the cost of sending over people like me and said, “You know what, this is not sound Keynesian economics. We put too much money into raising this guy in—where? Bakersfield, California?—sounds too expensive already. His mama probably put out pies to cool on a window ledge—just so he can end up dying in a fucking Huey Cobra crash? And how much does one of those things cost? How did someone that expensive end up in the shit? This is nuts. Don’t we have cheaper people we can send off to that godforsaken shithole? Isn’t that the reason we allowed Mississippi to be part of the country?…Where’s Lyndon?”

  “In his office, watching TV.”

  “He is not watching TV. He is watching TVs. All three TV networks at once. He’s paranoid. He’s gaga.”

  The moment I landed in Nam I knew there was no way we’d win the war over there. Sure, we had all these Hueys and fighter jets and shit, and Ann-Margret came and performed for the USO in Danang in ’66 and ’68, but we had expensive people like me playing with big, expensive toys that would never stand a chance against inexpensive—basically cost-free—gook soldiers playing with lots of essentially free Commie toys. It’s some sort of historical law. David and Goliath? Plus we were always getting crabs and syph, DEET burns, blister beetle scabs, and foot rot and ringworm…It was unholy.

  God, I was homesick in Nam. Nothing was familiar and everything stank, and man, those latrines with ventilation provided by Satan! I was grateful for the orders and discipline—otherwise I’d have cried all day. I always wanted to be on potato-peeling duty, except I went to a military academy, so they’d never have me doing that kind of chore. I’d have liked to be peeling potatoes because at least a potato’s a potato and you know what it is and that it comes from the northern hemisphere. Potatoes don’t have shuddering diesel engines that stink in your face, making sleep impossible, and potatoes aren’t yokels with teeth that look like handfuls of dice randomly stuck into gums inside heads with the intelligence quotient of Popeye cartoons…but I’m just being mean.

  We were all just babies over there. We shouldn’t have been there. It was stupid. We all knew it. April 1968: 48,000 men drafted and 537,000 troops in Nam. Those pansies burning their draft cards in New York City were totally right to do so, even if they did suck dick. I don’t think I met even one person in Nam who thought we were going to win someday. We all knew we were fucked. Maybe Ann-Margret thought we’d win. We just didn’t want to get killed…but then, obviously, I got killed, so…just more proof us boys were right.

  I’d like to talk to Mr. Washington General Guy someday…but time no longer exists for me, so what’s a day? I’d ask, “Sir, why did you think it was a good idea?”

  “Who said any of this was a good idea? How old are you, boy? Let me see—Private Garland?”

  “Call me Don. I was a month shy of nineteen when I was killed.”

  “Boo hoo, Don.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nam was obviously a total fucking disaster. There, are you satisfied?”

  “But wait—how long did you know it was a total fucking disaster, sir?”

  “Christ. Right out of the gate. If you want, I can go through my Day-timer and find the magic moment when it dawned on me that it was all a colossal goatfuck.”

  “Actually, yes, sir. Could you, please?”

  “Here it is: a telex from March 7, 1966. Mr. Bob Hope demands that he and Miss Margret be provided with Sealy Posturepedic mattresses with custom-molded foam pillows for her impending visit.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all. I read that specific telex, Don, and something inside me died. I don’t think Ann-Margret even knew the Nam reality. The reality was that Bob Hope had been in Nam before and he knew what a cosmic shithole that place really was, and he buckled at the thought of Ann-Margret witnessing the whole truth, because if she knew, then that would show in her performances. And then the troops would get spooked, and it would have just put the doom on fast-forward.”

  “But me…and all the other guys like me who got killed.”

  “You were cannon fodder. What else do you want me to say?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You and all the other guys—and women too, for that matter, goddamn dykes mostly—just cannon fodder. This somehow surprises you, Mr. Military Academy Graduate?”

  “Tell me more.”

  “This is getting tiring. The thing about males from about seventeen to twenty-two is that nature rigs your brains—don’t ask me how—so that you’re susceptible to even the stupidest fucking ideas, whatever they may be. And you’re out there carrying a rifle or a scimitar or—fuck, I don’t know…If it’s not the war, maybe it’s just a bitter, fucked-up English teacher who wants to poison you by making you hate all the writers he or she hates—I used to study English, and I remember those teachers. They didn’t care about what was good or bad—they just wanted to poison young brains. And that was just English classes. It wasn’t even something as visceral as putting dumbfuck rich boys from Bakersfield, California, out in some godforsaken toe-rot shithole like Bong Son to die useless, overfunded deaths.”

  “I see.”

  “Don, when was the last time you saw a guy in his thirties ditch his family and run off to certain death in some goatfuck war? Never. It’s a brain thing. Males from seventeen to twenty-two are genetically fucked. They’ll do anything for anybody and they’ll think it’s the right thing. They have no sense of risk assessment.”

  “That’s kind of cynical.”

  “Brother, young dumbos like you have been going off to war to fight for crazy batshit stuff since the dawn of man. Makes me embarrassed to be human sometimes.”

  “Thank you for your candour, sir.”

  “You’re welcome, Don.”

  You maybe think I must be angry for having been sent of
f so cynically to die in a pointless war with no clear good guys or bad guys, where young men were turned into zombies and ghouls and where everything good in the world was covered with a mixture of gasoline and Styrofoam pellets and then set alight.

  But what you don’t know is that I went to a museum once, in Toronto, Canada, in—1965?—and it was summer and my parents were arguing and my brothers were being a real pain, and I simply walked away from them, walked up echoey travertine stairs to another floor, into the rooms where they kept the displays of taxi-dermied life on Earth, and it changed the way I thought. Walking through those chambers didn’t feel like a boring school field trip: it was the most wondrous trip ever. I looked inside the glass display cases and they had an Alaska king crab with red prickly legs longer than my daddy’s arms, and there was a skeleton of a triceratops, and there was an extinct passenger pigeon, and a fungus that secreted a red blob shaped like a soccer ball. And there were foxes and butterflies and deep-sea creatures with little dangling light things in front of their mouths, and there was a clamshell the size of my car’s trunk and…I just looked at all of this life. So much life. Life in every shape and form and size, and I just stood there and thought, Here it is. I’m alive, just as everything here in these cases was once alive. So what is it, then, this thing called life? This thing called life that I share with all these creatures here.

  My parents were furious when they found me. I’d been gone an hour and we still had to visit some kind of castle thing a few miles away. But I didn’t care if they were mad, because I had been shown a small window in time. And I knew I’d been given something precious in my just sixteen years on this planet, a chance to share the Earth with those other creatures. It kept me going when I was in the shit.

  I thought, I could be a Butterfly fish off the Australian coast.

  I thought, I could be a leopard in a Kenyan tree, waiting to pounce on prey below.

  I thought, I could be one of those stray dogs who loiter outside the mess tent.

  I—you—we—anyone could be a coral reef, a cuttlefish, a gust of pollen or a bright yellow mantis longer than my foot. I was alive!

  My name was Don—Donald Garland—and now I’m gone, and I miss you, Earth. I really miss you dearly.