Mike's Note: I'm a big fan of the fiction of Douglas Coupland (@dougcoupland)... I think I've read everything of his at least three times through. Last night I finished off Girlfriend in a Coma again. Use your imagination, here's how the penultimate chapter begins:
"Plan B is this:"
"You're to be different now. Your behavior will be changing. Your thinking is to change. And people will watch these changes in you and they'll come to experience the world in your new manner."
"How?" Richard asks. "How do we change?"
"Richard, tell me this: back in the old world, didn't you often feel as if the only way you could fully truly change yourself in the powerful way you yearned for was to die and then start again from scratch? Didn't you feel as if all the symbols and ideas fed to you since birth had become worn out like old shoes? Didn't you ache for change but you didn't know how to achieve it? And even if you knew how to do it, would you have had the guts to go forth? Didn't you want your cards shuffled a different way?"
"Yeah sure. But didn't everybody?"
"No, Not always. This feeling is specific to the times we live in."
"Okay..."
"And Richard, haven't you always felt that you live forever on the brink of knowing a great truth? Well, that feeling is true. There is the truth. It does exist."
"Aha!"
"Yes, well, now it's going to be as if you died and were reincarnated but you stay inside your own body. For all of you. And 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 to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life."
"This is Plan B."
"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 beyond ourselves.
"Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask."
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