Generation A by Douglas Coupland

that’s never going to be eaten. That’s just scary.”
    Foul-mouthed ex–church lady here. I want to make you a bet. I bet I can make you think differently about your own head if you read just this one paragraph. Are you with me? Here’s what you do: rub behind your ears and then smell your finger—chances are you won’t like the result. Now I want you to take your index finger and massage the gums surrounding your top front teeth, squeezing out some of the guck trapped between your teeth and gums. Now rub your fingers lightly together and smell. Pee- yoo . The essence of halitosis.
    How do I know this? Aside from being a foul-mouthed ex–church lady, I’m also a dental hygienist. I know, I know—why would a person choose to be a dental hygienist? Let me tell you, it’s not like I was at a career counsellor’s office one day, poring through the pages of Career Magazine , saw an ad for dental hygienists and said, “Stop! That’s the job for me .” No, it’s one of those jobs people fall into: perhaps you’re interested in teeth but don’t want to commit a huge chunk of your life to getting a DDM. Or maybe you just want something to do until you have kids and drop out of the labour market. Or, like me, you just got kind of lazy and had parents on your back telling you to move on with your life and . . . one day you wake up and discover you’ve become a dental hygienist.
    Because I have Tourette’s, I make an awesome hygienist. Nobody gets away with anything on my beat. Have you been flossing regularly? Don’t say you have been, because I can tell you haven’t—so tell me why you’re not following my orders. By the way, your breath stinks, either because you don’t brush or because you’re doing a terrible job of it. Once I show people the guck-beneaththe-gums trick, they almost always begin to brush properly.
    I spent my first few hours out of isolation in a Winnipeg coffee shop, waiting out a snowstorm for my contact person, named Denny, to pick me up. I was kind of insulted that I was being treated as if I were a duffle bag filled with low-grade pot; I miss the days when governments had money. Denny was apparently snowbound on the other side of town, and so there I was, shunted into a coffee shop, its floor covered in icy grey boot sludge. The age of the clientele appeared to average between seventy and seventy-five. My first five donuts tasted heavenly; the sixth one made me feel like a pig.
    The only reading available was religious tracts somebody had left atop the trash can, but honestly, I was so happy to be reading something, anything, that I even read the 4-point Helvetica Light ingredients list on an empty cruller box a previous diner had kindly left on my table. The tracts were a curious blend of Olde Tyme religion, Mormonism and personal hygiene—sort of like me, minus the Mormon part. I read:
J OSEPH S MITH
Born 1805, Sharon, Vermont
Died 1844, Carthage, Illinois
    What did I want my own tombstone to read?
D IANA B EATON
Born 1990, Kapuskasing, Ontario
Died 2077, Becquerel Crater, Mars
    I am a child of science fiction. What can I say?
    My cellphone rang. It was my would-be escort, who’d now encountered a freshly generated snowbank at a Portage Street intersection and would be an hour longer. Fucking cunt.
    I walked over to the trash can, saw the business section of the Winnipeg Free Press and lunged for it. I had sat down and begun to read about new developments in solar fuel cells when I had a “blink” moment and looked up. Everyone in the restaurant was staring at me. I’d never felt so under the microscope in my life. I broke the silence: “What the fucking fuck are you looking at?” Awkward! “I’m just waiting for someone. Relax, yes, it’s me.”
    Afterwards, a few people came up to me and lamely asked for an autograph, and the penny dropped that this was going to be the rest of my life.
    Fortunately, a guy named Rick saw what was going on and asked if I needed a ride