Free Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland Page B

been watching the blue-white snows of Channel 1.
    Here’s another thought, this one about Reg: when I was maybe twelve, I got caught plundering the neighbors’ raspberry patch. Talk about sin. For the weeks that followed, my father pointedly pretended I didn’t exist. He’d bump into me in the hallway and say nothing, as if I were a chair. Kent the politician always stayed utterly neutral during this sort of conflict.
    The bonus of being invisible was that if I didn’t exist, I also couldn’t be punished. This played itself out mostly at thedinner table. My mother (on her sixth glass of Riesling from the spigot of a two-liter plastic-lined cardboard box) would ask how my woodwork assignment was going. I’d reply something like, “Reasonably well, but you know what?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThere’s this rumor going around the school right now.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œYeah. Word has it that God smokes cigarettes.”
    â€œJason, please don’t…”
    â€œAlso, and this is so weird, God drinks and he uses drugs. I mean, he invented the things. But the funny thing is, he’s exactly the same drunk as sober.”
    Mom recognized the pattern. “Jason, let it rest.” Kent sat there waiting for the crunch.
    Taunting my father was possibly the one time where I became vocal. Here’s another example: “It turns out God hates every piece of music written after the year 1901.” The thing that really got to Dad was when I dragged God into the modern world.
    â€œI hear God approves of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance.”
    Silence.
    â€œI hear that God has a really bad haircut.”
    Silence.
    During flu season and the week of my annual flu shot: “I hear that God allows purposefully killed germs to circulate in his blood system to fend off living germs.”
    Silence.
    â€œI hear that if God were to drive a car, he’d drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof…with leather upholstery and an opera window.”
    â€œWould the thief please pass the margarine?”
    I existed again.
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    It’s midnight and Kent’s memorial is over. Did I make it there? Yes. And I managed to pull my act together, and wore a halfway respectable suit, which I cologned into submission. But first I packed Joyce in the truck, and we drove to fetch Mom from her little condo at the foot of Lonsdale-a mock-Tudor space module built a few years ago, equipped with a soaker tub, optical fiber connections to the outer world and a fake wishing well in the courtyard area. Everyone else in the complex has kids; once they learned that Mom is indifferent to kids and baby-sitting-and that maybe she drinks too much-they shunned her. When I got there she was watching Entertainment Tonight while a single-portion can of Campbell’s low-sodium soup caramelized on the left rear element. I sent it hissing into the sink.
    â€œHey, Mom.”
    â€œJason.”
    I sat down, while Mom gave Joyce a nice rub. She said, “I don’t think I can make it tonight, dear.”
    â€œThat’s okay. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
    â€œIt’s a beautiful evening. Warm.”
    â€œIt is.”
    She looked out the sliding doors. “I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun.”
    â€œI’ll come join you.”
    â€œNo. You go.”
    â€œJoyce can stay with you tonight.”
    Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA, and in the end,I’m not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce’s need to be needed, and I let them be.
    It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the