Free Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland Page A

handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression.
    “What the fuck is this?”
    “It’s a spork.”
    A spork , or a foon , is hybrid cutlery having a spoon-like scoop at one end with three or four fork tines. Spork-type utensils have been in use since the late nineteenth century. Patents for spork-like designs date back to 1874, when the word “spork” was registered as a trademark in the U.S. Sporks are used by fast-food restaurants, schools, the military and prisons.
    “A
spork?
Who the fuck would eat food with a thing called a spork?”
    “Look,” said Neal. “You can see a forky bit on theedge of the spoony bit.” Neal dug into his chicken. His sporkwork was surprisingly dexterous.
    “Jesus, Neal, watching you eat with a spork is like seeing Helen Keller at a ladies’ afternoon tea.”
    “Sporks are the wave of the future, Ray. Oh—pass me some of that ravioli.”
    “Will do.”
    I took two sporks and began using them to down some of the smashingly good pasta.
    Neal said, “Wait, a second, Ray—you don’t need two sporks. The whole point of a spork is that you only need the one utensil.”
    “Neal, I’ll use two sporks if I fucking well want to.”
    “But it’s defeating the whole spirit of the spork.”
    “
Spork spirit?
” It’s hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total fucking stupidity.
    “Ray, don’t get mad just because I say yes to life. I like to keep myself available to the universe, because it brings me wisdom. Maybe you just don’t want me to soar.”
    “It’s a goddamn fucking
spork
, Neal. It is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the fucking Western universe.”
    “Ray, just eat.”
    “I can’t. I’m upset.” It’s true. When I get exercised about something, the adrenaline kills my hunger. Fight or flight.
    “But you’re going to sugar-crash, Ray, and then where’ll you be? It’ll take you days to rejigger your system back to normal.”
    Neal, confound him, had a point.
    “Here,” he said. “You have to eat something. Start with these.”
    “What are they?”
    “Mixed nuts.”
    “What’s this weird-looking one?”
    “A macadamia nut.”

13
    When a movie is made of this entire soul-fart of an experience, this will be the point where we cut to a scene in which our hero opens his eyes to find himself in bed with an IV in his right arm, while in the background comes the sound of hooting, hollering and the loathsome Neal, singing and most likely dancing his own version of the 1984 Tears for Fears classic, “Shout.”
    What the fuck?
    As our hero regains consciousness, he will realize he is in a six-bed hospital ward shared with five nut-brown Samoan wrestlers, all disintegrating as a result of heart disease or diabetes garnered from a lifetime of fatty, sugary snacks purchased through welfare fraud.
    The music will stop and our hero will hear clapping and laughter, and then his faithful slave friend Neal’s footsteps approaching.
    “Ray! You’re awake!”
    “What the fucking hell is going on here?”
    “You had an allergic reaction, Ray. That macadamianut you ate. You swelled up like one of these fellows here—you almost died.”
    I shuddered and a wave of hunger went through me. “Neal, how long have I been in here?”
    “Two days, Ray, but I knew you had
Survival
spirit and would make it through.”
    “
Survival
spirit? I have no such fucking thing. What is wrong with you, Neal?”
    “It’s a good thing I have some paramedic training. Your eyeballs were about to pop out of your skull like Ping-Pong balls.”
    At that very moment, I heard a voice that made my gonads retreat into my groin.
    “Darling! You’re alive! All the whores along the International Date Line must be rejoicing at the news.”
    Fiona?
What was
she
doing here?
    “Hello, darling. I can see your brush with death has made you contemplative and given your soul complexity and depth.”
    “Fi, what in God’s name are