Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

morning jobs, and he clocked out early once a week to watch the games down at the pubs. But Jason
never curried favor with people he didn't like. He never tried to fake being busy so he'd look good, and
he never fudged his opinion to suit the temperature of the room.
In failure, Jason could be truly himself, and there's a liberation that stems from that. Leave that shirt
untucked. Wash your hair tomorrow. Beer with lunch? Sure.
I wish I could say that success turns people into plastic dolls, but the truth is that I don't know any
successful people. The people in the courts are the closest I might come to knowing success stories, but
they're all vermin.
At first I wondered if I should take Jason and clean him up and turn him into a gung-ho
PowerPoint-driven success story, but that was never going to happen. I figured that out quickly, so I
never pushed him. That I didn't try to force him to change might have been my biggest attraction - that
and my manicotti Florentine - and the fact that I never judged him harshly, or even judged him at all. I
simply let him be who he was, this sweet, screwed-up refugee from a past that was so extreme and
harsh, and so different from my own. And he was so lonely when I met him - oh! He almost hummed
with relief in the mornings when he learned we could talk at breakfast. Apparently, that was forbidden
growing up. Reg must have been pretty gruesome back then.
Jason also had this thing called the glory-meter. A glory-meter was an invisible device Jason said almost
everybody carries around with them, a Palm Pilot-ish gadget that goes ding-ding-ding whenever we
come up with a salve to try to inflate our sense of importance. Examples would be "I make the best sour
cherry pie in Vancouver"; "My dachshund has the silkiest fur of all the dogs in the park"; "My
spreadsheets have the most sensibly ordered fields"; "I won the 500-yard dash in my senior year." You
get the picture. Simple stuff. Jason never saw anything wrong with this kind of thing, but when he pointed
the meter to himself, the ding-ding-ding stopped, and he'd pretend to whack it, as if the needle were
broken.
"Jason, you must have something in you to activate the glory-meter."
"Sorry, honey. Nada."
"Oh, come on . . ."
"Zilch."
This was his cue for me to say how much I loved him, and I'd spend the next ten minutes girlishly telling
him all the goofy things I like about him, and he felt so much better because of that. So, if that's fixing
someone, yup, I fixed the man.
Wednesday morning 10:30
I ended up needing five sleeping pills to knock me out, and it was all I could do to drag my butt into
work this morning. As an antidote, I took some trucker pills Jason kept in the medicine cabinet - heavy
duty, but they do wake me up. Fortunately, people will misinterpret my sour, inwardly turned face as
contrition after yesterday's cell phone debacle. However, I can barely think properly, let alone transcribe
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