Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

the Sasquatch - hoped to bring him out of the forest and into the world! I planned to teach him words
and clothe him and save him in as many ways as I could. My mother encouraged me to do this, to save
the soul of this damned beast, bear witness to him, make him one of us, force him to gain a world while
surrendering his mystery. I sometimes wondered whether gaining the world and losing one's mystery was
such a good deal, and I felt ashamed of thinking this. The world is a good place, rain and mud and
man-eating forests included. God created the world - I believe that. No theory of creation satisfies me,
but I have this sureness in my heart.
I remember finding out that the world was actually just a planet, in school in the third grade, and I
remember hating the teacher, Mr. Rowan, who discussed the solar system as if it were a rock collection.
It's so hard to balance in our minds the knowledge that "the world" is, mundanely, "a planet." The former
is so holy; the latter merely a science project. I walked out of class, indignant, and spent a week at home
as the school and my father tried to negotiate a meeting point between the rock-collection creation theory
of the earth and the more decent and spiritual notion of "the world." None was reached. I was put in
another teacher's class.
My father was an angry man, you know that, but he was also a man of little faith, constantly angry
because - because why? Because he took over his father's daffodil farm and forfeited whatever life he
might have created for himself. My father was fierce, and I was fierce with you, Jason, and when I
became fierce with you, I was appalled yet unable to stop myself.
My fierceness with you came not from any desire to copy my father, but instead from my desire to be his
opposite, to be righteous, and to be strong where my own father was weak. My piety galled him, and
when he was furious, I was driven out of the house and fields with threats of the leather strap he used for
sharpening his razor, out into the forest, away from home, for hours, sometimes days (yes, I ran away
from home) spent contemplating a God who would create an animal like my father, a religious man
without faith. A fake man - a human form containing nothing.
I never told you about my childhood. Why would I have? I told Kent, but never you. I suppose I
thought you'd twist the words and use them against me. You never said much around the house, but you
were a formidable opponent. I could see it in your eyes when you were a year old. You were
competition. Children are cruel in their ability to instantly identify a fraud, and that, especially, was your
gift and curse. I was so insecure about my beliefs that I feared being exposed by my own child. That was
wretched of me.
Your childhood: as an infant you were a crier, a creature of colicky squalls that frightened your mother
and me until we went to a doctor and he asked some questions and it turned out that the only time you
ever cried was just before or after sleeping - that technically you were asleep, sleepwalking, and what we
were seeing was your interior life -screaming in your dreams! Good Lord! As the years wore on, we
thought you were mute, or possibly autistic; you didn't start speaking until you were four. That is family
legend. Your first words weren't "Mama" or "Dada," but rather, "Go away." Your mother was
devastated, whereas I heard your words only as a challenge to my authority.
Listen to me, already - the words of a lonely broken man in his little apartment somewhere on the edge
of the New World. Let me change tactics. Maybe I can see myself better that way . . .
Here:
Reg, always thought that God had a startling revelation to hand him, a divine mission; that's why he
always seemed so aloof and arrogant and distant from the people and events around him: he was the
chosen one. And of course, Reg's mission never came. Instead, he was in his lunchroom one afternoon,
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