Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Saturday afternoon 4:00
I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad,
slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never
really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front
of me - no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos - and so maybe I didn't want to leave
too quickly after all.
The cashier was changing the paper tape - why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the
counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wiseacre had strapped it into a little
sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.
I said, "I think our giraffe here is a bit sexually conflicted."
Jason said, "It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket - always a dead giveaway."
"Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment."
"I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes,
but he doesn't even understand why he does it."
"The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him."
Jason handed his toys to the cashier. "He's, like, a vice president of Nestléoperating out of Switzerland,
but he's totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil
stuff to third world countries. He sort of bumbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him ..."
"His name is Gerard."
Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."
"What does the 'T' stand for?"
" 'The.' "
We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don't even know who was steering whom,
but we ended up in the Denny's next door, and we kept expanding Gerard's universe. Jason said Gerard
had this real fixation about being manly. "He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships
George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and scrapbooks about him on eBay."
"And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has
never changed them."
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