The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland

get their licence plate number because I was too busy cutting them off in traffic. I guess they followed me to the lot here at work, which is all to say that I deserved it, but at the same time I'd like to kill the bastard. My Hyundai is-was-the only unflawed thing in my life. I'm actually more sad than I am pissed.
    No, I could kill.
    Death.
    Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. I'm so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey paw curse attached. All those Hollywood people are always saying to be careful what you wish for, yeah, but at least they first had a wish come true.
    Hang on, I'm venting here.
    One more breath.
    I imagine myself sitting in a glade surrounded by woodland creatures that rest on my arms and shoulders, sleeping, utterly comforted by existence.
    Breathe once more.
    Who am I fooling? I merely did whatever everyone else seemed to be doing. It'd be nice if we had a course in school called Real Life. Forget don't-drink-and-drive videos and plastic models of the uterus. Imagine a class where they sit you down and spell everything out, deploying all of that information delivered to us by our ever-growing army of wise, surviving ninety somethings ...
    · .. Falling out of love happens as quickly as falling in.
    · .. Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters. · .. Animals spend time with you only if you feed them. · .. People armed with shopping carts who know what
    they want and where they're going will always cream clueless people standing in the middle of aisles holding vague shopping lists.
    · .. Time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties.
    My Theory of the Day is that the moment your brain locks into its permanent age, whoosh, it flips a time switch and your life zooms forward like a Japanese bullet train.
    Or the Road Runner. Or a 747. The point being that your soul is left behind in a cloud of dust.
    And all of those dead people in your life. I dream about Brendan every so often, but when he was alive, I never dreamed about him. Ever. How sick. When he was a toddler, I remember worrying about the fact that I never dreamed about him. If someone's big in your life, you dream about them. Is their absence from your dreams disloyal? Is it cheating? I dream about my old high school locker twice a week. I dream about our old next-door neighbour's poodle-dead twenty years now-twice a month, and I'm sure if I stared at snails, they'd become a nightly feature with me.
    The thing about dreaming about dead people is that you don't know they're dead-your brain makes you forget that one key fact. And then you wake up and remember they're dead, and you feel the loss all over again, every single time. You feel scooped out and hollow. I do. It's been three years now. Hit by a car while he was riding his bike. It was instant. Joan couldn't handle her Brendan dreams. Unlike me, she'd been dreaming about him since the moment she knew she was pregnant. Her counsellor kept trying to tell Joan that she should look at Brendan's dream visits as something wonderful, treasures to remember him by. That's when Joan stopped going to see the counsellor and went on autopilot taking care of Zoe. And then she was diagnosed with spleen cancer and she never really changed gears along the way, and the two years wore us ragged and we never recovered. Or, rather, I didn't-I think Joan did. Who knows? I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life. They merely get used to it.

Glove Pond

    "You answer the door."
    "No, you answer the door."
    As their guests waited on the other side, no doubt bored as well as chilled by gusts of arctic air whooshing in to refrigerate the fall evening, Steve and Gloria bickered.
"Why should I?" Gloria was indignant. "You heard the doorbell first." "We both heard it at the same time." "That's not true. I was upstairs, so technically you heard it first."
    "No, I didn't,"