Everybody has a โgripping strangerโ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe itโs the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the libraryโa stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying โDrop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,โ youโd follow them.
Douglas CouplandWhat's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.
Douglas Coupland