Generation A Read Free Page B

because I set high standards for myself. If people are unwilling to live up to my standards, I am not willing to accept them, especially Luc, the greasy bastard at the Astrolite’s front desk, who expectorates all day into a blue Rubbermaid spittoon.
    A spittoon .
    He considers it a colourful character trait; I see it as the devolution of the species. But even the greasy Luc should know that to have one’s “self ” vanish from any world for no known reason is not something one takes lightly. In fact, one is well entitled to have a shit fit when this happens. Luc should have been more understanding of this, and I, in the midst of my shit fit, should not have criticized Luc’s love of anime comics, declaring them bourgeois escapist ecotourism of the brain. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly.
    And so I was out on the street, tossed into an outdoor Las Vegas casino of timelessness. It was sunny out—ugh!—morning sun or afternoon sun? Noonish, I supposed. I looked around at the cars and the Starbucks and the shop windows and the middle-aged people looking calm and rich, and I thought, I hate the world . I hate the way everything has a surface—hardness; softness—the way everything has a smell : chestnut blossoms and roasting chickens.
    I hate the way our bodies move through the world, clip-clop, like beef marionettes. I hate how the world has turned into one massive hamburger-making machine, how the world is only about people now—everything else on the planet must bow to our will because there’s no longer any other option. Fundamentalists rejoiced when the bees died out; to them it was proof that the planet exists entirely for and was entirely about people . How could such thinking not make you want to go out and vomit into the street? And then I thought, Julien, are you an environmentalist now? I remembered World of Warcraft and I dragged myself along boulevard Poniatowski, turned down avenue de Général Dodds while avoiding the dog merde and tourists too stupid to realize they’re in the 12th arrondissement, and then crossed avenue du Général Laperrine (all these generals; all these wars) and entered Bois de Vincennes, so matronly, so boring, so permanent and a bit too much for my head to absorb just then. My head was a disaster. So I sat down on a bench with two crones afraid of tomorrow. I looked at the trees. What season was it? Summer? Fall? Leaves don’t really fall from the trees any more, do they? They just kind of sit on the branch and randomly commit suicide sometime before January. Seasons are passé. Only suckers believe in seasons.
    I stared at a dead leaf while the barking of the hags pounded my ears. I made a disgusted sound and said, “God, I hate the real world.” That’s when I was stung—a feeling like a paper cut concentrated into a single point of skin. At a club, Ralphe once stuck me with a pin and told me I had AIDS —talk about shit fits! Ralphe is an asshole, and the pin was a Coke tab he’d somehow bent into a small jabby thing. But it stung, and so did the bee sting.
    I looked at this winged insect on my forearm and swatted it away in panic. The two crones looked down at the bee and then fell to their knees and began to pray.

DIANA
    NORTH BAY, ONTARIO, CANADA
    My name is Diana, and yes, I was named after Diana, Princess of Wales, just as my mother was named after Jackie Kennedy. Plus ça change . I’m the oldest of the Wonka children ( Julien’s term), and because of this, at first, I was more like an older sibling than a peer. I remember very clearly how and when I was stung.
    It was Sunday afternoon and I’d been on Sunday school baking duty. I was washing out some cake tins that had been soaking in water, and I remember dawdling because the tins smelled so wonderful—almond and sugar and lemon—and then feeling sad because almonds are pretty much a thing of the past. I remember all those photos of California almond groves, the close-up shots of the