polaroids de figuras vivas

..hoje acordei assim.
apetece-me escrever; mas não consigo escrever.
apetece-me levantar vôo; mas faltam-me as asas - e o resto.
hoje acordei assim. 'transformei-me nisto' - no sentido em que gregor samsa, naquela imprecisa manhã, se tinha 'transformado naquilo'.
fui à gaveta dos fundos e encontrei-o(-me).

(hoje o meu nome é douglas coupland, uma formulação radical de mim)

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.
Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounded like a quiet tragedy.
Technology does not always equal progress.
I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.
When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.
I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.
Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? ...I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.
I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.
Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.
I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.
When you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.
The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.
I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals -- things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty... that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.
I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.
Language is such a technology.
Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.
At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identites - to clarify just who it is we really are?
We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.
At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.
Nobody believes the identites we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
There's nothing at the center of what we do.
Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.
There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now.
What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?
If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.

http://www.coupland.com