[Palm Springs] is also the setting for Douglas Coupland's excellent book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (which popularized the term Generation X.) It tells the story of three friends who are disillusioned with modern society and decide to escape the rat-race and move away from it all into the Mojave Desert. There, forced to work as bartenders (described as McJobs - another term popularized by the book) their existence and outlook grow bleaker, and much of their free time is spent telling each other stories about their lives. A postmodern answer to The Decameron, with commercialization substituting for the plague, if you will. Anyway, hard to make the book justice, but it's a great (and easy) read - recommended for all!
A lot of terms and expressions are presented in the book with definitions in the margins. For exampe, here is the explanation of a McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.
Well, today I encountered anther one that made me laugh. Bambification: The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.
Coupland has written several other books that I have enjoyed. Girlfriend In A Coma which is littered with hidden quotes from songs by The Smiths. Polaroids From The Dead is a number of short stories with very different perspectives from the same Grateful Dead concert. Miss Wyoming is a story of an aging former beauty queen whose career is fading, and when she miraculously becomes the only survivor of a plane crash allows the world to think she's perished along with the other passengers. That sounds a bit heavy, but like all of Coupland's writing it is also both witty and observant.
