Ethnomagnetism: the

tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: "You wouldn't understand it there, mother — they hug where I live now."

"Now: when you become a Basement Person, you drop out of the system. You have to give up, as I did, your above-ground apartment and all of the silly black matte objects inside as well as the meaningless rectangles of minimalist art above the oatmeal-colored sofa and the semidisposable furniture from Sweden. Basement People rent basement suites; the air above is too middle class.

"I stopped cutting my hair. I began drinking too many little baby coffees as strong as heroin in small cafes where sixteen-year-old boys and girls with nose rings daily invented new salad dressings by selecting spices with the most exotic names ('Oooh! Cardamom! Let's try a tea­spoon of that!'). I developed new friends who yapped endlessly about South American novelists never getting enough attention. I ate lentils. I wore llama motif serapes, smoked brave little cigarettes (Nazionali's, from Italy, I remember). In short, I was earnest.

"Basement subculture was strictly codified: wardrobes consisted primarily of tie-dyed and faded T-shirts bearing images of Schopenhauer or Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, all accessorized with Rasta doohickeys and badges. The girls all seemed to be ferocious dykey redheads, and the boys were untanned and sullen. No one ever seemed to have sex, saving their intensity instead for discussions of social work and gener­ating the best idea for the most obscure and politically correct travel destination (the Nama Valley in Namibia—but only to see the daisies). Movies were black and white and frequently Brazilian.

"And after a while of living the Basement life-style, I began to adopt more of its attitudes. I began occupational slumming: taking jobs so beneath my abilities that people would have to look at me and say, 'Well of course he could do better.' I also got into cult employment, the

best form of which was tree planting in the interior of British Columbia one summer in a not unpleasant blitz of pot and crab lice and drag races in beat up spray painted old Chevelles and Biscaynes.

"All of this was to try and shake the taint that marketing had given me, that had indulged my need for control too bloodlessly, that had, in some way, taught me to not really like myself. Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food. It's not creation, really, but theft, and no one ever feels good about stealing.

"But basically, my life-style escape wasn't working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends—no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs. I was an imposter, and in the end my situation got so bad that I finally had my Mid-twenties Breakdown. That's when things got pharmaceutical, when they hit bot­tom, and when all voices of comfort began to fail."

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Ever notice how hard it is to talk after you've eaten lunch outside on a
super-hot day? A real scorcher? Shimmying palm trees melt in the
distance; I absentmindedly stare at the ridges in my fingernails and
wonder if I'm receiving sufficient dietary calcium. Dag's story continues.
I runs in my head while the three of us eat lunch. "By then it was
winter. I moved in with my brother, Matthew, the jingle writer. That
res in Buffalo, New York, an hour south of Toronto, and a city which
• once read had been la- beled North America's

first 'ghost city' since a sizable chunk of its

core businesses had just up and left one fine

1970s day. "I remem- ber watching Lake Erie

freeze over a period of days from Matthew's

apartment window and thinking how corny but

apt the sight was. Mat- thew was out of town fre-

quently on business, and I'd sit by myself in the middle of his living room floor with stacks of pornography and bottles of Blue Sapphire gin and the stereo going full blast and I'd be thinking to myself, 'Hey! I'm having a party!' I was on a depressive's diet then—a total salad bar of downers and antidepressants. I needed them to fight my black thoughts, was convinced that all of the people I'd ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and that I wasn't. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life. I couldn't answer the telephone; I

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