Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

"Little breaths," she said. Her name was Angie and she was Irish. Twenty three, pigtails, flowers in her hair, and a leather choker with a small black stone in the front. I stared into the impossible blue of her eyes. She stared back. My eyes are brown and common.

I'd been hyperventilating during sex. We were in the back of her Volkswagen campervan. It was wallpapered with Care Bears cartoons. There were vegetables in the kitchenette's sink. Incense on the shelves, CDs on the floor.

I gave up. I'd been trying for a good two hours, but just when any sort of rhythm was established, I'd start hyperventilating. I rolled off, collapsed onto the floor. She sat on her futon-couch-bed, naked, and looked down at me.

Her ceiling was water stained and turning brown-green from mold. The plastic seal around the moon roof was cracking. It would start leaking soon. She got up. The shocks groaned. She groaned. She must've had rusted CV joints.

"How much did you pay for this?" I asked. I wanted to ask, "How much did you pay for this piece of shit?" but she was a nice girl.

"Six hundred dollars," she said. It was a good price. I stopped nit-picking her campervan.

She started getting dressed.

"Don't do that," I said. It was depressing and disappointing. There had been no orgasms.

"You need to see a shrink," said Angie the Irish.

I got up and started to get dressed too. She put her hand on my naked neck. It was cool and held no comfort.

"You're not mad at me for saying that?" she asked.

I was mad. I'd heard it a hundred times that year.

"Yeah, I'm mad," I told her. She was a pretty Wiccan girl from Vancouver Island, and hadn't seen many like me. Cynics don't last long in British Columbia. Nobody wants to smoke pot and stare at trees with a cynic.

"Mad like a fucking hatter," I finished. I looked into those eyes. They were blank.

"You have to learn to calm down, Jake," she said.

There were video cameras outside the van, recording the parking lot we were in. 70 percent of the people walking by were fat and would die of knife-strike heart attacks. There was a war going on. Somewhere. Women with unwashed jackets OD'ing on sewage-junk. Bad dogs being beaten up by worse owners. Men in hundred-dollar suits who wouldn't make eye contact with others on the bus.

And here I was, in a six-hundred-dollar campervan in Vancity, and I didn't want to calm down.

I left abruptly and without apology.

Josh Byer is not shy about popping his top.