Magellan's Log: Do You Glow in the Dark?

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Do You Glow
in the Dark?
The Magellan’s Log Checklist from the Edge

by Jerden Purmort

Rigged elections? Collapsing skyscrapers? Crashing markets? Rampant neo-imperialism? Pre-emptive wars? Incipient fascism? SARS? Melting ice shelves?

Those, we're sorry to report, may be the LEAST of our problems.

It’s possible that we are all living closer to the edge than we think. Getting through the day, minute by minute, is hard enough. But then going home and watching the news has become a trial by fire, requiring repression, denial, and simple refusal to pay attention to what’s going on.

Psychologists and psychiatrists of every stripe have long known that we pay a price when we live under stress. The price goes way, way up when we PRETEND that everything’s hunky-dory and thus don’t try to do anything about it.

Denial, thy name is contemporary media reality!

The greater the stress and the longer the denial, the more extreme the symptoms.

The current stress attack has been going on since the night of November 7, 2000, with no sign of a let-up in sight. Everybody of course thought it was odd that, as that inteminable evening wore on, Dan Rather started to stutter.

Little did we know what lay ahead.

From readers’ emails and from observation of life around us, we have noticed sporadic outbreaks of some pretty bizarre symptoms in response to these continuing years of extreme stress and denial. On the basis of this information we have created a checklist to help you decide just how near the edge you are.

But.

No sooner had we completed the checklist than we realized it was an exercise in futility. Why?

Think about it. Who are you going to go to for help? Your physician, who most likely is suffering from her own bizarre symptoms? Your religious leader, who may be on his way to prison for, well, you-know-what? Your child’s guidance counselor at school, who packs heat these days? Your broker??? Your elected representative??????

Well.

Still, maybe it’s better to know than not to know, huh?

So. Here’s our checklist from the edge. Even if you have a lot of yes’s, try not to get more upset than you already are.

The Magellan's Log Checklist
from the Edge

	1. Do you glow in the dark? It is quite possible, you know, that your friends and loved ones have just been too polite to say anything. Press them for an honest answer and you may be surprised.
	2. Do you sometimes feel your body beginning to morph into the shape of your favorite animal?
	3. Do you sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, glimpse shadow people lurking in the corner of the room?
	4. After consuming a quart of Double Double Chocolate Triple Almond Rocky Road Quadruple Cherry Fudge, do you generally have a strong desire for a second quart?
	5. After your last x-ray or MRI scan, did your attending physician comment on the presence of any inexplicable, very tiny objects implanted behind your ears or in one of your sinus cavities?
	6. Have you suffered one or more episodes of projectile vomiting while listening to President Bush speak?
	*7. Of an evening, do you find yourself memorizing long passages from The Life and Loves of Frank Harris? And then reciting them to yourself during coffe break at work?*
	8. Do you believe that you are occasionally in telepathic contact with Osama bin Laden, Orrin Hatch, or Martha Stewart?
	9. Do you harbor the deep-seated belief that Fox News is profoundly biased in the most reactionary way?
	10. Do you retain a faint memory of the time when, in America, the word "freedom" and the behavior it implies applied not only to CEO’s, Southern Baptist preachers, and politicians, but to EVERYBODY?

END

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