So I’m paying for my groceries at Basha’s the other night, and while I’m standing there, hypnotized by the bleeping of the barcode scanner, my glazed stare drifts down to the countertop where a neat green sign informs me that if I purchase more than four boxes of products containing pseudoephedrine, they will be obligated to report my name and address to the Department of Public Safety. It’s at times like this that I wonder whether or not I’m the narrator in a piece of speculative short fiction about a country preparing to wig out spectacularly.

So now allergy medicine will get you reported to the authorities. Sweet reason and rhyme, when will it end? What are they going to do if someone figures out a way to create a psychoactive substance using table salt and wildflowers? Maybe a War on Salt and Wildflowers.

Which is of course another huge part of the madness. Just declare war on everything. War on Poverty. War on Terrorism. War on Drugs. Hey, how about a War on Violence or even a War on War? Here’s an idea: win the War on Freaking Nonsense first and the rest will take care of themselves.








Stopping at the mailbox on my way home, I discovered that Newsweek’s cover story this week is about the meth epidemic that’s sweeping the nation and what an awful drug it is. Alright, you convinced me, meth is rotten scary stuff. But shouldn’t we be wondering why, as a nation, we like drugs so very very much?

What I’m trying to point out is that we Americans ricochet around the world knocking ourselves silly by obsessively bingeing on whatever flaps in front of our bugged-out eyes, whether it be food, lack of food, carbs, protein, alcohol, total abstinence from alcohol, sex, virginity, drugs, caffeine, antioxidants, gasoline, total abstinence from gasoline, TV, Internet, adrenaline, whatever.

In fact it seems to me that meth is almost emblematic, that it was inevitable that Americans plunge into something like it. From what I read in Newsweek it seems to put your body and mind into continuous overdrive, with the result that it ages you at what looks like ten times the normal pace. Why is everyone acting like this is an accident? Isn’t that what we all seem to be striving to do anyhow?