Recently I discovered that I was going sane. It was surprisingly pleasant. There were weeks unbroken by fits of melancholia, rage, anxiety, despair, hypochondria or terror. Life, inexplicably, seemed worth living again, and I went through my daily rounds whistling “Redwing” instead of bristling with hostility and perspiring with fear that my deodorant might not keep me safe all day long.
Pleasant, yes. But—
“If you permit yourself to sink into sanity and continue whistling ‘Redwing’ like this,” the doctor explained, “you will be unfit to function in American society. You could very well end up in—”
“In a sane asylum?”
He gravely fingered commitment papers.
I had placed myself in his hands after being found in a traffic jam whistling “Redwing” at the steering wheel. It seemed obvious that no car locked into that vast immobilized ocean of machinery would escape before the next weekend, and whistling seemed a pleasant way to pass the time.
All around me, other motorists were mashing their horns, grinding their fenders and bursting blood vessels. The notes of “Redwing” intensified their rage. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you crazy or something?” they shouted at me.
A policeman came. “If everybody just sat here whistling ‘Redwing,’” he said, “how would we ever get any fenders smashed while nobody’s going anyplace? You mustn’t be some kind of nut.”
One must function, after all. How else can America fulfill its destiny? How else can fenders be smashed while going noplace? The doctor prescribed strong treatment—television and newspaper immersion.
All of one day I sat straitjacketed at the tube being doused periodically with torrents of newspaper. Hypochondria burst into full flower almost immediately.
“You’d better quit whistling ‘Redwing,’ Buster, and get your blood pressure checked,” said the box. “And while you’re at it, don’t forget—you could be diabetic, have muscular dystrophy, be suffering from alcoholism without even knowing it and drop dead any instant of heart disease, stroke or failure to contribute to the Arthritis Fund.”
The newspapers suggested that early death was probable unless I jogged five miles a day in unpolluted air (presumably in the Antarctic), quit eating beef (bowel cancer), stopped sleeping more than eight hours at a stretch (cerebral hemorrhage) and quit kissing women (influenza).
Tension. Fear. Anxiety. Only by changing an entire way of life could I survive to old age. Could I do it? Not likely. Why not? Too set in my ways, perhaps? More sinister than that—maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to kill myself.
Feelings of self-loathing and misery. Then—another dousing of newspapers. Ah, what despair! “So you live to old age,” the newspapers laughed. “Know what that means? Unemployment. Sleazy pension boardinghouses. Shuffled off to play shuffleboard, starved on Social Security peanuts, ground down by inflationary cost rises, stuffed away in fire-trap nursing homes.”
Intense desire to weep, melancholia rampant. Sense of hopelessness.
“Ah, there is bad news tonight.” (The box has taken over again.) “The ozone layer of the atmosphere is being destroyed by gases emitted from aerosol cans.”
Despair, sense of imminent doom. Guilt. Who is emitting those doomful aerosol gases? Me. And for what? Shaving. Destroying the earth for whisker removal.
Intolerable sense of futility to go with guilt. After all, why give up beef, kissing and eight and a half hours’ sleep, why move to the Antarctic to jog in good air, if the ozone layer is going to be wiped out anyhow by shaving cream?
The box attacks from the blind side. That graying hair—yes, it could indeed cost me my job as well as the love of ungray women. That early evening fatigue—could it really be iron-poor blood?
I shall not go on. I require only the first hour of television and newspaper immersion, but the full therapy lasts all day and, in some cases, a full lifetime. At the end, one is normal again. Depressed, enraged, anxiety-ridden, desperate, terrorized—normal.
I no longer whistle “Redwing.” I have forgotten the tune. The doctor says this is because I am again well adjusted to society.
Hey, I know an island far away. Let’s go.