Brain germs!

Don’t let them!—— . . . oh well.

Tessa Vanderhart, staff/Illustrations by Kevin Doole

This article was supposed to be about germs, but . . . fuck it. Stop overusing penicillin, and antibacterials, ye dullards of the world, and ye shall avert a great crisis . . .

Which is handy, because the bigger crisis is upon us: an uncommonly quick descent into collective mental unhealth.

No, not like the “looney tunes” you see pictured on TV — OK, well, maybe a little — this is a far more subtle decay. One day, it seems, you just can’t figure out, for the life of you, where you put your keys — or what smells bad. Maybe it was the guy beside you, yeah.

But, like most of our pathetic excuse for a civilization (and no, I don’t include in that generalization geographical populations that are not to be considered “civilized,” i.e. ones with clean-ish air and unfluouridated water), I’m depressed. Except I’m not actually just depressed, but rather depressed about being depressed about how very depressed all of you are and how — gosh darn! — that’s going to cost us our planet.

Although one in four people will experience it in their lifetime (though I hardly think that statistic is currently accurate; try five in four), the first Google hit for “depression in Canada” is the Great Depression, something I don’t feel all that depressed about. Meaning that people are piddly-piddly popping the spam-advertisements instead.

Canada has more depressed people than any other country in the world, with the exception of Sweden (if I remember correctly). This impedes our ability to do what we do best — consume! I mean, some of us can’t sleep enough, so we eat too much, and others can’t get enough to eat, so we sleep too much and miss work — what a bummer!

One day, I reckon, instead of going to bed at a reasonable time we’ll all, collectively, be staying up super-late — Full House reruns? At least I was on Boing Boing — and — not again! — we’ll all collectively sleep in and miss our morning classes/jobs/meetings with our burly and bloodthirsty debtors and — ooopsie, daisy! — all commerce will stop.

It will be the most beautiful thing in the world.

And then, as our collective taken-from-our-mother’s-closet itchy-wool blankets get too hot, and our apathetically unwashed bodies start to sweat, we’ll all get up, scrambling to our long-unheard alarm clocks, and pull it through, thus precluding our one! great! chance! and, resignedly, resigning our great and terrible world to its great and terrible end.

Wait, what?