Magellan's Log: A.I.L Irascible Reaction No. 3

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The Anti-Irascibility League
of America

UNCONTROLLABLE IRASCIBLE REACTION NO. 3

Symptom:
You wake up to find that you are in the ICU of a local hospital, you having fallen comatose two weeks before and having remained unconscious since. Upon opening your eyes, your first observation is of a priest administering what appears to be Last Rites to you. This perception renders you comatose once again.

Possible Causes:
1. Though you get most of your information online these days, you do still subscribe to one print newspaper for early morning reading. You went out one morning and found that, though the delivery person had wrapped the paper in not one but two layers of blue polyurethane, the global-warming deluge had somehow seeped through and rendered the whole issue one soggy mass. Your last thought was a silent scream: "How will I get through the day without doing Will Shortz’ puzzle???"

2. You got up and groggily went to the bathroom where, while peeing you noticed that your spouse/partner/significant-other/co-cohabitor/fuck-buddy had once again squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle rather than from the end. This, after a major crisis a few days previous which, after hours of heated discussion, ended in compromise: You would henceforth offer no oral comments or directions while a passenger in the car, and your Other would always squeeze from the end.

3. After 15 minutes in the check-out line at the supermarket, you’d moved from 6^th to 2^nd, at which moment the checker flicked off her station light and placed the little plastic "CLOSED" sign over the price-scan window.

Cure:
The extremity of your reaction to such—let’s face it—quite minor irritants indicates that you have arrived at the ultimate condition of human life: incurability. The best you can hope for is either simple solace, for which we recommend the works of Franz Kafka, or a life of pointless cultural analysis and literary criticism, for which we recommend the works of Jacques Derrida.**

END

**If you undertake either the Kafka Cure of the Derrida Cure and find after a couple of months of the regimen that your level of irascibility has not noticeably declined, we have only one other suggestion: Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Each day commit at least one of the Journal’s inane editorial commentaries to memory. You will find that your mind is soon so completely benumbed by the sheer quantity of Brogdingnagian obfuscation that you will pay almost no attention to what is happening in the world around you. Your bland, imperturbable condition of self-satisfied Neo-capitalist indulgence will produce a personality inoculated against both the most trivial and the most damaging slings and arrows the world hurls at you.

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