WHAT TO BE AFRAID OF IN THE SUMMERTIME

You asked! How can I refuse you? I’ve always known you guys were sharp—sharper than me by a longshot. You know that if you only know what to fear, you can fear more effectively.

Maybe you’re asking yourself, “How is it that Maureen is such an expert in what to worry about?”

The answer can be found by reading the dedication of Girl At Sea. Or I can just tell you here. My mother was and is a nurse, an amazing nurse. But she’s also very, very, very cautious, and I was trained from a young age that everything is dangerous, if you only look at it from the right perspective. I have been prepared for Doom since I was just a tiny mj, and my training continues every time I go to Chez Johnson. When I was there a week ago, visiting while I was signing books in Pennsylvnia, my mother had just come back from a work-related conference on the Coming Pandemic. She quite seriously gave me instructions on what to do, on the procedures involved when we are all barricaded in our houses, when the roads and shops are closed down, when human contact will be cut off for weeks and months. All that over a cup of tea in the afternoon! I’ve been getting lessons like this all of my life.

This is why I am the person to tell you what to be Afraid Of In The Summertime.

This list is by no means comprehensive. I could write entire books on this subject. I just wanted to hit some of the major points. I may have to make one of these lists for every season and maybe for major holidays, if you find it helpful.

(Note: there are no jellyfish on this list. I’ve covered them in depth on this blog and in Girl At Sea.)

Before I begin, I just wanted to say that you can now find out where FREE MONKEY is on his World Tour by reading his LiveJournal page! I didn’t make this page—his hosts created it as a way for him to report back from the road. I see from it that he has been reading my blog, so I hope he reads this entry. I am worried for his safety out there!

BIRDS

It’s summer. You’re going to be outside a lot, right? Walking around on the beach, in the woods, down your street . . . that kind of thing. Which means you are a walking target for our Feathered Enemies.

Basically, the birds are out to get us, perhaps in retaliation for the cages, the poultry industry, and our alliance with the cats. Oh, you’re laughing, huh? You think birds are adorable and harmless? Think again.

Birds have been after us for a long time. They managed to take out one of history’s first and greatest playwrights, Aeschylus, inventor of tragedy. They sent an eagle to do that job. It flew low and dropped a turtle on his head. This very targeted, cultural attack has since become more of a widespread movement. Witness: seagulls swooping out of the sky and attacking English grannies’ heads, wood grouses throwing themselves at Norwegian police officers on bicycles, and organized gangs of grackles swooping down on entire city blocks.

And of course, now they’re developing their very own flu.

There are a handful of rebel alliance birds who are with us, like this one who attacked its owner’s murderer and then fingered the culprit to police (and was apparently not bothered by the fact that its owned had named it “Bird”). These birds are far and few between. The majority of them want nothing more than to pluck out our eyes and make nests in our rib cages.



After you.

THE SUN

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you know all about sunblock and skin cancer. You have a really good lip balm and a zinc stick and a hat. Well, none of that is going to help when the sun explodes.

You heard me. That thing is about to blow up, and the sooner we get away from it, the better. We only have 4.5 billion years before it turns into a red giant, expands, and takes over the orbit of Mercury, Venus, and Earth. Apparently, the Earth is going to make a general run for it, but even under the best of circumstances, the seas will dry up and the atmosphere will burn away. No amount of air conditioning is going to help.

So instead of sitting on the beach, letting Our Big Orange Enemy burn you, you should be making a plan. I realize Pluto is no longer a planet, but its shiny, icy surface is going to look pretty appealing during the Big Barbeque. Spend your summer sharpening your ice skates and studying all the astrophysics you can. Time is ticking away.


Also after you.

DEADLY FISH

So, you’re going swimming this summer, right? Well, you might as well just throw yourself into a live volcano. You’re just giving yourself to the fish.

No, I don’t mean sharks. Believe it or not, sharks are low on my list of summer concerns. I watch Jaws, and I laugh.

The fact is, sharks rarely attack humans. The Jaws phenomena is all part of a campaign designed to divert our attention from the fish who are really after us. Like the snakehead fish. The snakehead fish does something that no fish should be able to do: walk. Or slither, at any rate. If they have eaten everything in one lake, they can climb out and go to another. And these things are big, up to a meter long, with sharp teeth. Can you think of anything worse that a meter-long, toothy, walking fish? Because I can’t.

By this point in their rapid evolutionary progress, they have to have worked out other modes of transportation, possibly rental cars or skateboards. Ignore them if you want. Worry about the sharks if it makes you feel better. But when the skateboarding snakefish comes in the night and out pops the tiny tooth, don’t say I didn’t warn you. It is only a matter of time before they team up with the birds.


Boats won’t save you.

RABIES

Ah, summer nights. Perfect for opening the windows and letting the night breeze in. Oh, and also FLYING DEATH.

When I was little, my mother liked to send me off to bed at night with this story: there was a little boy, just slightly older than me, who lived somewhere. (It wasn’t a very specific story.) He didn’t have screens in his windows. One night, a rabid bat flew in, bit him, and he died. I’m not entirely sure what the point was of telling me this. I think it was something about the importance of window screens. I was probably the only five year-old in town who was actively admonishing adults to get them and keep them in good condition.

It’s actually kind of tricky to get rabies in the United States, but tricky does not mean impossible. Bats still remain one of the most common vectors of the disease. It’s extremely tricky to get it in England and Ireland, because it was eradicated there in the early 20th century, and the English and Irish put a lot of effort into keeping it out. They can’t, however, stop you from being attacked and eaten by football hooligans. It doesn’t exist at all in Australia or New Zealand, but since everything else that lives there can kill you, this hardly seems to matter.



See the anger in its eyes.

CELEBRITIES

If you think you’re safe because Lindsay’s in rehab and Paris is behind bars, you are hopelessly naïve. The Celebrity Army is still strong. Only people who are not normal would go to so much trouble to convince us how normal they are. “We’re just regular people,” they all say. No, they’re not. They want to adopt us, convert us, mow us down with their cars, flash us, make us read their horrible books, shout insane things at us, expose their bony bodies at us, feed us weird diet food, sell us stuff, and generally take way our time, money, souls, and attention scrap by precious scrap, until we are empty husks.

Only a few (Mos Def, Abba, Simon Pegg, the cast of Law and Order) want to protect you. The rest won’t stop until we have all been consumed. This is fact.

And what about Paris and La Lohan? When those two bust out later this summer, they’re going to be all “mommy needs a drink.” And then, no sidewalk will be safe. If I had a stun gun, I would be out there protecting you, but no one will let me have one. Think about that while you try to get to sleep tonight.

Maybe by this point you’ve wised up and decided to stay inside this summer with the curtains drawn. Good for you. But you still have plenty of things to worry about.

SHELVES

Shelves are the sleeper cells of deadly household items. They sit quietly for years, helping you, holding up your stuff, and then . . . they spring. Witness the case of 38 year-old Mariesa Weber, whose family had thought she had been kidnapped from their Florida home. They reported her missing, and for 11 days, they searched frantically for her. It turns out, she had fallen behind a bookcase while reaching around it, trying to adjust the plug of the TV set. No one noticed this until her sister saw a foot sticking out from the “bookcase trap” almost two weeks later.

DIET COKE

I always say it will be jellyfish, but I think it’s Diet Coke that’s really going to get me in the end. I was attacked by a Diet Coke the other day, as I reported here. It fell on my foot and then exploded into my eye.

I should really take the warning. Though I try to eat healthy, I do have a fondness for Diet Coke. This is bad, because Diet Coke is seriously out to get you. It has no nutritive value whatsoever. The sweeter, aspartame, has been linked to almost one hundred health problems, including cancer and brain lesions and other weird things. Though this link is not proven, the government takes it seriously enough to warn Air Force pilots not to drink products containing aspartame before flying. Those sweetened with sucralose (Splenda) may not be much better.

If the aspartame doesn’t get you, the rest of the drink will. The phosphoric acid in sodas displaces calcium from the bones. Many soft drinks are contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen. Also, Coke (and Pepsi, and really add sodas) is so acidic that it can (as I explain in The Key to the Golden Firebird) dissolve buildup on the nodes of a car battery.

Basically, we would all be better off if we just drank wholesome things like water, fruit juice, or (in my case) tea. But, of course, I am drinking a Diet Coke as I type this, and therefore speeding my way towards Doom.

There you go. Just seven of the thousands of things to worry about. Feel free to add the to list.