Okay, I’ll admit it. I may be stressed out. And if I am, I’m probably in good company.
According to Health Canada guidelines, my stress level may be nudging the point where I’m apt to go out and inexplicably steal a nice gold chain with an obscure, Polynesian-looking, totemic doodad hanging from it. Yes, that’s a real category.
Personally, I don’t think I have the chest hair or the tan to pull off that kind of jewelry. So I either have to throttle back into the relatively stress-free Apt to Steal Costume Jewelry Alert or start stressing my way up to nicking a Rolex. Which is absurd since I neither own nor wear a watch.
What, you ask, could I possibly be stressed out about? Fair enough. Outwardly, I appear very calm to those around me. Almost comatose some would say.
But stress is a self-inflicted wound and there are any number of reasons I might be feeling more stress than usual. For example, this very minute an obscure commercial jingle from the 1960s for a chewing gum that no longer exists and I never actually had in my mouth is on endless replay in the jukebox of my brain. I don’t know where it came from or why it’s there but it’s rolling around the semi-conscious part, stuck there like a skipping vinyl album and laying waste to vital synapses. I’m wondering how I’ll be able to work it into this column and keep a straight face.
Guess it wasn’t that hard after all.
I could be stressed because Tuesday morning is threatening to become Tuesday afternoon and in a couple of hours my editor will wonder whether I think it’s actually Monday. I’m in a bit of a time warp after spending the last five days or so minding grandchildren in Vancouver. The first night in my own bed since then, I woke up from an unsettling dream in which my Wonderful Wife finally decided I was too boring and left me for an itchy-footed Englishman who cashed in his Orthodontic Trust Fund and set off on an around-the-world jaunt, having decided travel was more important than straight teeth.
To make matters worse, Rosie the Granddog had, in the same dream, developed some sort of lower-body paralysis and was reduced to locomoting herself across the floor using what can best be described as the Flopping Fish Technique, admittedly hilarious if you could overlook the heartbreaking implications of her disability but made all the worse by my own sense of black humour, wanting to rename her Flipper.
I could be stressed by the infantile overreaction reported—or made up—in the media over the latest Somewhere Over the Rainbow budget the Liberals presented last week. Under-developed adults of all stripes seem to be terrified about the changes to the capital gains tax.
The Officious Opposition, having not much else to fall back on since the Liberals seemed to shanghai many of their ideas, have retreated to the old trope about deficit spending. The rest of the Trudeau haters find it all a socialized tax grab to address income inequality. It doesn’t.
The rest of the population either didn’t notice a new budget or have spent the time since humming Dire Straits’ line about money for nothing and chicks for free.
And few think the long-range spending plans will survive the next federal election.
There’s stress around the endless and worsening polarization between those who try to measure the inhumanity of Hamas against the inhumanity of the Israeli reaction and decide who has the higher moral ground when both are working well below sea level.
But the stressor that worries me most is happening south of our border. Some years back, the Orange Monster said, proudly, he could fire a gun, murder someone in Times Square and not be convicted of the crime. He did not say he couldn’t be convicted by a jury of his peers because he believes he is peerless.
I worry he is right.
The first criminal trial of a sitting or former president of the U.S. is underway in New York. I find it hard to imagine there isn’t one among the dozen jurors who doesn’t buy into his MAGA-Madness. One in 12 who won’t believe it’s all a witch hunt, conspiracy theory, damn the evidence, truthier truths espoused by a madman who could once again have the code to unleash Armageddon. One in 12 who think it’s preferable to have a president who will abandon long-standing allies, turn the Justice Department into his own personal vendetta machine, surround himself with sycophants who will do his deranged bidding, all the while chanting like drones.
The only salvation is my slim belief cooler heads will prevail. That and living in a relative bubble, not immune but insulated from the insane nonsense going on in the larger world.
The CDC—Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—says the best ways to deal with stress include, top of list, taking breaks from the news, especially what passes for news on social media. Check. Almost. Still troll major newspapers although fewer and fewer stories keep my attention past the first paragraph. Good advice, although John Prine said it better... and more melodic.
Take care of body and mind. The living-in-a-bubble thing works pretty well for that. Whether you work up a sweat and release endorphins skiing, biking, hiking or working out, it’s hard to dwell on stress and do any of those things, unless the path before you is a steep, mogul-strewn, stress-inducing minefield. Oops. Lots of those up in the alpine.
I’m not sure talking to others is the best advice the CDC could come up with. Nearly everybody else is just as stressed, many about the same things. Bumping into friends and acquaintances at, say, the grocery store probably isn’t the best stress-free place to chat.
And, admittedly, they lose me at the avoid-drugs-and-alcohol advice. Drugs and alcohol are not good places to go to escape stress. I’ll give them that. But if you find them a pleasant interlude as opposed to a coping mechanism, it’ll probably be more stressful to beat yourself up for having a beer or glass of wine or toke than will be a stress reducer. Just one man’s opinion; not peer-reviewed medical advice.
Or, if you’re privileged, you can stare at a blank screen and write a column about stress. Seems to work for me.
