Strange Magic

I don't know why I've succumbed to magical thinking lately. I find I can't turn off the radio in the car unless the person speaking or singing is on a "positive" word or phrase. ("TrimSpa really works!--click.) I can't turn off the TV, which is usually tuned to CNN, if they're talking about another bomb going off, or some disease or natural calamity. That can't be the last thing I hear about. (I can turn it off if they're yakking about Michael Jackson or Martha Stewart, though.) I can't leave home without making sure I've left the light over the stove on, because I don't want to walk into a dark house. (You know what always happens in the movies when someone walks into a dark house.) At the store, I can't buy the first item on the shelf -- it's contaminated somehow. I have to reach behind it and take the second one, or maybe the third or fourth. I trot across the street instead of walking, even when there's no traffic coming.

This is all just nonsense, of course. It's the same twaddle as thinking that coincidences mean something or that "if you step on a crack, you break your mother's back." It's like when you're idly thinking about how afraid of dying you are, and then you suddenly hear about the latest celebrity to kick it, or you open a book and the first word that strikes your eye is "dead," and you think: Is the universe trying to tell me something?

I don't think so. This kind of magical thinking comes and goes with me. It usually means that things are too good to be true at the moment, or that I need to make a change that I'm afraid to make. The problem now is that I don't think it's the former, and if it's the latter, I don't know what it is.