I get more afraid every time I look in the newspaper.

I’ve adjusted reasonably well to the more common threats like car bombs, exploding tires, SUV rollovers, E. Coli, Lyme Disease, Mad Cow Disease, nuclear war, nuclear power, global warming, airline crashes, secondhand smoke, road rage, air rage, hantavirus, West Nile Virus, flesh-eating bacteria, and of course the usual parade of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires, volcanoes and earthquakes.

I even managed to maintain what passes in me for mental stability when watching the eleven o’clock TV news with its ever-growing list of new health risks. Examples from real life: I saw a local news show not too long ago that warned in breathless tones about the dangers of mini-blinds (lead in the paint) apples (pesticides) and sleeping with your bedroom door closed (you might not hear the smoke alarm). This was before the first commercial break. Did this bother me? Au contraire, amigos. I went to bed and slept like a baby. Of course, that means I woke up screaming every three hours.

Lately, however, it’s beginning to look as if literally ANYTHING can kill you. For example, several firefighters in Britain recently barely escaped with their lives fighting a conflagration caused by, of all things, a goldfish bowl. According to the Reuters News Service, the firefighters "believe the bowl may have acted as a magnifying glass which concentrated the sun's rays and set light to a garden shed containing a rat-catcher's potentially noxious chemicals. The sun's rays are believed to have entered one shed where the goldfish were kept and then passed through to another where chemicals were stored." The resulting chemical fumes sent 18 firefighters to the hospital.

This gives rise to a number of questions: who the heck keeps goldfish in a gardening shed? Did the goldfish belong to any recognized terrorist group? And does Senator Lieberman need to hold Senate hearings to determine if federal Highway Funds should be withheld from states who fail to properly regulate the keeping of domesticated fish in agricultural enclosures?

After the Great Goldfish Scare, I was further stunned by the revelation that candles may be the next threat to the global environment. Research by the US Environmental Protection Agency has shown that the pollution from a burning candle exceeds the standards the agency has set for outdoor air quality. "If I were someone who had a health problem like asthma, and I were looking for things to prevent aggravating my respiratory problems, candles and incense are two things I would seriously consider" getting rid of, says Michael Osborne of the EPA. So much for romance, I thought. Then I remembered that under a Republican Administration, the EPA is prone to deliver such howlers as Reagan’s famous "trees cause pollution" sound-bite, so I relaxed a little bit. Until I found out about the money.

It seems that a group of researchers went to a grocery store checkout lane and traded people some brand-new greenbacks for the old money they were getting ready to spend. Then they took the old money back to the lab and ran a few tests. What they found was a veritable smorgasbord of infectious nasties. Streptococcus, Enterobacter, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae were just a few of the deadly and unpronounceable critters that turned up. I expect to hear this statistic in an ad for Visa any day now. "Remember: when you’re taking cash from someone, you’re taking cash from everyone they’ve taken cash from." If you don’t use plastic cards, you may consider wearing rubber gloves before you take out your wallet.

As if all of this wasn’t enough to worry about, now we apparently have mutant monkey men running around loose. No, this isn’t another one of my hallucinations (haven’t had one in years, and boy do I miss ‘em). The entire city of New Dehli, India (population 13 million) was recently terrorized by reports of a strange monkey-like creature that attacked people at random. Police received hundreds of complaints about the assailant, some of them by people claiming to have been clawed by the monkey man. Three people reportedly died by falling off roofs while trying to flee. Police claim the whole thing was either (a) a hoax or (b) the product of mass hysteria. Sounds like a cover-up to me. It’s got to be more than a coincidence that no one has heard from Mick Jagger lately.

So, in one week, we have pyromaniac goldfish, air-polluting candles, infected money, and mutant monkey-men to trouble our collective consciousness. It just goes to prove the wisdom of Mark Twain’s advice: "Find something you love to do and do it until it kills you. Otherwise, something you don’t love will do the job. "

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.