Oh Harold, jeez, I just don't know.
Things to Remember: The Gillette parrot. "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." The walking Kool-Aid pitcher that used to say, "Oh... YEAAAAHHH! " "O.B. Tampons... created by a woman gynecologist." Converse All-Stars. Night of the Living Dead. Brrrr! That last one hits too close to home. I quit.
July 14, 1990
We had a very long and very sober talk about these dreams today at lunch, stopping much longer than we should have, probably. We're just north of Batavia, New York, by the way.
Yesterday, Harold very diffidently (for him) suggested we start stocking up on Veronal and hitting ourselves with very light doses to see if we couldn't "disrupt the dream-cycle," as he put it. I went along with the idea so no one would start to wonder if something might be wrong with me, but I plan to palm my dose because I don't know what it might do to the Lone Ranger (I hope he's Lone; I'm not sure I could face twins).
With the Veronal proposal adopted, Mark had a comment. "You know," he sez, "things like this really don't bear too much thinking about. The next thing you know, we'll all be thinking we're Moses or Joseph, getting telephone calls from God."
"That dark man isn't calling from heaven," Stu sez. "If it's a toll-call, I think it's comin from someplace a lot lower down."
"Which is Stu's way of saying Old Scratch is after us," Frannie pipes up.
"And that's as good an explanation as any other," Glen sez. We all looked at him. "Well," he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, "if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we're the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven and hell, doesn't it? If there are any Jesuit survivors of the superflu, they must be going absolutely bananas."
That made Mark laugh his head off. I didn't really get it, but kept my mouth shut.
"Well, I think the whole thing is ridiculous," Harold put in. "You'll be getting around to Edgar Cayce and the transmigration of souls before we know it."
He pronounced Cayce Case, and when I corrected him (you say it like the initials for Kansas City), he gave me a really HORRID HAROLD-FROWN. He isn't the type of guy who swamps you with gratitude when you point out his little flaws, diary!
"Whenever something overtly paranormal occurs," Glen said, "the only explanation that really fits well and holds its interior logic is the theological one. That's why psychics and religion have always gone hand in hand, right up to your modern-day faith-healers."
Harold was grumbling, but Glen went on anyway.
"My own gut feeling is that everyone's psychic... and it's so ingrained a part of us that we very rarely notice it. The talent may be largely preventative, and that keeps it from being noticed, too."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's a negative factor, Fran. Have any of you ever read James D.L. Staunton's 1958 study of train and airplane crashes? It was originally published in a sociology journal, but the tabloid newspapers rake it up every now and again."
We all shook our heads.
"You ought to," he said. "James Staunton was what my students of twenty years ago would have called 'a real good head' - a mild-mannered clinical sociologist who studied the occult as a kind of hobby. He wrote any number of articles on the combined subjects before going over to the other side to do some first-hand research."
Harold snorted, but Stu and Mark were grinning. I fear I was, too.
"So tell us about the planes and trains," Peri sez.
"Well, Staunton got the stats on over fifty plane crashes since 1925 and over two hundred train crashes since 1900. He fed all the data into a computer. Basically, he was correlating three factors: those present on any such conveyance that met with disaster, those killed, and the capacity of the vehicle."
"Don't see what he was trying to prove," Stu said.
"To see that, you have to understand that he fed a second series of figures into the computer - this time an equal number of planes and trains which didn't meet with disaster."
Mark nodded. "A control group and an experimental group. That seems solid enough."
"What he found was simple enough, but staggering in its implications. It's a shame one has to stagger through sixteen tables to get at the underlying statistical fact."
"What fact?" I asked.
"Full planes and trains rarely crash," Glen said.