TOUGH TIMES CALL for communion over cheap beer. So after the first anthrax diagnosis in Florida, I found myself at a local café, sharing a pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon with a handful of acquaintances. Looking around our dimly lit, wheatgrass-serving environs, I noted that the place seemed really, really deserted for a Thursday night.

"Yeah, it is," agreed a girl munching on nachos. "But I don’t know why everyone’s staying home all the time. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?"

The question struck me as both uninformed and shockingly naive, since we had been inundated for days by headlines screaming about biological weapons. For the same reason rabid doomsayers love to yell about the Apocalypse on street corners, I didn’t let her remarks rest. "We could all get smallpox and die horribly disfigured," I offered, not quite realizing that I sounded more like a caller on Art Bell’s paranormal-obsessed radio show than a clear-eyed pessimist.

There was an awkward pause. "She’s in the media," a male friend informed the table, in the same hushed, sympathetic tone one might use while observing, "It’s not Uncle Loopy’s fault he shoots baby squirrels in the back yard; Uncle Loopy still thinks he’s in Vietnam."

Paranoia is never cool unless set to music — as when Garbage’s Shirley Manson sculpted pathological mistrust into a sultry come-on, or Bob Dylan’s raspy pipes exaggerated his suspicious tone in "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues." So I should’ve known not to insinuate my paranoia into a casual social setting. Afterward, I felt a bit the way crackpot Anne Heche (remember her?) must’ve felt, or should’ve felt, after her tell-all interview with Barbara Walters: slightly chagrined, somewhat reflective, and pretty damn stupid.

Until then, I’d been convinced that everyone around me was on edge, fraught with apprehension, and, well, scared shitless. In my surroundings, knee-jerk reactions to perfectly normal situations had become laughably skewed. The week after the terrorist attacks, a deafening roar sounded outside my office building, and someone rasped "What was that?" as a handful of my co-workers and I jumped up to peer out the windows. Outside, we saw nothing more sinister than gathering storm clouds.

Half laughing, I wondered the unthinkable: "Could that be nature?"

But when I heard myself droning away over that pitcher of watery suds like some dark herald of sorrow, I realized how paranoid I’d become. With my eyes fixed on CNN, the Drudge Report, and the morning papers, I’d concluded that constant — albeit irrational — suspicion was what post-terrorist-attack survival required. Only fools rested easy, I told myself, and I wasn’t a fool. Or so I thought.

Truth is, I had already begun to act irrationally. Within the past six weeks, I have caught myself: 1) holding my breath each time a plane passes overhead (fear of deadly-toxin-spraying crop dusters); 2) keeping my mouth closed in the shower so as not to swallow any tap water (fear of contaminated public reservoirs); 3) losing sleep and having paralyzing nightmares (fear of resting easy, thereby becoming a fool); 4) searching online for a Tony Blair girly-T (fear of recent lack of erotic fantasies, which somehow led to an inexplicable crush on a foreign leader); 5) standing away from air ducts and vents in public places (fear of cyanide in ventilation systems); 6) worrying that the guy with shifty eyes who moved into the apartment across the hall is a terrorist (fear of shifty-eyed strangers); 7) "profiling" every shady character on the train (fear of shady characters on the train); 8) getting off the train nowhere near my stop because one of those shady characters brought in a bag with two wires peeping out (fear of being bombed in the subway after reading about a gang of European terrorists who were caught on tape discussing how to conceal a bomb in a personal cassette player); 9) not opening any mail (fear of anthrax and overdue accounts); and 10) forwarding an e-mail hoax, specifically the one about staying out of Boston on September 22 because "a few drunk Arab men" had divulged that there would be "a lot of bloodshed" on that day (fear of a lifetime of guilt after family and friends blew up because I was too proud to forward a possible hoax).

In the scope of things, my reactions aren’t even that extreme. Never mind that Cipro sales are skyrocketing, germ experts are telling "panicky people" that ironing their mail will kill potential anthrax spores, and racist freaks have seized the moment to inflict violence on dark-skinned Americans. The LA Times reports: "State Department of Justice officials said Friday that the number of people buying guns jumped by more than 50 percent the week of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon over the previous week, and have remained about 32 percent above the previous year." And on October 15, the AP reported, "A Delta Air Lines flight from Atlanta to Newark, N.J. was diverted Sunday after two men were seen huddled together and speaking a foreign language in the back of the plane, officials said.... It turned out to be two Jewish men praying together."

The list could go on. Yes, creating paranoia is one of the ways terrorism works. But more than one elected official has asked Americans to be "vigilant." The problem with perpetual vigilance, as we’re finding out, is that we don’t really know what true vigilance means. We’ve been carefree for so long that most folks don’t know what it’s like to be incessantly alert.

Unfortunately, right now vigilance feels a lot like paranoia.

Camille Dodero will be looking for a Tony Blair T-shirt when you reach her at cdodero[a]phx.com

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001