STANDARD TRANSMISSIONS
The end is near
By Rik Davie/The Scugog Standard

The first significant sign that the end of days is at hand occurred without any of us noticing.

Never mind the earthquakes and the volcanic eruptions or the tsunami waves that come in their wake ... uh, can a wave come in a wake?

Never mind the revelations of that amateur Nostradamus. The sure sign that the anti-Christ is upon us came in a small news story in a Toronto paper on Wednesday.

Like the shining talisman of the demise of our culture it announced what every single one of us born between 1950 and 1970 has secretly feared above all other things ... they’re making a feature-length movie of Gilligan’s Island!

Seriously, Gilligan’s Island. What is probably even more depressing, no I take that back, nothing is more depressing. What is probably as hard to take is that I don’t recognize one person touted for the cast except Jeff Daniels as the professor.

Jeff can play anyone. He once played Bill Lishman so convincingly that he made me think I was having an acid flashback when he stood next to Bill while Bill talked to me during the filming of that all-goose classic Fly Away Home.

Speaking of which, the lead goose died this year of an apparent drug overdose in an East L.A. rooming house and was, along with Farrah Fawcett, snubbed at this year’s Oscars in the memorials. But that’s another story.

If you’ve got the feeling so far that this was an unusual week you’d be right. Just the other morning I had to go to our local clinic for blood test. You know the ones. Where you have to fast from 10 p.m. the night before and then go into a room with 400 other people who haven’t had their morning coffee and wait for someone to drive a sharp object into your arm and take out enough blood to build 50 or 60 clones. (That is what they’re doing you know)

So in I walk and I present my health card and my requisition. The nice lady seats me and a few minutes later I’m called and I’m thinking, ‘gee, this didn’t take long.’

“I’m sorry, she says. “We won’t be able to do this test today. This request is out of date.”

Out of date? I now see my trusty cardiologist only once a year and so each time I see ‘she who holds my fate’ the good Doc hands me a request for blood samples for my next appointment. Out of date?

“So,” I say, trying not to allow my caffeine deficient self say any of the things I’m thinking, “can I get it updated now? I mean, my Doc is just upstairs.” I didn’t fly in from a Stockholm clinic ’cause I like the gauge of their surgical steel.

It was done and I was done and I left and grabbed a passing cat and ate it before going back to the office.

But I got to thinking what the stop gaps were for in stale-dating a request to take blood.

Were they afraid that I had gotten healthy in the passing 12 months and had withheld the information so I could have bodily fluids removed from myself in some odd satanic rite? Were they afraid that I might just be some roving blood giver randomly leaving my DNA and all?

Perhaps I am a part of a terrorist group set on completely clogging the free world healthcare systems with bogus requests for blood tests in order to bring the free world health system crashing down and leaving us all dying from sinus colds with nowhere to turn?

Well, probably not. There is probably a plausible reason, I doubt there’s a good one, for this rule. But I have to wonder what would have happened if they had not noticed the date until after the test. I have this vision (again attributed to the use of experimental treatments in the 70s) of the OHIP Tactical Unit sweeping into my home in the dead of night, search lights from their black helicopter blazing outside my window as they re-inject the red cells back into my arm while pinning me to the bed. They’d leave with a stern warning, “Don’t try it again. You’re in the file.”

And no doubt I have a file. If I don’t, you can bet they’ll start one when they find out I’m complaining about Gilligan’s Island.