When I find myself in times of trouble, The Firesign Theatre’s Chester Cadaver comes to me … speaking words of wisdom, “Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But, there they are.”

And those damn bees are noisy. With all the humming and the buzzing, it’s hard to get a thought in edgewise. And if you think about it for a moment or two … if you can think about it through all that noise … you might realize that’s the bees’ job. To keep you from thinking at all.

When I was a kid I was deathly afraid of atomic bombs. I had seen newsreels of Hiroshima after the blast and knew “Duck and Cover” wouldn’t keep me from being turned into radioactive charcoal when The Commies dropped The Big One. The Cuban Missile Crisis made home fallout shelters the talk of radio, TV, magazines, and newspapers. I didn’t know my dad had a fatalistic side to him until I asked if he was going to get a shelter for us and he said, “No. If they drop the bomb we’re all going to die anyway.” Soon after, I read that the hydrogen, or H-Bomb, was thousands of times more powerful than the bombs we dropped on Japan. I remained fearful of thermonuclear war until 1980. Then I discovered something more powerful than all the nuclear weapons in the world. I was no longer afraid of bombs. I was terrified of television.