Looney Tunes

I've been looking for a therapist ever since my fish died. You know how hard it is to find a good therapist. Or maybe you don't. Well bully for you.

It's not that I need a therapist to deal with my fish's death, I've got binders full of drugs for that. It's that my fish WAS my therapist. When she finally gave up the ghost and swam into the light, she left me upstream without a paddle.

All I can say is, thank the gods for Netflix streaming. "Celebrity Rehab" got me through. Turns out Heidi Fleiss and Dennis Rodman were just what the doctor ordered. Who knew? And last summer, when my dog was so sick? Fuhgeddaboutid! "Mob Wives" to the rescue. If anyone knows how to stay cool in a crisis, it's those girls.

The thing about therapists — whether you find them streaming at 4 a.m. or at the bottom of a fishtank — is they help put things in perspective.

So what if your daughter has started her own inhouse piercing and tattoing salon in her bedroom? You've got Felix Baumgartner of Austria, LIVE! on YouTube, parachuting from a hot air balloon toward Roswell, New Mexico, 24 miles below on Planet Earth.

Twenty-four fucking miles!! He made it in under ten minutes, free-falling through half of it. Which pretty much describes my approach to life. Likewise:

"Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are!" Thus spake Fearless Felix upon landing. I wouldn't touch that one with a 24-mile pole. Or Austrian, for that matter.

So what if one of the preschoolers you teach leaked Number Two onto the big alphabet rug? From Q to U? "Prison Wives" will calm you down.

So what if your peer group is beginning to be heavily featured in the obituaries? Since when did you start reading the obituaries? What the fuck are you doing admitting you read the obituaries? Who needs an intervention, you've got "Paranormal Witness, Season One."

Put a space in "therapist," you have "the rapist." A therapist once pointed that out to me. I wasn't "seeing" this therapist, I just "saw" her at a party. I quickly put a space between us.

That's about the time my addiction to "Dallas" went into overdrive. Of course this was waaay before Modern Life, in the days of tube TVs and $900 VCRs and video rental stores that required a lien on your firstborn male offspring before granting you an account. In those days, "streaming" meant meeting at the Cedar Lake narrows to get stoned and watch minnows.

Ever an eye on their market, Netflix provides a hefty dose of nostalgia for us Boomers, so we can revisit our Booming childhoods and hang out with the Ricardos and the Andersons and the Cleavers until we're done jonesing for the Glory Days for another few hours. Never let it be said the engineers of Modern Life aren't sensitive to the needs of their elders. After all, they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for us. Well, some of us. I myself never managed to increase the surplus population, a fact which, over the years, has in turns made me feel anguished, really really motherfucking lucky, and/or hungover.

So as far as The Election goes? Sheriff Taylor is standing between me and all the madness. They don't even allow politics in Mayberry, they think it's some sort of communicable disease. Ain't gonna argue with that one, Goober. And when I just can't stomach another eyeful of Aint Bea and her homespun amplitude, I stream on over to New Rochelle and check in on the streamlined Petries. My "Oh, Ro-ob!" is bloody spot-on, if I don't say so. I've been known to use it on my husband when I can't for the life of me remember whose house it is I'm not cleaning.

Which reminds me. I've got "Extreme Hoarders" cued up, gotta book. I've got my cell phone on vibrate just in case I get a call from one of the plethora of mental health clinics I've left messages at, or from "Aquarium World." That's the orphanage where I adopted my recently deceased therapist. And you know how hard it is to find a good fish.