Why is tin foil the accoutrement of choice for the mentally ill?  You don’t see/hear about folks with mental health issues swaddling their craniums in toilet paper or glad bags to keep the voices at bay.  Is this, as someone at work suggested, the result of a Jungian archetype placed in our collective unconscious by bad 50’s TV shows about aliens and outer space? 

This was a random thought that happened after I saw Helmet Guy today (see Under the Bridge blog entry 12.28.05) on the sidewalk and he was wearing his surge protector plugged into itself as a necklace.  This is not an irregular event per se, but it is also not an everyday part of his attire, as is the helmet.  So I got to wondering about what it is that prompts some days to be a surge-protector day for H.G. and others not to be.  Is there some moment during the day when things go wrong and the surge protector comes out?  Is there a sense at the onset of the day that there may well be spate of bad shit coming down the pike in the next twelve hours so it’s best to have on every available piece of protective equipment? (I have to admit that on days like the aforementioned I myself throw on my velvet pants because they make me feel invincible).  Or is it as simple as when I choose my grey scarf over my green scarf – only a surge protector instead of, say, hmm, I haven’t seen him wear anything else around his neck?