Sometimes it feels like the only thing keeping me from taking that five hour drive to the back of the garage is abject cowardice. That rhymes with "powerless," which is probably part of the problem. Maybe if I were bitten by a radioactive spider, I could take some sort of constructive action.

Is it just me? Am I the only one feeling this? Because that's all it is, really. A feeling. Or rather, a bunch of feelings. Like something unimaginable is about to transpire. Like we're being prepared for something. Like somebody knows something we don't know. Something big.

The last time I felt this way was late summer, 2001. From out of the blue, after years of mocking the very idea, I suffered a panic attack. Have you ever had one? It's like a migraine, in that unless you've experienced one yourself, you can't understand what it's like. And, also like a migraine, I've only ever had one. Unfortunately, that one panic attack lasted three days.

It started by waking me up in the middle of the night with a sensation like a garlic crouton was working its way through all four chambers of my heart. Stark terror submerged me in the frigid waters of total awareness. Everything simultaneously slowed down and sped up as I began to experience adrenaline time. I experienced the certainty of imminent death. A blood clot was ripping up my circulatory system. Or maybe my aorta had come unplugged from my heart. Whatever it was, I was dying.

Topping it all off, I couldn't breathe. I tried to inhale - gasping, gulping - but my lungs were Novocaine numb and dry as cotton. My ears started to buzz. I lurched to my feet, dark room spinning around me. My face was tingling from lack of oxygen. This was it� what I'd been half-expecting for years. It was "the big one, Elizabeth."

Let me tell you, dialing 999 doesn't even cross your mind when you're teetering at the brink of an all-sucking void.

I stumbled to the washroom, not even feeling the bone break when I smashed my pinky-toe against the door frame. I turned on the light and was shocked by the sight of my own face. Jaw slack and hanging, eyes wild and open wide. A twisted mask of pure animal panic. You fat idiot. You've thrown it all away for a bottle of scotch, a dose of speed, and a big bag of chips. A wasted life. Oh well. Goodbye, cruel world.

Then, just as suddenly as it had overtaken me, it was gone. I could breathe again. My hearing returned. It was as though someone had repressurised the airlock. Shaken and panting, I sat down and came to grips with being alive.

I couldn't get to sleep for the rest of the night, coming close, only to be jolted awake, certain that I hadn't taken a breath for minutes, and that I was moments away from dying. The next day, I made an appointment with my doctor for the day after that.

After taking some blood, putting me through a stress test and running an EKG, the doc pronounced my ticker to be in tip-top shape, especially considering the mitigating circumstances of my freak-show dimensions and drink/drug habit. He said my symptoms were more in line with a panic attack than a heart attack. I didn't believe him at first, but gradually, after researching the subject, came to realize his diagnosis was correct.

Now, more than two years later, the dread has begun to return. No full fledged attack yet, mind you. But at night, in those dark, racing moments just before sleep comes, I feel it building in my blood like nitrogen bubbles in a deep sea diver with the bends.

It's that Body Snatchers anxiety you get when you're surrounded by media that not only deny the obvious, but proclaim its opposite. The economy is the best it's been in decades! Pollution is just a junk science myth! We're selfless liberators with only the purest of intentions for Iraq, Afghanistan and whatever comes next! What can possibly become of a society where truth has lost all value?

Unfiltered facts being in such desperately short supply these days, we must look to style for clues to substance. And when we look there, what do we find? A bunch of morally retarded and spiritually bankrupt ciphers - all of whom have read far too many Tom Clancy novels - playing Masters of the Universe with real people's lives. Self-styled Men of Destiny simmered in arrogance, entitlement, hypocrisy and greed, and topped off with a generous scoop of messianic delusion.

So what do we do? We do the only thing we can. We continue to pretend. I suppose it's like giving up, in a way, but what choice do we have? In the midst of this hermetically sealed, schizophrenic boom/bust economy that is evolving towards some ephemeral abstraction of legitimate commerce - a parade of ghosts - we sacrifice our futures for a bag of Iscariot silver. The relentless drive to "brand" - cruel ritual of symbolic possession - has reached mania status. We trademark faces, abstract concepts, religious texts, even the genetic sequences of plants that have been on this planet since before we crawled out of the swamps.

Everything is digital now. Nothing is real. Everything is virtual, plastic and vulnerable. It's the Great Leap Forward all over again. We're newborns, defenseless and pink, tossed into a corrosive river of disinformation. All around us, the water is boiling with the shrill scream of razor-toothed piranhas.

We're expected to drown, or be eaten alive. I fear that we are.