If you’ve ever been in a health food store or a Whole Foods store, you’ve seen them. They hang out in the vitamins section. They’re all pale, usually skinny, with an intensely concerned look on their face. They scan the rows of vitamins, anxiously, as if some salvage is there. As if some pill can protect us from the ravages of our little existence.

I always want to go up to them and say, “Hey, why don’t you go have a cheeseburger and fries — and wash it down with a chocolate martini? I guarantee you that’ll do a lot more for you than another dose of vitamin D.” But of course I never do.

I think I understand them. Maybe (and this is the part I probably don’t want to admit) I have a little bit of them in me. It’d be nice, wouldn’t it, if some brightly packaged megadose could protect us? But unfortunately, as James Thurber observed, the claw of the sea puss gets us all in the end.