Hey You, Go Wash Your Hands

I am a member of the Public, and I am interested in staying Healthy during this current Cold and Flu Season, so please, for my Health, and the combined, aggregated, and agglomerated Health of this Great Nation of ours, go wash your hands. Seriously, this is how it all starts, you and your hands, touching everything, and then, eventually, my hands touch the stuff you touched, and then no matter how good I am about not touching myself in Bad Places — which for the purposes of this discussion include, but are not limited to, the eyes, ears, nose, and throat — I wake up with a Cold and/or Flu. Thanks a lot.

Then there are all the things you and your hands touch: doorknobs, and all the stuff in the restroom, and salad bars, and money. Although right now there’s no way I touch enough money for it to be a way that I’m gonna get the Cold and/or Flu, but if you are someone who works in an Industry where they have to touch money all the time, man, maybe you should wear gloves or something, because money must be the dirtiest thing out there to touch, bleagh. I mean, everybody touches money, right? It gets passed around for years and years, right? Think about it, you can look on your money and there’s even a date stamped or printed on it showing you how long that particular piece of money has been passed from human to human until it ended up in your palm for you to pass on to the next victim. That’s got to be the dirtiest thing you touch all day, money, unless your job involves routine exposure to like, garbage or dead animals, or you work in a hospital, but if you do that stuff you take precautions, yes?

It’s like, anybody can walk up to you and hand you a dollar they just had in the most horrible place, germ-wise, and you’d be like “hey, wow, thanks, a dollar!” Or did you ever find some money lying on the sidewalk? Did you leave it there because it’s on the dirty filthy sidewalk, or did you scoop it up and go blow it on a slice of pizza or maybe some Starbucks or something? I mean, if it was a five or a ten, Starbucks-wise. Man, think about it, the people at Starbucks could be touching everybody’s money and then touching the coffee cup you touch, right? And places that have the “Take a Penny/Leave a Penny” cup? How scuzzy is what’s in there, eh? I wonder if anybody worries about this and ends up washing their money? Or putting that hand-sanitizer all over it? I think hand-sanitizer is bad, though, I think it’s like, accelerating the rate of mutation of the Cold and/or Flu and helping turn all that stuff into the Super Cold and Flu bug, you know? Do you clean your money? You can, I guess, since the coins are washable and the paper money is made out of linen or something, so you could totally launder it, in the non-criminal-enterprise sense of the term. Have you rubbed at your eye, ear, nose, or throat at anytime since you started reading this? See, you should go wash your hands.

Along with the hand-washing, I employ a method of Positive Visualization where my Health is concerned, always thinking about what got touched by who, so I can avoid touching it or wash my hands afterwards, and I don’t need you and your Negativity poo-pooing all over my Best Practices with regards to protecting myself from you and the possibility you are a vector of the Cold & Flu. Nothing personal. Go wash your hands.

I’m not obsessive-compulsive about this stuff. I’ve totally eaten food after I dropped it on the floor, you know? I mean, not, like, soup or pudding, or anything extreme, but I take certain calculated-risk chances because I know that I have been endowed with a battery of natural defenses against all the teeny-tiny little microbes or bacteriums or whatever that end up making us, The People, sick with The Cold and/or Flu, and that’s all I care about right now, because it’s the fucking Cold and Flu Season, and there’s no need to upset the Balance of Nature and increase the odds of some Common Cold and/or The Flu finding its way into my Temple, you know?

C’mon, you need to go and wash your hands. It’s not unreasonable to do this, it’s common sense, and besides helping me, it will also help you to avoid the Cold and Flu, but if your prophylaxis was sketchy and it’s too late, you now need to not come to my workplace sick with your sick breath sicking sickly sicknesses all up inside my office breathing-air which, during Cold and Flu season, ends up being sick-building-recycled more than usual because nobody will toughen up and put on a sweater or a warm hat indoors so we can crack a goddamn window just to get some fresh air coming into the building, which, if it isn’t technically a sick building, is basically at this point a building where people come in sick and sniffly and phlegmy-cough on stuff and breathe all over the place and then touch all the surfaces of everything I touch in the whole wide world with their sick-touching hands.

I’m not even saying you have to go and get a flu shot, because I know a lot of people think they are gonna get sick or a sore arm or be injected with Government Mind Control Agents if they get a flu shot for the H1N1 and the H3N2 and the Influenza B and whatever. Fine, don’t get a flu shot, but if you plan on not getting a flu shot, and you plan on walking the Earth among Humans, you better practice some prophylaxis so you don’t spread the filth and pestilence to me, because that is what important about the Cold and/or Flu Season, keeping me healthy, OK? If you are feeling flu-ish, stay the fuck home, man. Get on the couch, watch some of that Maury Povich show, wow, there is like an unlimited supply of couples who cannot agree on who is a baby’s daddy, Jesus H. Christmas in July, why do I think I can get anybody to take prophylactic measures about rhinovirus? I’m doomed.

Previously: The Hyphen-American Dream


Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias. He is currently suffering through a rhino-cold.