#25 Hear-giene

So I’m watching TV and this beer commercial comes on. Right away I know it’s a beer commercial cause there’s this twenty-something woman sitting in a noisy bar. Funny, my experience here in the great Northwest is that either a fancy-named multiple booze concoction or white wine is the drink of choice for mirthful maidens. But wine ads always seem to involve fields and vineyards or elegant table linen— not smoky bars. Go figure. Anyhow, this gal is sitting at a bar and the announcer’s intoning something that sounds mildly poetic and the gal looks over to her left and there’s this scraggly-looking guy with earphones on sucking back the soon-to-be-favorably-mentioned beer in the ad. The attractive and far from scruffy girl gives him a look, chug-a-lugs a fair amount of the same beer from her own bottle, and glances sidelong at him again. Even old Mr. self-involved-in-his-music Scruffy can see this come on. He takes the hint, reaches into his right ear, pulls out one of those tiny full-insert type earphones, and hands it to her. She promptly, and much to my disgust, sticks it in her own ear. Gross!
Somehow the point that these two young people are now grooving together drinking the same beer was totally lost on me while I gagged into my XXL Hungry Man TV dinner. I mean really. I don’t trade earphones with my own family members without a Clorox handi-wipe and a vigorous rubdown. Those things go deep into your ear, man. And they come from deep in someone else’s ear. And I don’t believe in trusting anything that came from any of anyone else’s orifices, no matter how shallow. Heck, I circle widely around guys with innies in the locker room for fear of stray belly-button lint. It’s worse than kissing the windscreen on Joe Cocker’s microphone.
Maybe that job I had as an orderly in a convalescent hospital affected my outlook on things ear-al. Or Aural. That’s Aural as in ear, not oral as in mouth. Earwax build-up is such a problem with old folks. And one of my many not-so-appetizing tasks as an orderly was swabbing the yellowish scum from the ear canals of the personal hygiene-challenged oldsters under my care. I had to pluck out their hearing aids, clean them off, and reinsert them as well. A task second only to bedpan-jockeying on my list of least favorite things in my job description. And one I always manage to leave off my resume.
Today’s young folks are different. They’ve been so antibioti-sized and cyber-ized their whole life they don’t fully understand the risks of inappropriate electronics sharing. From file sharing, to Ipod, to sticking your earphone in another person’s ear is one continuum.
But really. When you see this commercial, you’ll know what I mean. This guy looked really scraggly and unkempt. He looked like the kind that wouldn’t even tip. Much less Q-tip. America, ya gotta love it.