#428 Bugs

This is the season for parties. I find it interesting. It’s the time of year when people are most inclined to be getting social diseases. You know, like the flu, and colds, and typhoid and stuff, and yet, this is the season when society demands we spend the most time together. The commitments of our work and friends and family require that we lock ourselves up in warm rooms together. The weather dictates that we prevent those rooms from recharging with fresh air. Then we turn those rooms into the perfect bacterial medium by making them moist with the steam of cooking and hot toddies. We lower our resistance with mass consumption of alcohol and the shortening of our sleep periods as the stress of the holidays has us burning the candle at three ends. And then we go to other parties. Cause heck, if you catch a bug, it’s only part of the giving season to spread it to someone else. Some say it’s nature’s way of tuning up humanity to face the next wave of superbugs. But it’s not working. A new bug will rage through a party a lot quicker than any one family member can develop a resistance to it. And if you do develop a resistance, it doesn’t help you friends and relatives anyhow. It just insures you survive with minimal discomfort. It’s not like you can cough disease resistance on your party buddy. But ‘tis the season to make it easy to cough the disease itself. So anyhow, I’m at this party, doing my best to not breathe my fellow partygoers air and the waiter who was waiting on us does a great job. Afterwards I told him I thought his tip was included in the bill that was being sent to my company. He said, it better be or his company would be getting a memo. Oh no! Not a memo. A fate worse than death. Nothing I hate worse than being in the heat of battle, bullets flying all around, people dying at my feet and suddenly I get a MEMO! It’s a sad commentary on the state of our decadent society when the threat of a memo looms larger than, say, the threat of an invasion or the onslaught of the black plague. Oh yeah, a scathing memo. I think that was the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. Pestilence, war, famine and memo writers. Run everyone, take cover, make peace with your god, here comes the fourth horseman of the apocalypse¾and he’s got a memo! Actually, memos can be a good thing, sometimes it’s the absence thereof that can cause a problem. I once went to a housewarming party, didn’t get the memo that the costume theme had been changed from “famous divas” to “football greats” and found out it’s no fun to be dressed like a woman when everyone else is dressed like an NFL linebacker. Funny too, because I had been feeling a little sick and almost didn’t go to the party. But as long as I was there feeling like an idiot I figured what the heck. So I went up to the host and hostess and gave them the flu. A raging fever warms a house doesn’t it?
America, ya gotta love it.