Living In A Hermetically Sealed World, by Mike Gold – Braniac on Banjo #277 | MDWorld

June 4, 2012 Mike Gold 3 Comments

I listen to news radio a lot. Despite this I am not a flamingly paranoid person, and that’s starting to make me concerned.

Lately CBS radio has been on this “everything is going to infect you and you are going to die” kick. Then they try to sell me a credit-fixing scheme. That conundrum aside… I was recently informed that when I take my underwear out of the washing machine, it has gifted my Maytag with a half million e-coli bacteria. These little monsters will infect whatever I next put into the machine, so I damn well better watch my ass.

Holy Odin’s Eyepatch, every day it’s something new. For the past several years, you cannot go into or out of a supermarket, a public washroom, or a big box megastore without sashaying past several Purell stations. Of course you don’t have to use that stuff, you filthy pig, but there’s got to be a reason why Sam Wall’s children are giving it away. They need you alive.

If you happen to be a Baby Boomer, you might recall the good old days when we burned incense. This was often to mask the enduring odor of marijuana, but it was used in certain mystical rights and, come to think of it, certain top-shelf religious organizations have used incense in their worship services for centuries. That’s groovy. Do you know what that soul-and-dope cleansing concoction is often made with?

Shit. Cow, horse, moose (it comes in easy-to-process pellets)… it’s natural. So if you’re worried about e coli and microscopic fecal grease balls on your clothing and bedding, you might want to pass on that next Catholic Mass or Hare Krishna ceremony.

And whatever you do, do not blink. Doctor Who fans gave up on this a couple years ago, but for the rest of you: you are killing us. It’s as if you are blowing your cigarette smoke straight into a baby’s face. Your eyelashes are home to millions of bacteria and mites and every time you blink you are infecting helpless humans who don’t even have the option of sitting in a “no-blinking zone.” Google around; you’re supposed to wash your eyeholes twice a day!

Do you want to know what’s growing all over your skin – and is constantly and continuously shedding into our environment? No, you do not!

All this information – fecal material disgorged from our toilets and glomming onto our toothbrushes, bacteria colonies living on our doorknobs, strange and possibly dangerous chemicals lining our product containers, meat fillers with names so bad they can’t be good for you – what do we do with it? We lacquer ourselves up with hand and body sanitizers, we exfoliate like Bill O’Reilly in heat, we put anti-bacterials in our laundry and soon we’ll be shooting anti-bacterials up our noses… and I’m not kidding.

How the hell did we ever survive as a species from the time we crawled out of the sea until June 4, 2012? Well, here’s a bulletin for you. We’ve made it this far, and we’ve been doing okay simply taking reasonable precautions like washing your hands and using clean stuff instead of dirty stuff.

Our bodies adapt. We create our own defenses naturally. If we aren’t exposed to most of the bacteria that we were exposed to back in the dark ages of the 1990s, we won’t develop immunities to them. If you don’t let your kids ever catch a cold, they won’t develop those natural defenses. Someday a common cold will kill our over-Purelled children.

Go read H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Humanity survived because the invading Martians had no natural immunity to bacteria and… they… simply… died. War of the Worlds was published in 1898. H. G. Wells died in 1946, a month short of 80. That’s a good run even by today’s standards.

H. G. Wells was one smart dude.

Immediately after rolling around naked in the sewer, Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place, so listen to it already! He also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com, where he pontificates on matters of four-color.