Sunshine

The sun came out and it was 60 degrees for lunch today. It felt like it was about 60 degrees warmer than it was when I walked in to work this morning. It was so crazy awesome.

On my way back from lunch, I overheard a conversation. I did listen in, because a few special buzzwords caught my ear and immediately caused my brain to splinter into a thousand metallic shards of dis-believing goop.

I overheard an overweight person who was not size 14 overweight, rather, fourteen sizes overweight. I overheard this person proclaim that they were absolutely not Ehn-Oh-Tee getting any flu shots because of all the dastardly toxins found therein. These words were punctuated by long pauses, which though dramatic, were specifically designed to allow the speaker to take another drag from a cigarette. That’s right, a smoker was Ehn-Oh-Tee getting the flu shot toxins injected and said so loudly between smooth, refreshing lungfulls of cigarette smoke.

Sometimes, I feel like I live in bizarre-o world. I would not be surprised at all if an evil superman burst in through the windows and killed us all with his death-beam-laser-vision. It might be kinda’ fun. Ya know?

I think, as a nation, we could all use some kind of Jack Bauer catastrophe to kind of shake us back to our senses. How sweet is life for us right now, as a nation, that all we have to worry about and attack each other about and get really persnicketty and pissy about is the housing market, thimerisol, and the leader of the free world and his shiny new Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, there are countries out there who don’t even HAVE a housing market. There are starving kids out there, ya know? And they’ve got machine guns and they’re pissed as hell and they’re hooked on heroine. Heroine, people.

There are people out there who have never ever once set eyes on a human who was too big to walk through a doorway.

I realize that we have problems in this country, and I know that this country is in some pretty deep poo-doo right now. I do. I lament a lot of those problems pretty much daily in one form or another.

But this whole flu-shot hysteria just rings so damned hollow. So much panic. So much fear. And we, as a nation, are sooo good at panic and fear and self-righteous indignation. Gragh.