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jambar

stopping sickness before it starts
Cold and flu season is upon us, or maybe it isn’t; I’m too sick to check at the moment, and the robot I’m dictating this to at my bedside has too much of an attitude to check for me. All I know is that the name is misleading. Unlike deer season, when it’s clear what should be killed, the shocking twist to cold and flu season is in the fashion of “The Most Dangerous Game,” where humans are the prey and germs are the evil Russian nobles that are hunting us on their private island. And even if you’ve never read that particular short story, it’s no surprise that being sick is no picnic, and if it is a picnic it’s one where bears do unspeakable things to your body before they eat you. Looking back at my healthy years, I realize a few preventative measures could have been taken to prevent my current status; I will share these with you before I die.

• Avoid doorknobs: This cannot be stressed enough. If life was the movie “Outbreak,” then doorknobs would be shrieking, infected monkeys, with you not having the Morgan Freeman-esque tenacity needed for survival. Not only will avoiding doorknobs make your life healthier, it will also make your life more exciting. While at first it may seem impossible to avoid these globular Petri dishes, a little creativity and an action movie mindset will help you get where you need to go. For example, did you know that most doors can be kicked down with a good 10 to 20 minutes of work? Even if this doesn’t pan out for you, someone will surely open the door so the scene you are undoubtedly causing will end. Also keep windows in mind as an alternate form of entry; you may even earn clever nicknames such as “Glass Shard Seamus.”
  
  
• Avoid civil war era time capsules: I know what you’re thinking, “How often am I going to run across a civil war era time capsule?” The truth is that there are millions of these scattered under the fertile soil of these United States, and every year I usually throw away five or six of them that I uncover doing minor yard work. You’ll no doubt be curious regarding the contents of these capsules, but I advise against opening them. If you remember the Ken Burns documentary “The Civil War,” you’ll know that in all of those soldiers’ letters to home, the words “scarlet fever” and “rubella” were mentioned ten times more than slavery. You really don’t want diseases that have had 200 years to mutate crawling all over you, and surely you don’t want to open the capsule that contains Lincoln’s angry ghost, put in the ground by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 (the only remarkable thing he did).
  
  
• Oranges: Not only are they rich in vitamin C, they can also be sold on busy stretches of highways to orange-starved commuters at an extremely high profit margin. This money you earn can be traded at most pharmacies for medications that contain ingredients with long names which, in medical jargon, will “knock your ass out.”
  
  
• Stop kissing your dog: While it has been proven that dogs have cleaner mouths than those of humans, I just don’t trust them. Also, should you really be kissing your dog? That’s creepy. If you don’t want to break its heart, I recommend that you instead give your dog a firm handshake, or perhaps take the animal out for coffee and then say, “It’s not you, it’s me,” when you clearly know that it’s not you. You may want to find a relatively clean and angry cat to hold in front of your face if your dog persists.
  
  
• Wash your hands: Even if it’s clear that you did not intentionally urinate on your hands, they still need washing after every visit to the bathroom. Don’t let this behavior end at the toilet, though; every action in your life should be followed by a rigorous hand-washing session. About to eat dinner? Wash your hands. Save the rec center from evil land developers? Wash your hands. Just finished washing your hands? Wash your hands. After all, your filthy hands touched the soap, no doubt spreading germs during that first washing. With practice, this routine should prevent illness, or as least cause so much pain to your chapped and disfigured hands that any illness you do come down with will go unnoticeable.

While I have nothing but regrets, there’s no reason to not take this advice, unless you want my death to be in vain. I would also like to add that while my death may not be “official,” my creditors can stop sending me their threatening letters. Have they no respect for the dead?