Please don’t finger the monkeys

We have so many choices these days. It feels like wealth, but it can be a trap. More choice means more decisions, more dithering and disquiet, more regret, and less time. My parents grew up with “put on a sweater” and “finish your food,” neither of which was presented as a choice. By the time I came along, we were getting soft: we had choices. Jif or Skippy. Huntley-Brinkley or Cronkite. Speckled Formica or Formica with little boomerangs. Jell-O with banana slices or marshmallow salad. Apples or oranges.

We did not have fruit that looked like fingers, or fruit that looked like a grenade bigger than your head. We did not have wanga-wanga drupes from the rain shadow region of Lower Wakapopo.

And we were okay with all that. It gave us time to be alive. We didn’t waste fifteen minutes snooting up and down the condiment aisle like a trufflehunting pig, feeling all defeated because we couldn’t find the Aji Amarillo paste that the recipe adamantly insisted on. We didn’t spend hours online looking for cute pants and a good deal. We had pull-up blue corduroy or pull-up brown corduroy and then we got on with the day.

The one thing we did have was an admirable choice of childhood diseases. All that pretty much went by the wayside eventually, until all we had left was The Sniffles or The Flu, but the modern obsession with choices has led to a nostalgic return to the glory days of measles, rubella, polio, whooping cough, and whatever else we almost defeated. In addition to all that, we have a whole condiment aisle of novelty illnesses. It’s always something.

People get sick all the time now but they don’t know what with. They’ll tell you they came down with this thing, this thing that’s going around, and you’ll ask if it’s COVID, and they’ll squint with their shoulders bunched up under their ears and say they don’t think so, but it’s bad. They haven’t stopped coughing in three weeks, they report a general loss of joie, and a remarkable number of people, despite the odds, seem to be familiar with what it feels like to be run over by a truck. One plague is traced to a dyspeptic Indonesian bat and another to pigeon poop in an Asian outdoor meat market. Weasel-to-human transmission is reported. Monkeys are fingered. Wombats arouse suspicion. Antique pathogens well up out of newly thawed tundra. And every year some fancy new tick shows up that will put you in bed for the rest of your life, so fatigued you don’t even care when your tits fall off.

I haven’t picked up any of these wonders so far. Not even COVID. I have no illusions that this will continue, what with my propensity for hanging out with humans and my casual attitude toward public health hygiene. But even though I rail against having too many choices, I do have a definite preference in novel plagues. Spare me the projectile vomiting, or the endless cough, or anything where someone needs to jam a tube in you somewhere. But explosive diarrhea? Sign me up! That would be fine as long as I have reading material and can DoorDash the Gatorade. Might even be kind of fun. Yep, put me down for the mega-trots every time. It’s exuberant! Outgoing! Expressive! And probably amusingly noisy.

I mean, you might as well shoot it out all at once. Pretend like it’s your second crack at the presidency.