The prairie spy

(This is about the last time I had a summer cold. Sigh. Don’t you just hate them.)

I have a cold. A good one. My head hurts. My sinuses are pounding. It’s 80-some degrees outside so on top of the weather being miserable, I am too.

Summer colds are the worst, and although I’m trying to keep a nice, Christian outlook on it, it’s awfully hard to find something good to say about a cold virus.

But I did find something. Last night, there was a cool breeze blowing in my bedroom window, and it has been my philosophy not to go to sleep in any kind of substantial draft. Why? Because you’ll wake up with a cold, that’s why. So I’m moving over in bed, out of the way of the draft, when I realize that I can now go to sleep in a wind tunnel if I want—I already have a cold!

Another somewhat nice thing to say about a virus is that they’re not piggy. When you’ve got one, all the other viruses kind of line up and wait their turn. Although there are about a million variants of viruses as they mutate and find new ways to break through the body’s defense system, you can only get one at a time. This is kind of like bank robbers lining up outside a Savings and Loan, each knowing that they’ll in time get their turn. Plus, in this hypothetical scenario, there are no police to stop them.

As my head throbs and my nose runs and as I’ve run out of good things to say about this cold that has control of my nose, I find that I’m filled with un-Christian thoughts of petty vengeance against whoever it was that passed this stuff to me. I don’t even know anyone who has a cold. Maybe I got it from a shopping cart. Recent studies have shown that they’re one of the best ways to pass a virus along, so there’s very little way of getting even there.

Sigh. One longs for the days of Stalin-esque punishment against enemies of the state—the state being in this case me. I cannot at the moment remember the term for the secret police he sent around in the dark of the night to gather up anyone he thought might not think quite the way he did, but I do have a term for my hypothetical secret police: The Snot Patrol.

Also, in order to make it obvious that someone has a cold, new advances in gene-splicing makes it possible that scientists could splice in a fluorescent gene to the common rhino-virus, so that anyone who has a cold would have, ummmm, (this is requiring some thinking outside the box) maybe a fluorescent-orange nose, that is dripping day-glo mucus, and would be readily identifiable.

That way, along with a reward for anyone who rats out a family member, or a neighbor, or someone whose nose is turning deer-hunter orange, The Snot Patrol would show up and demand money. I’m thinking money, because the common cold costs businesses billions of dollars every year in lost time on the job. Why not get some back?

In the far-fetched feverishness this cold of mine seems to be giving me, should the person who has the cold refuse to pay, or be unable to pay, The Snot Patrol would shove him or her into a bedroom, along with a bucket of water—and an empty bucket for that water—and put a five-day time lock on the bedroom door. This is in keeping with the old adage of feed a fever, starve a cold. Should someone take pity on the snot prisoner, and decide to let him or her out to sneeze and blow and spread, the orange nose would be a give-away. The Snot Patrol could get them all.

I hate summer colds.