I was about three years old when I first saw another kid do something that almost made me puke. She was slurping water out of the road gutter by the sidewalk.
The next thing I remember was playing with this kid in the schoolyard at Earl Kitchener Public School on Dundurn Ave. in 1959. He showed me something he thought was quite brilliant. The playground pavement was splattered with flattened chewing gum that other kids had spit out of their mouths, and what he had figured out was that he could peel this flat, greyish slime from the tarmac and re-chew it. Yummy! I can still hear the crunching from the bits of tar and other detritus like sticks, gravel, and worm and insect guts that were now part of that candy.
Sometimes I wonder if that kid got polio.
I doubt his parents were the ones who taught him to do that, but these days, seeing how many parents are happy to force their kids to wear face diapers and get injected with experimental mRNA vaccines, I am, perhaps, a little less doubtful.
People who know me will attest to my germ phobia. I've had this condition since before I went to Kindergarten. I know I got the condition from my mother probably out of fear of the poliovirus.
I won't drink out of another person's glass, or take a bite from someone else's sandwich unless I can get an unchewed portion. I don't wipe chip salt off on my pants because that is where urinal splash drops might congregate and it is only with the greatest reluctance that I will open a door to a public place, especially if it's a washroom without using a paper towel or something similar.
Not everyone has this condition. In my cab-driving days, I had many opportunities to see the kind of people whose asses sat on those seats. In the days of vinyl seats, which I believe were mandatory for cabs when I started driving in 1977, and especially on very hot, humid days, you would not always know just how filthy some people are until they exited the cab. I developed a theory about that. My theory was that most of the greasy stink on some people was coming from the butt area. When sitting on a taxi seat, this area was covered, but when they left the cab you would be treated to a strong whiff of what they had left on the seats.
I was talking to a cab driver friend of mine about this issue and he told me a story about a drunk he had who dropped his french fries all over the seat, then nonchalantly picked them back up, and ate them. I don't know if they had any ketchup on them.
And now, here we are with this global mask hysteria. It makes me wonder how many people who, having forgotten their mask to enter a grocery store, might just pick one up off the ground and use that. To me, that is the equivalent of licking toilet seats in a sleazy bar or a jail cell, but hey, as I hope to have demonstrated with my rant, it takes all kinds.
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