Latest mental disinfectant reports

Hey, nice to be with you guys again. I enjoy our little weekly visits. You might buy the coffee once in a while, huh. You got an anchor on your wallet or what?

But I still like you. In fact, I like you so much that I didn't - I did not - write a column about my recent operation. Yes, I had arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. And I did not write about it. I spared you guys from a semi-old guy's medical rant. Let me just say that I endured the excruciating pain kind of like the world-class athlete I am.

OK, since I didn't write about my operation, I was trying to come up with a germ of an idea for a column, and I sat down this morning for breakfast with Marge and we did the crossword puzzle and then I was reading the Wall Street Journal and there it was. An article about germs. You talk about a germ of an idea, baby.

The basic premise of the article was that door handles on gas station bathrooms are the dirtiest things in the world. I guess the writer hadn't seen my shorts. Anyway, it seems that some inventor guy has come up with a special handle opener that will allow you to open the door without touching the actual handle. I don't know what the hell it is exactly. It's just some plastic gizmo.

OK, I guess that's pretty cool if you are that afraid of gas station door handles. But the article got me to thinking about germs themselves. I confess that I do not know much about germs. I have looked at germs once through a microscope, and that was pretty damn scary, I have to admit. You know, you blow up the picture a thousand times or whatever, and those little suckers look like death monsters with tentacles that will suck the blood out of your nose and spit it out on your face. And laugh while they're sucking and spitting. They just suck, laugh and spit and look creepy. And I want to kill them. Just cause they look like Osama Bin Laden, I don't know.

But I guess a lot of people are really afraid of germs. Actively, even proactively, afraid of germs. They wash their hands all the time. They use hand creams and anti-germ sprays. And they disinfect everything. Some people even wear gloves. Jeez. Some people even wear masks. Holy Lone Ranger!

I guess I'm nuts or just naïve or lucky, but I was never afraid of germs. I always thought that anything stupid enough to get inside my body would get what's coming to it. I kind of hoped some damn germ would get into my stomach and see all those Red Vines and Snickers bar chunks and chili peppers and hot fudge and guacamole dip and Budweiser and corn nuts and just decide to go on up to the librarian's body.

In fact, and I'm not afraid to admit this, I actually talk to germs. I really do. I say stuff like, "Hey, you little germ-ass suck-head, you want a little of me? I'm not going anywhere, Mr. Filth. Just come on down and try to take a bite out of this cowboy, you chickenshit piece of germ slime." I say that to them. Right to their little germy-distended faces. And they never answer me. I keep waiting. They just sit there, being dirty. And then I'll poke their damn supposedly scary diseased tentacles and they don't do nothin'. And I'll tell them that I'm not wearing any gloves and I don't have a mask on and they just sit there like vomit losers. The little commie cowards.

I did get a pretty good germ scare when I was in college. Back in 1960 I was living with three guys in an apartment at Humboldt State College. Their names were Injun, Davy, and Yo-Yo. (My friends, not the germs.) The germs' names were Manny, Moe, and Schwartzie.

Anyway, we thought cheap beer would keep us healthy, and we only cleaned the apartment once a year. To get the deposit back. And our bathroom was, shall we say, germ-a-riffic. There were places in the bathtub that had little mounds of dirt and hair and toenails and earwax and scum. They were like diphtheria meeting halls.

And the toilet. Oh, my god. I can't tell you what the toilet was like. Let's just say what used to be white now was not white, and the whole toilet was slowly gurgling and eating itself. Every time you flushed, the toilet would sink lower into the rotting linoleum floor. Girls would go into the bathroom and come back out shaken. They wouldn't say anything. They would just point back to the bathroom and moan. Ah, those were the good old days.

I have to laugh at this modern germ scare obsession. Ha, ha. Back then, we were of the school that said if you dropped say, a potato chip on the floor, as long as you picked it up within five seconds and you didn't actually see some cockroach actually pee on it, you could go ahead and brush off the dust and eat it. If the germs wanted it, they had to be fast, dammit.

One time though, we did get a pretty good germ scare. We were out in the living room discussing Eastern philosophy or blowjobs and we heard something in the bathroom. We checked it out. Couldn't find anything. So we went back to our discussion. Again we heard this noise in the bathroom. This time I personally went to check it out. I couldn't believe what I saw. Standing on top of one of the scum mounds in the bathtub were two giant germs. High fiving!

Man, when you can hear germs, maybe it's time for a little Lysol.