Weaponized Rugrats

My left arm is sore, I’m feeling a little flushed, and yet there’s no pornography to be seen anywhere. Must be flu vaccine season.

Normally I schedule my annual flu shot at my doctor’s office, but this year I was told that demand for the seasonal vaccine was so high that they were completely out of doses, forcing me to attend a flu shot clinic at the local CostCo. Which was a strange experience, since I’ve had friends  telling me for years that if I didn’t change my lifestyle, one day I’d find myself taking the spike in a dingy warehouse. Somehow I don’t think they were picturing a syringe full of flu juice, but it was still spooky enough that maybe I want to cut back on the booze a little bit. Or not. Yeah, not. Either way, I digress.

What gets me this year is how the demand for the seasonal flu vaccine is up when everyone knows that the real risk out there is the H1N1 flu, otherwise known as the “swine flu”, also known as “the Porky Plague”, and referred to by me as “Revenge For Cavalierly Sprinkling Bits of My Flesh On A Fucking Salad So You Can Lie To Yourself That You’re Eating Healthy You Fat Bastard”.

My initial guess was that most people getting the seasonal shot for the first time think that it’s actually the Swine Flu vaccine, meaning those people will die in a puddle of snot and raise the collective IQ a point or two. But it turns out that it might just be a bunch of nervous people who want to feel like they’re doing something to keep themselves healthy, because you can’t even get the Swine Flu vaccine yet.

I asked my doctor about it when I called to schedule my normal shot, and he said that he’s not even expecting to hear how much of the Swine Flu Goo he’s going to get until next week, and even then I might not be able to get one because giving it to children is the first priority in an effort to build up a “herd immunity” to the bug. Which my doctor, who has treated me since I was fifteen and therefore knows how to communicate with me in terms I can easily understand, explained thusly:

“Imagine, Rob, that I shot at you across a crowded room with a high-powered rifle. God knows I imagine it all the time. If nobody in the room was wearing a bulletproof vest, not only would I kill you, but everyone standing between us. However, if we made a bunch of those people immune to bullets with vests, it vastly reduces the odds that you’ll be hit, even if you don’t have one.”

“Ah! I understand herd immunity now! Thanks, Doctor!”

“Whatever. With the crap you’ve been dumping in your body for the past twenty years, I’m not convinced even a bullet would kill you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have patients who at least act like they give a damn whether they live or die.” *Click*

So I can’t get the Swine Flu shot yet, but they’ll shoot up the kids, which will cut the virus off at the most likely vector of transmission. Yup, once all the kids are vaccinated, there’s nothing to worry ab-

Wait – what’s that moaning, bleating sound? Sounds like sheep… or a pack of mindless zombies… Oh, no. Not you again. I thought I killed you morons last year!

Jackie Shea of Newtown, Conn., the mother of a 5-year-old boy named Emmett, says the vaccine is too new and too untested.

“I will not be first in line in October to get him vaccinated,” she said in an interview last month. “We’re talking about putting an unknown into him. I can’t do that.”

All right, parents: listen up. We’re going to have a conversation… meaning that I am going to call you morons and tell you to shut the hell up. Considering your opinions on a simple vaccine, that’s the kind of conversation you fucking halfwits are used to. We’re gonna go point by point here, okay?

Point 1: Fuck you.

Point 2: Seriously: fuck you. I guarantee you that any random sampling of, say, two hundred of you Goddamned parents will turn up people stuffed full of silicone, Botox, saline, surgical stomach staples, Valium, Xanax, infomercialed penis pills, and homemade Russian moonshine (Okay, only I will test positive for the Russian moonshine. It was Mikhail’s birthday at work yesterday).

But God forbid you put an “unknown” into your precious little unique snowflake child. I got news for you: every parent thinks their child is special. My parents thought I was; when I was a kid they thought I would grow up to walk on water. Now, thirty-odd years later, they’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can barely call a cab on bourbon. Every time my parents see my ponytail or my brother’s Highlander tattoos, they realize that the only talent we had was the ability to turn twenty-five years of Porsches and romantic tropical getaways into Dodge Aspen station wagons and pathetic squalling at Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

And I know that you’re looking at your little bundle of joy and picturing Senator Jacob or Governor Isabella, but stop and think about the actual odds for a second, squint and look again. What do you see? That’s right: a cubicle drone. Just like that cell-phone-yammering prick in the Lexus SUV who cut you off yesterday morning. The only thing separating your kid and that fuckwad is twenty-five years and about a quarter million dollars worth of Twilight books, expensive designer sneakers and a mid-level Bachelor’s degree. And considering that you would have shot Liquid Plum’r into the Lexus douchebag’s brain stem if you could have gotten your hands on him, consider vaccination a preemptive strike for the rest of us and give your kid the fucking shot.

Besides, be honest: how many of you parents have bent over, looked into litttle Ethan or Chloe’s face and said something like, “Don’t worry; Mommy and Daddy won’t let doctors put an unknown into you… now if you’re good and take your Ritalin, we’ll let you have a Fruit Roll-Up and a Red Bull”? You put unknowns into your kids all day long. The only known that’s going into your child is if you forced them to be an altar boy.

Point 3: Here’s an analogy: I am prohibited by law from smoking a cigarette indoors almost anywhere in the Massachusetts. The logic behind this law is that if I light up indoors, and everyone else in that space lights up, and there’s no ventilation, and you’re trapped in that room with us every single fucking day, and you are predisposed to particular health problems regardless of the smoke, there is a slightly higher than average chance that you will suffer a deleterious effect on your health. And I can bitch and complain all day long about my individual rights, and the length of the odds that my smoke will actually injure anyone, and how nature dictates that anyone weak enough to succumb to my secondhand smoke should be culled from the herd to strengthen the rest of us, and that I’d be willing to do that culling right now with a pipe wrench if necessary…

But it doesn’t matter. If I light up and a cop sees me? BOOM! A hundred dollar ticket. All to protect public health.

Meanwhile, you seem to feel completely justified in traipsing about with your weaponized rugrat, dripping biohazards off his upper lip, where he can tug on my sleeve at the comic book store and rasp, “Mister? Can you give me that Spider-Man book? My mommy says that I can get all the comics I want to read while I ah-CHOO! ah-CHOO! ah-CHOO! get better. Mommy? Does this man’s sleeve count as a Kleenex?” And if I light up to calm my nerves over the fact that I’m now looking at a week of agony, a potential hospital stay and possibly death within days, I’m a criminal. While you, you selfish fucking cock, call yourself a “concerned parent exercising your rights” because the swine flu vaccine makes you feel icky.

Once again, for the record: FUCK. YOU. You know what else’ll make you feel icky? Double fucking pneumonia. You know what’ll make you feel filthy? BURYING YOUR CHILD. But clearly you won’t feel anything if your kid gives me H1N1, because you don’t give a fuck about me or anybody else… unless we’re smoking in front of your precious little angel. Then we’re criminals for jeopardizing their health. You fucking hypocrites.

Butch up. Find out where you can get your rotten kid shot up. Quit spreading this shit around. I don’t want it. I hate hospitals.

They don’t let you smoke there. Bastards.

[tags]H1N1, Swine Flu, vaccine, dark humor, satire[/tags]