Thursday, October 29, 2009

Somewhere between the movie theater, library, Chipotle, church, and the dog shelter, I’d be able to circumvent Halloween and all its festivities entirely, or so went the original plan. Saturday was supposed to be the one day of the year when the public appears where you least expect it–on your doorstep–and the solution to compulsory candy distribution would be poetic, if nothing else: run straight into the proverbial gunfire and spend the day not on Hulu.com, but outside, immersed in the public at large.

Something happened, though, when I stood in line at the supermarket, waiting as the fellow behind me finished coughing into the back of my head, cringing as the children in the adjacent line sniffled at funereal levels, and, in a fitting finish to this special tenth circle of hell, gazing in horror as the woman in front of me presented a quarter-inch stack of coupons to the cashier.

What began as one problem–how to avoid Halloween–quickly became two, with my original solution now operating at cross-purposes to, oh, the desire to refrain from waging germ warfare on myself. Suddenly the movie theater transformed from a place of entertainment into a breeding ground for a new, improved superstrain of flu. Chipotle, a casual fiesta of pathogens in each tub of medium salsa. The library, now a repository of ancient variants of H1N1 tucked within every dusty page. The animal shelter, ground zero for a terrifying dog flu outbreak. And church? Well, you may recall from Sunday school the story of Jesus healing the lepers, but I certainly don’t recall service ever being held in leper colonies.

Deadpan once asked me whether I suffer from agoraphobia, upon which I scurried off to hide in the closest available nook. Before doing so, however, I brushed off the question as ridiculous, explaining how it wasn’t open spaces that repulse me, but what actually fills the space that sets me on edge. Put me on a Swiss mountaintop, and I will spin around deliriously, much in the style popularized by Julie Andrews. Put me on the same Swiss mountaintop with Julie Andrews and the von Trapps, and I will likely dig a hole in said mountaintop and die in it. Perhaps this is agoraphobia, then. But here, now, in today’s biohazardous landscape, my general avoidance of people may be the cure for once, rather than the curse.