I have a cold. A rather annoying cold. My wife gave it to me. She got it when she went to the doctor’s office. It’s been a week since it started on me. It’s the first I’ve had in several years, despite my wife trying to give me hers a couple of times a year.

Here’s where I do the required quote from Wikipedia:

“They usually resolve in seven to ten days, but some can last for up to three weeks. The average duration of cough(ing) is eighteen days and in some cases people develop a post-viral cough which can linger after the infection is gone.” I had to modify that quote a bit because the author apparently didn’t understand common English usage.

Great. They might as well have said,”You’ll feel like crap for a couple three weeks. Get used to it.”

The most annoying thing about a cold, to me anyways, is when you sneeze or cough and somebody says, “God bless you.”

If you believe that God will somehow cure someone because you declared that God should bless you, aren’t you trying to countermand God’s will? Didn’t God give that cold to that special someone to begin with? Isn’t everything God’s will? And which God? I find it difficult to believe that the presumed creator of the heavens, earth, and hell, well, hell, let’s throw in all the possible other universes and alternate timelines and sub-dimensions and all things quantum… where was I? Damn sneezing attack made me lose my train of thought. I edited it out of the audio. No need to splatter my audience with it. Bad enough it splooshed my monitor and keyboard.

Oh, yeah, God. That’s where I was. Okay, so if you insist that God cure someone’s cold, and you want God to then cure that cold, aren’t you, basically, trying to order God around? Sounds like you’re treading on dangerous grounds there, my friend. Time for some Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishnas, and maybe an Om Nama Shivaya or two.

What if you’re a pantheist with a whole pantheon of gods? Which god, or goddess, is the god, or goddess, of the common cold? What do you offer that god, or goddess, as a sacrifice to bribe him, or her, into curing a cold? Burnt Kleenex? Light up a lamp filled with high octane, high alcohol content cough syrup? Gallons of orange juice spiked with vitamin C?

No best leave God, and/or Gods out if it.

You could say, like the Germans, “Gesundheit!”, which literally means, “Be in a state of wellness!”. But that’s essentially an order, and we all know what can happen when Germans start issuing orders.

Now, I’ve gotta go blow my nose and hawk up a lung.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: