It's a Dirty World We Live In

It’s a Dirty World We Live In

You never realize what disgusting world we live in until you have a kid. From the moment they’re born parents shield them from the dangers of dirt. How come we never noticed how dirty the floor was until a baby crawled on it? I’ll tell you why. From up here everything looks clean. But they’re down there, they’re right there in it. It’s sort of like watching an astronaut set foot on a new planet. You’re scared for their safety; there’s no telling what they could step in.

When you’re a parent you see everything with new eyes. And your new eyes can see the dirt that your old eyes would miss. Your radar vision scans the area and immediately locates every piece of dirt as a blip on your screen. “Oh this will never do. Quick! Sanitize this child and tape off the area immediately. It’s a biohazard!”

Of course as a parent we can now get away with calling anything dirty. You’ll have no bones about pointing every dirty thing for your child to avoid. Anything and everything you don’t want them to touch is now called dirty. You’re a guest at the White House when your kid drops a cookie on the floor. “Don’t eat that! It’s dirty!” You look over at the First Lady, “Oh, I certainly don’t mean to say that your floors are dirty. I’m sure you could serve dinner off of these floors, but would you really want to?”

Let me clear something up: There is no five second rule. That rule only applies to the slobs so lazy that they can’t be bothered to disregard filth. Don’t come crying to me when you get food poisoning. You’re whole life could summed up in a petri dish.

Look around where you live and you’ll see that dirt is everywhere. It’s all around us. It’s on the floor, it’s on the door, and when you wake up in the morning, somehow it is in your hair. “My hair had no dirt on it when I went to bed last night, but when I got up this morning, it was filthy.”

Dirt. There’s a whole bunch of it outside, too. Dirt is on the street and in your driveway. Want to really knock yourself out? Go outside and dig up a patch of grass and you’ll find nothing but dirt under there. Some people build piles of dirt on their lawn called “mulch” that they decorate with flowers like that makes it okay. It’s dirt! Don’t you people know that?

Our mothers knew where the evil lurked and they were terrified of it. They knew what it was, and they didn’t want it in the house. The biggest concern was always the carpet. You could be wearing a new pair shoes fresh out of the box, but shoes were never to be worn on the carpet. Shoes, no matter how clean, were always dirty.

Our feet are dirty. But when you stop and think about it, they should cleanest thing on our body. How is it that our feet are so dirty? They have socks on them. They have shoes on them. They have layers of protection from dirt exposure. What about our hands? They’re just hanging out naked. We should really be shaking people’s feet instead of their hands.
If dirt was flying in the air right towards your head and there wasn’t enough time to duck, what do we use to protect our face? Our hands. If dirt were about to land on our feet what do we do? We jump the hell out of the way, that’s what we do. We are so quick to protect the shoes which cover the socks covering our feet. This proves my point. I think I’d rather shake a guy’s foot than the filthy hand he might have sneezed in.

As a kid you’d go outside to play and tapping on the window from the safety of the clean indoors was your mother screaming, “Don’t touch that! It’s dirty!” You’d look at the fire hydrant and think, “I don’t see any dirt. She just never wants me to touch anything fun.” If my mother had been more specific and said that a dog used it as a urinal, perhaps I would have been less inclined to get my mitts on it.

I’ll never be comfortable with dirt and germs. They make me nervous like when you come across snarling dog without a leash and no owner in sight. You could be minding your own business taking a stroll in the park and there it is. You could be waiting in line at the drug store when the slob behind you coughs on the back of your neck. It’s a dangerous dirty world out there and you sometimes you never know when you’ll be attacked.

Some of this fear is stemmed from thousands of years of evolution. It’s in the genes. In order to survive we must steer away from the clear and present danger of filth. For some of us, namely me, the fear and resistance may have gone a bit far. For example; I would sooner walk across hot coals to sign to divorce papers in my own blood before fishing out the wedding ring I dropped in the toilet. Doesn’t matter if it’s clean. I think I’d even be willing to lose it if it fell in one of those display toilets lined up at the Home Depot.