It’s 2:37 AM, Mountain time, and I’m walking down the middle of the yellow lines of what appears to be a dimly lit, abandoned side street of a residential area in Red Deer. I have no idea how I got here, where I am, and where all my friends have gone. What’s worse is that I’m covered in some kind of slimy green muck – swamp water.
This memory, while memorable for being the first and last time I drank 20 Crest Beer, is vivid because of my overwhelming germaphobia. Even now I can still feel the silt water crawling on my skin.
Being a germaphobe in Alberta is a lot like being a functional alcoholic – no one minds as long as it’s kept in the closet. And, to be honest, I built the damn house for the closet.
Germaphobia, for children, is synonymous with being a pansy. And while being called a pansy might have compelled me to stomp around in the mud when I was a kid, is hardly compelling enough to force me to shake hands with the neanderthal who forgot to wash his hands in the public washroom. There he is, pristine in a Marc Jacobs suit. His hair in a perfectly gelled coif. Arm outstretched. Waiting.
I keep one sink for dirty dishes and one for vegetables, which wouldn’t seem strange until one sees the look on my face when a guest or (heaven forbid) family forget which sink is which. But my true fear – the one that keeps me up at night – is the way I feel about the pinnacle of polluted, the sultan of sickness, the great germ-machine that are children; or, to be exact, my children. I’ve never had a baby, but I’m afraid that I would look at my own flesh-and-blood the way I do at the ones playing in the shale of the ball diamonds with their mouths full of mud, and dirt, and snot. Needless to say it’s not pleasant to feel this way about a creature helpless to his or her nature, but disgust as an emotion has never cared for my empathy.
I think everyone I know is an environmentalist on some level; however, I think we can all agree that there are different types. I, for example, am the kind that recycles, makes sure to rip-apart the six pack rings that seagulls get trapped in, and I try to reuse all the interesting jam jars I find. So, in other words I’m a 90s environmentalist, which could also be called: not a very good environmentalist. My partner, who I live with, is the kind of environmentalist that constructed her own makeshift clothesline, fills up both sinks with dirty dishes to conserve water, and used cloth diapers when her daughter was a baby. And I love her. Or, I want to love her, but I can’t help recoiling every time she washes and reuses a dish cloth that is ten wipes away from becoming a biological living entity. She often argues that “dirt is good.” I can get behind the idea that to maintain homeostasis we as humans should have contact with the microbes of the living world, that is, until I drop a fork on the kitchen floor – ten second rule or not, I’ll be damned before I put that back on the plate.
Can a germaphobe even be a good environmentalist? After all, I’m the kind of guy that takes a shower for a preposterous amount of time, and when people start assuming I’m up to shenanigans I let them think that because I’d rather they think that than know showering is a ritualistic process for me. In SF Bloomfield, et. Al,’s article “Too clean or not too clean: The Hygiene Hypothesis and home hygiene” they claim, “Avoiding the term ‘hygiene’ would help focus attention on determining the true impact of microbes on atopic diseases, while minimizing risks of discouraging good hygiene practice” (425). I think looking at the language around cleanliness is a good start. Sanitation, for example, has a connotation that suggests a sort of hyper-cleanliness, a true clean, and a separation from nature. And isn’t a separation from nature what we’re really talking about with our fear of germs? We want the lamb without the tiger and what could be more of a tiger than the SARS of the world, the Ebolas, and, of course, the Common Cold. When I used to cook in restaurants, my boss was fond of saying that dishwashers don’t clean dishes, they sanitize them. I loved this idea. I used to put my uniform in the dishwasher to clean it.
A friend of mine told me a story about his travels around India: he had just finished a lecture at the university and while walking around the bazaar in the centre of the city he was moved by a young beggar sitting inside the archway of a door while trying to avoid the sun. He crouched down and placed a few American dollars at her feet. When he turned to leave he felt her hand on his shoulder. She held out her other hand to thank him and he saw that she was covered in sores from leprosy. He took her palm in his and held it for a minute before getting up to leave.
I wondered if I could take her hand, I’d thought when he’d said, “I felt a connection.”
I know that the odds of him catching leprosy would be pretty low, and I know that the odds of him not being able to cure leprosy if he caught it are even lower; but, for a guy that puts a fork that lands on the kitchen floor back in the dishwasher, that’s some pretty powerful stuff.
So, Mr. Marc Jacobs Suit’s hand is outstretched. Waiting. And I’m trying to fight my inner nature.