Going Viral

The blood-shot college student. What a cliche. Tired not high. Eyes slightly glazed with fine sugar and the warm flickering light from a computer screen pushing you on.

It's the trudge of a knight without clothes. A king without his crown or a doola without her tub.

Charlie bit me. Did he?
David went to the dentist.
Dove made the beauty transformation once and for all revealing that beauty is truly in the eyes of the beholder. That the beautiful models depicted on internationally distributed magazines are as unreal as our daydreams about them. It was like Rasputin telling the world's children the truth about Santa Claus. The towns wept and a green monster (green?) came and found himself.

Now people talk about going viral. Making something go viral. It would appear we live in a viral time in history.

Liberally applied.
H1N1. Seasonal flu shots - but those are just "bugs" right? SARS.
And we got started early. Think of the bubonic plague. Think of polio, and leprosy.
The first true mass marketed viral news.

We have been doing this collectively but we rarely plan things - as we are prone not to do. History has taught me that we often create the best types of chaos when we are given free rein of a situation. Think of yourself at a bar.

The 60's Mad Men with Macallan scotch and cigarettes gave us an era of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups slipping a sable under the Christmas tree. The marketing wunderkinds of today have given us viral.

It's only natural for us to accept virality (Newspeak for viral related). Of course we have to wear face masks and latex gloves but give us a hazmat and we'll even embrace it.

I love the idea of the human race as a virus. It might be what we need to drive us into space or explore the rest of this world. We don't need Magellan's or da Gama's, we need a new Thomas More to embark on the search for utopia - one not so fundamentally flawed.

And we're still looking for a flu shot.