Will We Succumb To The Fungi?

I feel like I’ve been fighting a cold since 2019. Allergy season has become allergy years. It seems like every other day I’ve got drainage going down the back of my throat, with the follow up feeling of wanting to just cough up whatever was draining in the first place. I’d think that maybe there was something else going on, like Grumpy Midwesterner Disease or Curmudgeon’s Drip, but it seems everyone around me feels the same thing. The guy I work with has felt the same way I have for as long as I can remember. Maybe we’ve been together so long one of us are feeling empathy pains for the other. Or maybe we’re slowly being poisoned by airborne spores at work.

Either way, I’m tired of being tired(and drippy.)

But then I start going down a sickness rabbit hole and begin thinking it’s some environmental catastrophe that we’re all feeling the effects of, slowly but surely. Sure, I know that global warming and climate change are just made up disasters by “Big Lib” in order to take all the gas guzzling pick em up trucks from all the hard working weekend warriors and couch jockeys.

But humor me for a moment, won’t you?

So dig this: Let’s say the climate is changing and globally the earth is warming at an exponential rate. Who’s to say this “global warming” isn’t waking ancient or prehistoric microbes, spores, and airborne fungi that couldn’t travel until the temps got to a certain level. We’ve made it to that level, now every time we go outside we’re breathing in new and exciting forms of microbial life and they are taking up residency in our lungs. Maybe they sit dormant in our lungs, only causing mild irritation that feel and look like allergic reactions. Or maybe what seems like a head and chest cold; mild congestion, runny nose, headache, pressure in the sinuses, wheezy chest. But unlike the old kind of allergies and colds that would go away with a shot of diphenhydramine(Benadryl) or Amoxicillin, this new stuff never really goes away. It just dies down for a day or two leading you to believe you’re getting better. But surprise, you’re not. It’s back.

Or maybe we’re just getting to the point as a society that all these meds we’ve been taking since we were kids no longer work. The microbes, spores, and airborne fungi have become intelligent and resilient and can now just kick those old cures in the teeth and stand their ground in our bodies. We either have to come up with some new, super meds to fight these steroid’d strains of the common colds or we’re going to become buffets for the fungi.

In all honesty, fungi aren’t bad. They’ve been a tasty food for us humans for centuries. Serve ’em up in a pan with butter and a little salt and you’ve got yourself a treat. And if you ingest the right one you’ll be on a some amazing(or horrifying) journey, all in your mind(and if you’re listening to Dark Side Of The Moon as this happens, even better.) Fungi are pretty intelligent, too. They create this very elaborate communication system under the forest floor so they can all, you know, talk or plot their eventual global takeover as they sit dormant on the forest floor, tree trunk, or growing on a dead body in some psychopaths corpse garden(that was a great episode of Hannibal.) It’s like this information superhighway for fungi. Plus, they beat out Al Gore by a few millennia in that department.

The fungi might just be pretty decent overlords. I mean, besides the complete destruction and takeover of our limbic systems.

Sorry. This is the kind of stuff that rattles around in my brain as I’m hacking up phlegm for the fourth day in a row. When I don’t feel bad enough to warrant sympathy or someone bringing me egg drop soup, fried rice, and hot tea along with a warm “Cheer up, fella.” Just bad enough to make me angry but still be good enough for all the responsibilities I’m, well, responsible for. This is just a half-hearted illness with no perks. No get out of work free cards.

Oh well. Whether its super fungi making a home in our lungs or just an allergic reaction to life itself there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll keep on keeping on until the spores take over and we’re nothing more than puppets for the Fungi overlords. Or until post nasal drip stops. Whichever comes first.