7 Things That Suck Because You Have a Terrible Cold

So, it’s winter time and right out of left field, some disease-ridden, poxy, unsanitary refuse-pile of a human spread their disgusting germs all over your juice box or your chapstick or God knows what and now you’re producing phlegm like Taiwanese workers in a factory producing Dollar Store underpants. Fantastic. Your head is hot, your throat feels like there’s a bread knife jammed in it sideways and your nose randomly spouts snot rivers whenever you let loose a hasty exhalation. Can it get worse? Yes. Yes it can.

1. Urinating – The morning piss is a daily right of passage for every man. It invigorates as it reaffirms life. It’s like being the very sun itself, rising above the world and letting down sunny rays of golden warmth. Gross, huh? Yes. Now try to do it while your body is wracked with spastic coughs which may have been mistaken for demonic possession in less enlightened times. Suddenly the fine art of morning urination has become a frenzied urinary storm of drunken discoordination. Is that even a word? No time to care because you’re pissing on the medicine cabinet.

2. Sex – Do you know what ladies love the most in the bedroom? Not being stuck under someone suffering a pulmonary edema. If you have more sticky fluids above the belt than below, you instantly become as sexually attractive a Cher. From a distance you might be appealing, but as you draw nearer the veneer is stripped away and you’re revealed to be the goblin you are. Plus there’s a chance you may feast on souls like Cher as well, and no one wants that.

Traditionally, sex with a diseased person is a punishment doled out in certain 3rd world nations and outer spheres of the Abyss. You could have every smooth line in the world committed to memory, but your mucous automatically makes them as awful as the lyrics to a Justin Bieber song. Also, I’m out $50 now due to Mercedes’ no refund policy.

3. Cooking Dinner – There’s something untoward about making dinner when you’re diseased. Do you want to eat food made by someone who is oozing? Coughing? Someone whose orifices are caked with bacterial or viral or fungal atrocities? Colonel Sanders may slaughter millions of chickens every year, but at least he wears that pristine white suit and neatly coiffed Southern gentleman bear while he does it. Dressed like that, you’d let that man bang your mother on your coffee table. But if he’s got the bed head you get when you’re too sick to give a shit how you look, wearing grubbies and wiping his nose like a crack addict, you’d kick his Mississippi-stanking ass right out the door.

4. Talking Your Way Out of Visiting Relatives – You have to be quick of wit and tongue to avoid your extended family. No one likes their extended family, that’s why they’re extended. Meaning away. Like a soiled diaper you hold at arm’s length in the hopes to keep the rank, awfulness within from infecting you. So too is grandma. The problem with being sick, of course, is that you have sacrificed your mind and reflexes and now, as someone is planning to come over and deliver you some homemade borsht and bring eerie-smelling cousin Luke for a visit as well, you have no recourse. You can’t escape and you can’t really fight them off. You jus lay there while grandma makes your kitchen stink like cabbage and cousin Luke “accidentally” goes through your underwear drawer.

5. Walking the Dog – A dog is the most honest animal on earth. If you’re sick the dog thinks “I need to shit then eat then lick my ass, in that order.” Your sickness was in that thought nowhere. The dog doesn’t care. So sick or not, you better grab a tiny bag and walk outside behind your dog when he scratches at the door, because he’s not going to be sympathetic to your plight and toilet train himself today. And while that is an uncomfortable task when you’re ill, it’s compounded by the fact the universe demands, at a fundamental, subatomic level, that when you bend over to retrieve that duke with the tiny bag on your hand, you will be take by a coughing jag that will culminate in your thumb tearing through the bag and embedding itself firmly in the poo.

6. Demanding Refunds – When your rubber fisting mitten finally arrives in the mail, and it was clearly made for a hand much larger than yours, and you call the company to complain, that sassy receptionist on the other end will hang up on you if you cough out every sentence in an unintelligible growl.

7. Being a Voyeur – Like most Holy Taco staffers, you probably make ends meet by dressing up like a woman, hiding a camera in your shoe and going to public restrooms to stick your foot under stall doors and film strangers going to the bathroom. And as awesome as that is, it really works poorly without a little discretion. Obviously there’s an unspoken agreement between people in public restrooms that they will be filmed and it’s totally cool, but you can’t draw attention to it. However, if you’re wearing your mother’s sundress and a wig and sliding your foot into the next stall and suddenly you start hacking and wheezing to beat the band, that tacit understanding is lost and some people may actually report you to authorities. Thanks for nothing, cold virus.