Swine Flu Hits the Playroom

Over the weekend, we celebrated my mother's 60th birthday. I KNOW, can you believe she's that old! I certainly can't. I'm glad that my age is in no way reflected by hers.

Mom is a notorious pig hater. She's always detested the stinky little buggers, and who can blame her, really. If they weren't so delicious, they would almost certainly be worthy of the type of discrimination usually reserved for your most attentive of religions (just kidding, I know that some religions already discriminate against the pig--silly though that may be since it means NO BACON, which is probably too high of a price to pay just for a particular brand of heaven). Because she hates pigs, and because our family is so very supportive, she is guaranteed to receive at least one pig for every major gift giving holiday from some family member or other. And, if we're ALL really on our game, she might receive four or five. Not surprisingly, she has quite a collection of pigs.

For this birthday, since it was a milestone, we decided that we needed to do something special. My sister-in-law Casey suggested that we decorate the house with 60 pigs. The rest of us thought this was brilliant, so we went on various pig-buying quests to find as many as we could.

We ended up getting 64--we figured the rest were "to grow on" pigs. When we were finished with our weekend of surprise parties and other gatherings, some of the pigs were divvied out, and since Gabe is too young to know how disgusting some animals are, he just HAD to have several of them. Thus we are now in possession of several new pigs.

And I decided that it was timely to do an H1N1 bit in our living room. Yes, this was a "teaching moment," and I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to explain to Gabe some of the intricate in's and out's of epidemics, pandemics, and the occasional hysterias that go along with them.

Rather, it COULD HAVE BEEN a teaching moment. Instead, it was just me orchestrating another story in the background while Gabe went about his business. As you will see from the video at the end, the four months that have passed since the last time we had a playroom escapade hasn't been enough to make Gabe interested in my stories. He has also gained remarkably little ground in his Following Directions area of expertise.

The story began with the introduction of the pigs to the room.

Gabe, along with some of the other denizens of the living room, greet the new arrivals.

Because it wouldn't be very interesting if everyone got along swimmingly from the first moment on, trouble started to brew almost immediately.

Currently, our room has a very high redneck population, thanks to Gabe's unwavering interest in cars, trucks, and tractors. Nothing against rednecks, of course. Salt of the earth, and all that. "Git r done," and "I hunt white tail year 'round." See, I can talk your talk, so there's no need to visit me in the night and burn down my house or plant a four story rendering of the 10 Commandments in my yard or whatever. 'Necks are very understanding and sympathetic people, normally. Very accepting and eager to move the human race along its social and cultural path towards the kind of living perfection that we MUST be heading towards, otherwise, what's the point of it all?

But OUR rednecks, well-intentioned though they are, tend to be unusually undereducated by the normally rigorous standards of the NASCAR culture. They tend to get their news from sources that prefer to insight and instill fear and hatred rather than actually inform (that's right, NPR and PBS), so they have a tendency to over-react to any little thing.

And, wouldn't you know it, just this morning, Morning Edition had a big piece of Swine Flu. "SWINE flu?" they said, incensed into action by the knee-jerk media. "We just had a mess of swine move into our neighborhood! Surely they will kill us all! Huzzah!" (You read that correctly. Thanks to the summer Brandy Sue spent traveling the Renn Faire circuit, she'd picked up a few peculiarities of speech, and one or two of them stuck because the goodly people of our living room are eager to expand their horizons linguistically as well as culturally).

As the timing is wont to be when a story is wholly constructed by an addled and somewhat hackneyed brain, several noteworthy citizens (meaning, no homeless or foreigners, obviously) came down with deathly illnesses and were consigned to the hospital couch. Terrible timing, indeed!

Oh the humanity! NORMAL people are being struck down! (Note: that pink one isn't a pig, it's a hippo, so it's SAFE for it to be there)

Almost immediately, in the tradition of other well-thought-out and totally justified rounding-ups of possible problem sorts such as the witches of Salem, the Japanese during WWII, and the Commies during the 50s, the new porcine citizens of the living room were gathered together (interestingly, in the exact same place they were greeted) by the good people of the room.

"Let's roast these porkers!" screamed Randy Bob (the first word of his name is actually an adjective, not a proper name--I know, it's confusing to people until they get to know him) as he thoughtfully and empathetically leveled his twelve gauge shotgun on the pink perpetrators.

Then, all of these little piggies were hauled in to a confinement center (which was later unofficially renamed Happy Funtime Piggy Palace to better illustrate the exact kind of pampering the pigs could assume they would receive there).

The Happy Funtime Piggy Palace (or the Porcine Organizational and Re-educational Klink--P.O.R.K.--as its official government letterhead says). Sadly, all of these pigs were eaten by the P.O.R.K. facility's single gigantic baby guard. A sad day, indeed . . . if you're one of them there pig-lovers!

Less than a week after the giant baby guard ate the detainees, it was discovered by socialists in the scientific community that, in fact, none of the people in the hospital had contracted Swine Flu. What they DID have was a hybridized mutation of Monkey Pox and Bird Flu. It was also discovered that Patient Zero, the monkey that can nearly be seen in one of the pictures above--had been the very first person admitted with the symptoms--and he had only been brought to the hospital after his baby mama (a pigeon) had died from the same malady back at their trailer. Patient Zero had, actually, refused to be admitted to the hospital because, as he calmly and cleverly noted, "I'll be goddamned if I'm going into that place! It'll be SWIMMING in those swine loving, pig fucking, hog humpers! I'll die in five minutes in that pig pen!" Once he lost consciousness, however, face down in the giant plate of fatback he had set before him just moments before, his neighbor delivered him to the hospital where he passed away less than five minutes after being admitted!

The moral here, good readers, is that he COULD have been saved, if only the goddamn pigs that spread this terrible malady had been corraled earlier! Never hesitate! Your instincts are always right! Trust your guts cause your head's got no balls!

Gabe, hustling the pig-folk to their eventual resting place. What a helpful child!