Pollen Count

When I was a child, I never knew there was such a thing as a pollen count.  Even in my teens, I was unaware of what, exactly, the phenomenon was called.

What I did know was that every year, something crawled into my head through my sinuses and played the timpani...badly...before migrating down into my lungs and camping there for a few weeks, lodging me firmly in The Misery Zone.

One spring, it even turned into a lovely case of pneumonia that came within a gnat's ninny of hospitalizing me.  Fun times.

To this day I am not certain what the pollen count really means.  I mean...okay...I understand it's how much pollen is in the air at any given time, usually a daily average or high.  But...how does that apply?  Sometimes the count is really quite low and I have a head full of glue.  Sometimes the count is insanely high and my sinuses are as clear as if I'd been eating hot Chinese mustard by the spoonful.  It seems it's not the amount of pollen, it's what the pollen is that matters most.

I propose that instead of a count telling us how much pollen there is overall, we change it to a pollen quality, enumerating the various things trying to kill us at any given time.  Heck...not just pollen...how about we include particulate matter like pollution and diesel exhaust, construction dust, and the dry, powdery substance that looks, acts, and smells remarkably like what comes out of a bull's backside but in fact spills out of politicians' mouths every time they open them.

In fact, I bet if we installed BS filters on politicians, our general air quality would improve exponentially!

Meanwhile, we are well within the time period when my immune system goes haywire in response to the blooming of things, so I will be keeping Kleenex in business for the next month or so.  Poor Evil Genius suffers the same affliction, so he'll be joining me in the head-full-of-pudding-lungs-full-of-gelatin-nose-running-like-a-faucet club.  Lucky us.