I hope I don’t get smallpox.

Or black pox. That would be the worst.

Black pox is that variety of smallpox that spreads underneath your skin in gigantic black patches, then your skin falls off in bloody sheets, then you die. And all in about 9 hours or so.

Yes, I’d much prefer the killer avian flu. With the killer, awful, virulent avian (aka also “bird”) flu, you can still think to yourself “Man, this flu is bad! I’d better stay home from work today.” You can hold out hope that it’s not going to be fatal, that you just caught some real gnarly flu and you’ll be right as rum in no time.

Wouldn’t it be cool if, instead of killing you, the bird flu turned you into Big Bird?

I want that.

I want an unstoppable virus that rips across the world, smashing international boundaries, sparing neither man nor woman nor child, that turns people into…

… no… oh, dear God, no …

… Big Bird.

I want to see razor-wire fenced quarantine camps packed with nine-foot tall yellow canaries with affable nasal voices inquiring after the welfare of their friend “Snuffleupagus”.

I want to see deserted, trash-strewn streets abandoned to the disease, silent and still but for the ghostly forms of long-beaked giants in the mist, their heads bobbing innocently.

I want to see heroic, steel-nerved nuns ministering to wards chock-a-block with the wretched afflicted, massive orange feet hanging over the ends of too-small beds.

That’s what I want.

Anything but my skin falling off my body in bloody sheets.