CW FISHER

Scientists are saying we're just a sneeze away from a pandemic that could wipe us out in a day or two. No call to panic. They just wanted to let us know they're working on it.

Bird flu, as they call it, comes from, just as it sounds, bird poo; droppings of various sorts, including snot blow, and yes, birds have nostrils, and no, they have no manners: thus their every expectorant heeds gravity's call, splashing equally over good seed and bad, which other birds then eat, creating dead birds everywhere. The first thing you notice is the silence; you step outside, slip on a... crow. And that's how you learn you're next.

According to my local newspaper, the DeKalb County Chronicle, "scientists fear there would be nothing they could do to quarantine a virus as virulent as the avian strain if it were to mutate with a human flu virus. The pandemic would be quick and deadly, perhaps much worse than the pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide in 1918. We're due for another." Using the word pandemic twice calls attention to the fact that pandemic minus dem equals panic. The experts are trying to tell us they're freaked.

I heard a report yesterday that the vultures are dying.

When the experts are freaked, it's only a matter of time before the public catches up, usually about the time the bodies start turning up and you're just getting the sniffles. It all plays like the classic Stephen King novel, The Stand, except that the real thing would kill you way before you could finish the book.

Scientists, what babies. "There's nothing we can do!" "It's so virulent!" "Quarantine would be impossible!" "We're due for another."

Order your casket NOW!

In a way, it's funny. We've been looking in the wrong direction. We were looking for shoe bombs, car bombs, human bombs, dirty bombs, smart bombs — not bird bombs.

Never did we think it would be bird bombs. When we looked at birds we saw happy birds, not sowing or reaping or storing up in barns, just happy, fat birds, enjoying God's bounty. Turns out they were just waiting to take us down.

Here we are, not 20 feet below, minding our own business, hanging out on the playground yelling fight fight fight fight when we start dropping one by one and a few swings of the clock later it's sayonara good fight aloha seven virgins in a topsy-turvy cross-cultural traffic jam of dead and dying--Christians bunked with Muslims next to Jews, you got your Hindi and your Buddhists and your Wicca's in there somewhere in a spaceless weightless timeless place where ectoplasm mingles free without debate and we discover no desire to disagree; we're republicrats and demolicans who play our part in the big big band and yes the birds are there too — but our pets are all alive, running things.