I can think of very few people who were as prepared for Covid-19 than one Michael Joseph Jackson. Most people thought he was as bizarre and as creepy as hell for always appearing in public wearing gloves and a face mask. I have struggled with OCD and a pretty severe case of germaphobia all my life, and as a result I totally understood where the reclusive King of Pop was coming from.
Unfortunately for me, I've always been about nine zeros away from being a billionaire. And, as we all know, the difference between being "eccentric" and being committed to a Fort Napier psychiatric ward is your bank balance, so I've resisted wearing gloves everywhere I go. But while "Wacko Jacko" was watching out for Ebola, SARS and Covid-19, he was blindsided by a deadlier disease in the person of a Dr Conrad Murray.
It is an open secret that I harbour quite a strong anti-humanism sentiment. I do not think very highly of collective human intelligence and our general self-preservation acumen. But, in spite of my natural disposition, in early April I made an hallucinatory prediction that Covid-19 would elicit a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we practise human contact and personal hygiene in general.
I remember suggesting to someone that Zweli Mkhize had probably consulted scientific literature suggesting it takes the average person 22 days to form a habit, which is why the initial lockdown was 21 days.
I truly believed back then that by now, handshaking, hugging and coitus without wearing Nasa suits with holes in the groin area would be things of the past. I thought men invoking the title of the Fred Khumalo autobiography by yelling, "Touch my blood" while extending their fists towards you for a bump would end. How silly of me.
It would seem that, true to form, the human collective used the various lockdowns across the globe to adopt a wait-and-see attitude towards the virus. The perennial smartest individuals in the room used their lockdowns to peddle conspiracy theories about G5 towers, Bill Gates and the Chinese government plotting to form an oligarchy that will take over the governments of the world and implant Microsoft chips in all of us.
The rest of us spent the lockdown stuffing our faces with amagwinya, pork trotters, guzzling homemade pineapple beer and getting fat. We formed no new habits other than being forced to work from home in our underwear and masturbating to colleagues' images during Zoom meetings, like The New Yorker writer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.
When we emerged from the hard lockdown, this germaphobe was thrown back into the cesspool of microbial exchange he had prayed for Covid-19 to obliterate. One of my greatest phobias is to touch hands with strangers. That's absolutely irrational because I don't think strangers are any filthier than my friends and family.
One of the reasons I avoid going to the mall is the number of hands that come into contact with mine "accidentally". I have a theory that the bosses of supermarket till operators, toll booth personnel, petrol attendants, waitrons and car guards set them daily and annual targets of the number of fingers they must deliberately touch.
Have you ever tried to receive change from a till operator without your fingers touching?
Have you ever tried to hand over money or receive change from a till operator without your fingers touching? Kicking Trump out of the White House is significantly easier.
The other day I tried to drop two R5 coins onto a car guard's open palm from a height of half a centimetre to avoid hand contact - 0.0001 seconds after the coins landed, his thick, sweaty fingers curled up and grabbed mine before I could retract.
But the woman who served me at Wimpy takes the award for most concerted attempt at finger contact ever. To avoid human contact, I ordered four "Double Up" meals over the phone. I offered to pick up my order because I didn't want to wait an hour and end up eating ice-cold eggs. The woman behind the counter seemed genuinely offended when I tapped my card instead of handing it to her. She then tried to hand me the till slip. I refused it.
She then grabbed the big bag with four breakfasts inside and tried to hand it to me. I indicated that she put it on the counter while pretending to be frantically searching for my car keys. After I picked up the bag, she suddenly grabbed it from my clutch without warning, "accidentally" wrapping her fingers around mine while mumbling something about wanting to make sure there were condiments inside.
I swear she executed a tiny air punch as she walked away and I stood there flummoxed, my mouth agape.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.