The New Normal #1

It is well known that the human body is covered completely in hair. In the obvious and conventional places the hair is plainly evident, sometimes in lush, conspicuous thatches that serve some documented biological purpose, like attraction. But little realized is the fact that the whole of our integument is also forested with small, finite twigs that protrude through the surface of our skin like the bristles of fuzz on a peach. Perhaps the rude awakening of the sight of the beginnings of a moustache on the first girl you kissed brought this knowledge to you, perhaps it was the hirsute carpet of your boyfriend’s back, or the stems protruding from your uncle’s ears. But close inspection, if permitted, reveal that it’s everywhere, all over, the hair that is, on the outside, save the soles of our feet and the palms of our hands, which nature has kindly left smooth that we may enjoy gentle caresses and the very real feel of the earth.
Early in our history the hair that covered our bodies was thick, luxuriant, in order to keep us warm and protect us from the rough, thorny world we lived in. Evolution spared it as we became sleeker, only making it much thinner but still omnipresent so that it might serve as a tactile sensing mechanism for our skin, same as an insect’s feelers, or a cat’s whiskers if you will. To prove the point pluck a hair from your head, or another’s, with permission, and gradually bring it to closer proximity with any part of your  body, or another’s, with permission or in secret, that appears devoid of hair, your nose, or theirs, say. Before it actually touches the skin it is felt as an almost inconsolable itch, one that must be scratched. A troubling, pernicious nuisance of an itch.
Huck Finn once found himself in the uncomfortable position of feeling such an itch that, had he scratched it, might have resulted in a terrible beating, or worse. We now find ourselves in a similar predicament.
Sit in a bright sunny room. Pick a place where a ray of sun pierces a window and it’s light is clearly visible.  Lightly pat the cushion of the chair where you sit and observe the dance of particles that enter the ray of light. Some rush through it, bright specks racing on tiny wisps of air that are like hurricanes to them, and some drift aimlessly on the current, waiting to alight where they can do the most they can for themselves, or the worst. One such mote may land upon one of the fine, infinitesimal hairs of your nose.
In the past we would sweep our fingertips across the area where the itch occurred that was a result of the settling dustmote, but no more. For this is The New Normal, and we must not touch our face!
Bringing our hand to our face brings it and everything it has come in contact with, which is everything, everything fair, foul or inert, into close range of three points of ingress to the innards of our bodies, the eyes, the mouth and the nose. Each of these have moist, circulating fluids that are in intimate closeness with all things vital to our corporal selves. Let an infinitesimally minute organism swim in these mucousal environs and they will happily explore the limits of their new habitat, leisurely do the backstroke, prosper and propigate. If that bacterium, or virus, be harmful, woe to the unfortunate soul that introduced it to the swim party by mining for gold or scratching an itch.
So The New Normal indicates we can no longer casually just scratch every itch. Shame, there are several itches we would scritch at, the current, agrivating one aside our left nostril included, most immediately, were it prudent.