I’ve said it before. There are too many choices in the world. We’re living in a country in which almost everyone has drinking water piped right into their house but grocery stores have entire aisles devoted to branded tap water in plastic bottles. It’s paralyzing.

But it’s a brave new world, and now we’ve got too many choices in disease too.

Admittedly you had a lot of diseases to choose from back a century or two. You had your dropsy and your flux and Yellow Fever and Scarlet Fever and lots of polka-dotted fevers. It wasn’t as complicated though. Mostly people didn’t get old enough to get some of our crappier diseases, and your options for treatment boiled down to Opium or Death.

But by the time I came along, they were getting a serious handle on this business. They’d already almost knocked out one pox and were taking aim at another. Kids a bit younger than me never did get measles or chicken pox or diphtheria or polio. Antibiotics kicked bacterial ass right and left. At a certain point in my lifetime, all anybody ever got was a cold or the flu. There may have been gradations but not important enough for anyone to make a distinction. “It’s just a cold,” we’d say, hacking away in the concert hall, or “I don’t know—some kind of flu bug.”

In fact that “some kind of flu bug” covered a lot of territory. Influenza has some specific symptoms to it but we didn’t care: we smacked that label on everything from hangover to getting into some bad oysters. Anything you couldn’t sneeze into a Kleenex was some kind of flu. Any time an orifice is used in an extracurricular fashion: flu.

Shoot. It used to take a lot to keep us in bed. There wasn’t a respiratory virus we didn’t want to share. Everybody showed up for work no problem. Everyone swapped snot, everyone went on and on about whatever they had. We did okay. Nobody you knew ever checked out. Just random old people and people who probably had it coming for one reason or another. All the legacy viruses had been consigned to the history books. In fact, it was hard to get super sick unless you had a drug habit.

But now it’s gotten out of hand. Our antibiotics are so over us; they’re retiring. Now we’re back to having too many diseases. It started a decade or two ago. There’d be rumors of cheap new viruses stamped Made In China and sent out into the world, but they mostly didn’t get any traction.

Until COVID. And then they made a vaccine, and a booster, and a few auxiliary vaccines and boosters, and this year’s flu vaccine recipe, and viruses and sub-viruses with names that must contain at least eight characters including one upper-case and one lower-case letter and a number.

So instead of everyone happily swapping snot and the population coming up one short now and then, now we’ve got the dang wild West. You’ve got complete strangers coughing in the store and hollering “It’s just allergies” and everyone else running for cover. You’ve got people eyeing each other with suspicion even if they’re all unarmed Democrats.

I kept up with it avidly in the beginning of COVID years. We were learning along with the experts, as the thing went along. I thought when the vaccine showed up that we could skim off Robert Kennedy Jr. and some of the other weirdos and the rest of us would go about our lives with COVID in the rear view mirror, just like smallpox. But no. Every year it’s something new. Some cult somewhere decides to make a ritual out of sucking on bats and Mother Nature shakes her germy head and thinks: Shoot. What morons. Might as well take out everyone else too.

So now we have RSV. Supposedly we’ve had that my whole life but I don’t believe it. I do not know what it is. I don’t know how it’s transmitted or how crappy it makes you feel or how likely it is to take you out. I am acronymed out. I have a new plan. I’m going into the clinic every year, and roll up my sleeve, or bend over, and I’m going to say “Top me up, baby. Gimme whatever you got.”