Sneezing

I've played with several different titles for this inane blog. Namely What Sneezing Can Do For You and An Aspiring Humorist's Take On Sneezing and The Things I Dwell On At Concerts, before finally settling on Sneezing.

This past school year when I was aiding for my 7th and 8th grade English teacher I stopped my cruel paper editing long enough to listen to her explain to her students the history of the positively antagonizing rebuttal to sneezes everywhere, "Bless You." She told of a certain plague in some part of Europe and that one of the symptoms were sneezing. The ignorant civilians exhibited there fixation with the supernatural by assuming that the sneeze meant that they were cursed and an evil spirit was attacking them. To counteract this omen they would respond with, "Bless You."

Tonight at my church, in the middle of a John Waller concert I had a seemingly useless epiphany of sorts. A woman three rows up sneezed. I somewhat automatically said, "Bless You." Then it ocurred to me that I blessed her without her even knowing. She'll probably never know, that a boy she'll never know, blessed her this night. I entertained the idea among Waller hits like "The Blessing" and "Ancient Words." I conversed in my head recalling times where I had wondered, "What did I do to deserve such a blessing?" The answer of course was nothing. I went on to do some of my strange and often avante garde guesswork on the subject. What if those bewildering benedictions are the product of someone's behind the scenes sneeze response. It's kind of comical. We never specify as to what way we should bless them, so in theory (my wild and strange and probably useless theory) I would think that the blessing would be shifted to the greatest area of need. I continued to wonder about the maximity of the blessings in relation to the proportions of the sneeze. If you sneeze bigger does the same blessing count for more, or maybe the enunciation of the blessing in response to such a sneeze is what makes for a better reward. So, a large sneeze might grant you a new car and a smaller one might bless you with a nickel on the sidewalk.

Look around you, how many of your blessings might you suppose were the product of a sneeze? A sneeze in which we wonder why comes. A sneeze that is maybe annoying or unpleasant.

A sneeze.

Why does my mind work this way?