L – Lepers

Here's a question for all of your social philanthropists out there; do leper colonies still exist?

We’ve all heard of the hideous wasting disease known as leprosy.  We all laughed at the idea that their arms might fall off at any given moment.  We’d all like to slap them on the back and watch them crumble to bits like a crash test dummy.  But do lepers and leprosy actually exist in the modern world?

I’ve never come across a leper.  After spending a lot of time amongst the homeless (the free lunches they get sure are tasty.  If you simply piss in your own pockets and tousle your hair and they’ll accept you as one of their own), I’ve never seen an actual, real life leper.

I have come to the conclusion that lepers are simply make believe creatures, like the unicorn, the griffin, and the platypus.  If they do exist, it’d be difficult for them to fully blend in, especially in the business world.  If you find someone who refuses to shake your hand, perhaps they might suffer from leprosy.  A man who regularly shuns high fives must be a leper.

On that note, what exactly are leper colonies?  I imagine a leper colony would work in a similar manner to a bee colony, with one leper queen and thousands of leper drones toiling to provide food for the colony.  Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be able to carry much more weight than a handful of leaves, otherwise their hands would drop off.  Starvation must have been a common dilemma amongst leper colonies.  That’s not to mention the sheer horror faced by leper drones when mating with their queen.  I’d guess it was like a discarded string of sausages across her chamber floor.

If there are any lepers or leper experts out there, I’d love to hear from you.  Please don’t take this post as an attack on lepers, I am just a little loose on the facts.  Forgive my ignorance on the subject, as I’d hate for you to fall apart over it.  In fact, I’d like to take a leper out for a beer and watch him get completely legless.  On beer!  Nothing else was meant by that comment, oh god!  Please don’t throw any punches at me.  Not that you’d be detaching your fists and literally throwing them at me or anything.  Again I didn’t mean it like that...I’ll shut up now.  I'll pull my finger out for the next post.

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By the way, have you noticed the new layout?  Well you can thank Elton over at Elton Says Things for that.  He created that nice spangled banner up there, which I feel has really livened this place up.  In a show of appreciation, I urge you to visit his Blog which is really very, very good.