Source of Random Itchiness Finally Discovered!
It's 11PM. You're in bed, settled in comfortably after a satisfying night of binge drinking and strip Bingo. With the lights off and all 86 cats fed, you close your eyes and start to drift away to night terror land. After a few moments of quiet reflection, you begin that odd snort/gasp/gargle breathing pattern your partner often mistook for death throes. But that's just your way of busting down the door to sleep town, wherein lies 3.4 hours of peaceful rest and wild dreams of more strip bingo.
Then the back of your knee starts to itch. Badly. You snap out of your chat with Mayan bug monsters as soon as it begins (They are not pleased, and you will suffer for this transgression later). You instinctively tilt up, reach for your leg with your last good hand and... the itch just stops. You barely had to touch it, given you even made it that far.
What the hell was that? What just happened? What could itch like crazy in such a tiny spot for a split second and then vanish? Your mind races, you can't get back to sleep. Eventually, you settle for the most reasonable alternative to a good rest. You creep downstairs to spend another night watching episodes of The Golden Girls with no pants on. At least it's only Monday. Otherwise it would have been Family Matters.
Time to put those sleep pants back on because science has some good news for you! They've found out what that mystery itch probably was! No more sleepless nights for you! Not related to that itch, at least. All those bedtime hallucinations about David Copperfield moonwalking out of your closet and making your nipples disappear? It's probably unrelated.
Also, you should get some help. Weirdo.
So, what was that about sudden, random itches? Science say's it's not allergies. It's not dry skin, either. It's actually something much more basic, and actually involves many things that we all do on a daily basis. The only difference in this case is that we aren't the ones doing them this time.
It's not us that are doing it. It's what's on us that's doing it.
According to the most scientific of scientists, the mystery itch is simply a newly-discovered form of herpes contracted from a hideous microscopic insect as it simultaneously vomits and defecates on you while it eats your dead skin cells during mating. We can now suspend belief of all those terrible, false conclusions that it's probably eczema or some other minor irritation. We now know it's the insectoid equivalent of your crazy uncle Barry with food poisoning and a priapism. Thanks, science!
You would think such a bizarre number of disgusting bodily functions occurring at the same time is a rare instance, and it is. Rarer than the itch itself, right? Not exactly. Though the odds of one microscopic organism performing so many acts in unison is indeed orders of magnitude smaller than any of us could imagine, keep in mind that there are literally trillions of these things crawling all over our bodies all of the time. Just like you're more likely to witness a lightning strike within a square mile of land rather than a square foot, you're more likely to experience a disgusting, microscopic bug creature eating, pooping, vomiting, and having sex simultaneously when there are literally trillions of them. Is it making sense now?
The fact that there are such a staggering number of these creatures, most of which are said to look like a ring of spider legs attached to Donald Trump's orgasm face, makes this odd combination of events far more likely. Alongside this, the organisms in question seem to enjoy it when it happens, and they appear to try to combine these events as often as they can.
Like all other known forms of herpes, this one is also incurable. But according to science, it's mostly pretty much kind of generally harmless, so it's definitely nothing worth thinking about. Sweet dreams!
