It's not like ball-and-stick injuries don't scare the shit out of you anyhow from like birth, of course, but like I needed goddamn reinforcement there was this awkwardness during the summer of 1999, look here: I'm caught up in a breakup and this great job, she's living in my house which is awkward and I'm making new friends, things are moving fast, and my dear friend is holed up in his own bedroom maybe on the third floor (I lived there but was never around) and not coming out, pretty much ever. Well the time comes to be a friend, belatedly, lamely, knock knock on the door he answers and he's like 'Wax,' (he was fond of the silly fraternity nicknames and his was 'Thexter' or 'DXDR' or 'Thexdex' or whatever), 'Wax' he says, 'this is what's happened.' And he drops his boxer shorts to reveal that one testicle is absolutely huge, I mean fucking A like you drop this thing on Nagasaki and they surrender huge is what I'm saying.
'Torsion,' he says, teaching me a new word.
Apparently the overwhelming majority of testicle pains reported by the menfolk are minor cases of torsion which means 'spinning' basically, yowza. Actually OK sidebar: my XGF and I once asked if he was interested in taking the not-for-public-consumption pictures of us, etc., and it was the friendliest thing in a way. We all hugged, it never happened. Better that way in a way, or maybe neutral that way.
Here's what a dickweed I was: shortly after dude killed himself I wrote a hypertext essay/poem about him for a new media narratives class and got an A on the project. Christicles. The professor liked my use of whitespace and iteration, repetition. You know I was proud of it and felt I was doing us both a service, him and me. But what I should've been saying was probably get to a doctor ya damn fool, yer ball is huge, like usher-in-the-atomic-era huge, like I should be afraid to sully the collective memory of the beloved dead but damn huge.
Which OK, we're around the barn here and have come to: like you're not terrified of the goddamn injuries-to-package motif, plus the familiar I'll-never-do-the-thing-again trope, there's gotta be the resonance with memories of friendships judged (at low moments) ill-served aspect. The literary term here is 'overdetermined.'
Which brings us to mid-March, and the sudden onset of shattering this-and-that in basically the Tiny Toon, about which more later when the mere thought does not crush my mind, plus y'know not drinking whiskey, thanks Reader(s). Wish you well, you have no idea.
