I just paid $9 for a mediocre sandwich because I’m stuck at the airport and have been for a subjective time of several decades.
I can’t remember offhand which theorist described airports and bus stations as no-places, as not being destinations but merely brief transit points. As anyone who’s been stuck waiting at one of these sites can attest, they are most definitely places, places of misery and boredom.
Thank god for smartphones.
Lately I’ve been considering the moral underpinnings of the nut shot and how it relates to the debate on the existence of God.
I’ve asked around and found that most guys have taken multiple blows to the testicles over the course of their lives. This result was surprising to me since I figured that the crippling pain of the experience would discourage the possibility of repeats, but life throws us curve balls occasionally.
So, long story short, I wrote a pastiche in the style of Cormac McCarthy pontificating majestically about nut shots. Think of it as the opening for a magisterial work examining the experience of suffering.
I’ve titled this piece “So You’ve Been Kicked in the Testicles”.
So You’ve Been Kicked in the Testicles
The pain of being kicked in the testicles is not merely a physical pain but an existential one, which is to say that the pain is not contained in one part of the body but rather located throughout the entirety of one’s existence. When crippled by a blow to the groin, time loses all meaning and it feels as if one’s entire life has been spent with stabbing pains on the crotch.
Better and worse is the experience of seeing others receive a blow to the groin. It’s a sight uniquely tinged with both sympathy and hilarity in equal measure. There’s a recognition of pain, an empathetic understanding of living with the savage terror of existence in our uncaring universe, but there’s also the joy born of relief that the one so bedevilled is not oneself. The blow to the testicles lays bare the fiction of a just world, for there is no fairness in the disproportionate anguish caused by a random testicular blow. Faced with this fundamental injustice, how else can one react but with laughter?
I bought a KitKat bar because Google is running a promotion for the release of the new version of Android. You can win a Nexus 7 by entering a code you find on the inside of the chocolate bar’s wrapping, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but with less child endangerment. But there was no code in mine.
Damn you, KitKat, I broke my vow not to eat transfats any more because of you. How dare you not reward me for this sacrifice.
Okay, fine, I already have a Nexus 7 but this is still definitely a miscarriage of justice. You will rue this day in the future, KitKat.