Category: anti-humor

Necrotizing Fasciitis of the Genitalia: The Comedy

RilalyLeave a comment

I just got over a mean case of food poisoning. It was so awful. Thank you for your attempts to sympathize, but I don’t deserve it. I did it to myself. I poisoned myself. Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine. Maybe I deserve your sympathy, because unlike the Neanderthal man I have all these food preservation techniques and appliances at my disposal, I just choose not to use them. Does that idiocy does warrant some sympathy, maybe.   

Who, other than a complete moron, accidentally poisons themselves three times? You do it once, and it’s because you’re living by yourself for the first time in your life. You’re a bachelor, and you’ll learn, right? Twice is happenstance. It’s a circumstantial accident that can happen to anyone, but three times? That man just refuses to learn. Check that, I learned one thing. I learned that there are levels of food poisoning. There’s the ‘Ooh, I don’t feel so good,’ uncomfortable stomach ache that leads to limited activity for a night. It’s the ‘I’m not calling in sick for work today, but I don’t think I’ll be playing softball tonight’ type of food poisoning. Then, there’s the ‘I don’t want to go out, speak to anyone, or do anything other than just sit here and watch TV, and maybe listen to some soft, soothing music before I sleep this off’ food poisoning. The third level, the one I was introduced to the other day, is a ‘not only do I think this could take me, but I’m not really sure if I want to go on’ level of food poisoning. Seriously, I consider myself something of a survivor now. Someone said I should’ve gone to the hospital, and do you want to hear how dumb I am? That thought never even crossed my mind. That’s right, if you read my name in some obituary, you’ll probably shake your head and say, ‘It was only a matter of time. The man just didn’t know how to take care of himself.’

I also sprained my ankle last week. It was a bad, high ankle sprain that happened while I was walking my dog. Pathetic right? Oh, and I almost forgot, I’ve been diagnosed with stage four liver cancer, and I have four years to live. I’m lying, I don’t have stage four liver cancer, but Geoffrey Guardina does. Do you want to know how I know that, because he told me. He gave me this earth-shattering revelation about sixty seconds after our hello. 

“Hi, I’m Geoffrey Guardina,” he said, “and I have stage four liver cancer.” All right, I’m exaggerating a little. He said some things in between, but the minute he dropped that bomb, I forgot everything else he said.

Geoffrey and I were trying to have a casual, adult conversation, and then he goes and says something like that to bring the proceedings to a crashing halt. I couldn’t, and I’m a pretty decent conversationalist. I wouldn’t call myself gifted, but I’m pretty adaptable. I challenge any gifted conversationalist to pivot into the trivial and mundane topics that adults talk about when meeting a person for the first time after they say something like that? No, Geoffrey has the floor after that info dump.

I wanted to say, ‘Geoffrey, Geoffrey, hold on, before you go into the excruciating details of your terminal diagnosis, remember, I just met you, and I’m not done calculating how the mistakes you’ve made with your diet can have on me, and I just learned your name one minute and twelve seconds ago. We might want to hold off on the excruciating details of your impending death until, whaddya say, the three-minute mark? I don’t know if there’s a protocol for dropping a terminal diagnosis, but I think I should, at least, have your first name committed to memory. Because when you say something like that, I’ll not only forget your name, but I might be so shocked that I neglect to say I’m sorry to hear that.    

That’s right, I forgot to say, I’m sorry to hear that. I could see it all over Geoffrey’s face. The look said, ‘I just told this man I have stage four liver cancer, and this guy hasn’t said I’m sorry to hear that yet? What is wrong with him?’ Geoffrey’s face had total condemnation all over it. ‘It’s social protocol for him to say that, yet he refuses,’ his face said.   

Geoffrey paused to allow me a spot to say it, and I forgot. I admit it, but I just met this guy, and he introduces himself, and I’m all wrapped up in observing him and trying to figure him out a little. I’m not devouring his characteristics, because he’s not that engaging, but I’m always curious about what makes my fellow man tick, and then he tells me he has stage four liver cancer. Stage four, yeah, he just found out, and he just found out he likely won’t see his son graduate from high school. Maybe you’re quicker than me, but with that shock and awe whirlwind, but I think I should be forgiven for my failure to fulfill my end of the cultural obligations of social protocol. 

“They’ve given me four years to live,” he added. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I got it in.

Now, I know what you’re thinking right here. I can feel it on some of your faces. Four years for stage four? Was Geoffrey lying to me, or did his doctors lie to him? I don’t know. That’s what Geoffrey told me, and I wasn’t about to say, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you might want to check again with your doctor, because I’ve never heard of doctors giving stage four liver cancer patients four years. I think you might have six months Geoffrey, tops. If you’re one of those fact checkers who fact checks everyone on every stupid, little thing, including their mortality, then you’re either a better man than me, or much, much worse.  

Whatever the case was, we weren’t two minutes past his terminal diagnosis, and Geoffrey starts giving me intimate details about his divorce. “Yeah, she was cheating on me,” he said, “with one of my best friends.” 

It wobbled me. I couldn’t think of anything to say, but I caught myself, and I said it. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Geoffrey.” I added his name to further punctuate the seriousness of my sympathy to hopefully erase any remnants of my initial transgression. I should’ve added a big old Good God man! Good God Geoffrey, we just finished an awkward intro that I still haven’t quite recovered from, and now you’re telling me your best friend slept with your wife? Nothing you say to me from now until the end of time is going to top that buddy. 

I felt bad, I still feel bad, for Geoffrey. Don’t we all, but I think my tank of sympathy and empathy done dried out years ago. I’ll continue to live up to my obligation of saying, “I’m so sorry to hear that,” but you guys done dried me out with all your divulging. You divulge, confess, and reveal the most intimate, embarrassing and uncomfortable details of your life to me, a person you’ve just met. You do it on all of your social media sites, and we click, like and emoji, until we’re just done caring about you. 

My dad’s generation opened up a bit more to their immediate family, but they kept the embarrassing stuff close to the vest, for the most part. Alcohol was the asterisk, and they drank … a lot. They drank so much that it was a part of their personality. When my dad’s generation drank, they opened up and told every Tom, Dick and Harry who sat next to them at their favorite watering hole, anything and everything they could think up. My grandpa didn’t say anything to anyone, even his immediate family, but my grandpa didn’t drink. He would’ve been floored by what we tell the person sitting next to us in the office.

Our generation, sober and drunk, walk up to complete strangers and tells them about their problems at work, their inability to perform sexually, and their genital warts, because why not? If we can’t handle it, it’s kind of on us, or that seems to be the way they see it. Have you ever seen those guys who get competitive? They drop the ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ and then they say something along the lines of:

“You think you got it bad, Geoffrey Guardina? Huh, I say you have no idea how bad it can get. The other day, I was walking across a bridge, and the largest, most aggressive eagle you ever saw picked me up, flew me to her nest, and tried to feed me to her babies. And if I didn’t keep a can of pepper spray on me, which I do at all times, I hasten to think what would have transpired. Moral of the story, always carry a can of pepper spray. Stage four, liver cancer? Pffft! I’ll rock your gawdamed world Geoffrey Guardina!”  

We call this the war story effect. Everyone has to have it worse than their neighbors, and no one is embarrassed by it. “What? It’s the truth man, and if you can’t handle the truth that says more about you than me.”

If you’re dumb enough to walk up to people and ask, “Hey Geoffrey, how you doing?” They’ll tell you. EVERYTHING.

And they’ll preface it with, “You might want to sit down for this.” I don’t know who invented that phrase, but we all need to get together to stop using it. Have you ever heard of the economic principle of supply and demand? If we all agree to limit the supply, it might have a corresponding effect on its demand. Why do we do it, why do we say this phrase so often, because we want to give our story a dramatic intro, but before we say it, we need to make sure our story has a pay off first. I’d have to check my logs, but I’ve never said, “Good God, Thomas, why didn’t you tell me to sit down before you said that. You had to know that I’d lose all consciousness after hearing it. It’s your job as the storyteller to warn me, have me sit down, or something. You just can’t do that to people.” 

I’ve finally figured out why people suggest that you might want to sit down for this. It’s not about blowing us out of the water with their plight in life. It’s that it’s going to take them so long to tell us what’s wrong with them that if we’re not sitting, we run the risk of our knees locking up and falling to the ground. “You ask what’s wrong with me,” the Geoffreys of the world ask. “A better question might be, what’s right?” 

“There are some people with whom we can, and should talk about our ailments. Like our doctor, for example, our family physician. The ear, nose and throat doctors are paid to listen to our every complaint. Imagine being Geoffrey’s doctor. “All right, Geoffrey, I understand you have the worst ailment since the Bubonic Plague swept Europe, but if you were to chart your pain on a 1-10 pain scale, what would it be?” A fifteen. Of course. How many of us chart a fifteen for our family physician? How many of us now know about the ‘off the chart to fifteen’ people, so we drop a seventeen on our doctors? That’s right, I’m a seventeen. “Listen, you don’t know pain, until you’ve felt an eagle’s talons go an inch and a half into your shoulders.” That may be, Geoffrey, but we have this pain scale for a reason. We’ve carefully tailored it to be between one and ten, so we know what we’re dealing with, and if we don’t abide by a pain scale of limited standards, it’ll go away. You don’t want that do you Geoffrey? Right, so what’s your actual number?

“Well, doc, I’m not sure if your western medicine pain scales cover the level of pain I’m experiencing here.” 

“My bet is most ear, nose and throat doctors just threw the whole notion of charting and scaling out decades ago, because most of us, myself included, have no perspective. We off-the-chart pain everything from food poisoning to sprained ankles as a fifteen on the pain scale, because we  have no perspective.

Greatest Magnification of Bacteria Yet

You disagree? You think your level fifteen pain is worse than anything mere mortals can ever comprehend? Have you ever heard the term necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia? Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia was the diagnosis my wife’s friend’s father-in-law received after his doctor had a biopsy performed on a sample of what Huey once considered an uncomfortable irritation.

“Doc, I got this itch in an embarrassing location that just won’t stop.” 

“Well, let’s take a look Huey … huh, interesting. We’ll have to put this through a variety of tests, but I’m pretty sure that what we have here is a case of necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia.”  

“A what?” 

“Yeah, I read about it in a medical journal a couple years ago,” the doctor says, studying Huey’s area far too long, “and I never thought I’d see one myself.”  

“That’s great doc. Now, on another note, I’m not sure, but I think … yeah, I just lost all feeling in my left arm.” 

Imagine sitting on the family physician’s examination table. Huey probably thought he had a really mean case of jock itch for months, and it kept getting worse. He and his wife tried all sorts of talcum powders, anti-itch creams and balms. They tried every over-the-counter remedy the corporations have to offer, and nothing helped. He was probably in the doctor’s office to get some kind of prescription strength ointment for what his friends and family thought was a nasty fungal infection that defied over-the-counter medicines, and this doctor drops the medical equivalent of Hiroshima on him. I don’t know about you, but that might be one of the first pieces of information that I might need to sit down before hearing. 

Just hearing necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, lets those of us who think we’re fifteens on the pain scale know we have no idea what true pain is. I had a mean case of food poisoning, and last year I had a bout with the flu a year ago that topped out at 105-degrees, and … what was that term again? Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia. Ok, well, I feel completely ridiculous now for ever complaining about anything in life now. If you’re anything like me, and you hear the term, you cringe. Just hearing the term, before knowing any of the details, we cringe so long that our old wives will tell tales of our faces getting stuck that way. We’ll walk around the office for a week with that look on our face, mumbling necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia in the halls.  

“What is necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, anyway, Bob?” 

“I don’t know. Huey told me, and I sort of blacked out before he could get into the details of it.” We make that face just imagining what it could be. And it turns out, it’s one of those rare conditions that is actually worse than we can imagine. 

It’s a flesh-eating bacterial disease. How do you actually make a flesh-eating bacterial disease sound scarier? You give it a name that combines the scariest words you can find from the Greece and the Latin lexicons. They took the Greek term nekros, which means corpse or dead, and they combined it with fasciitis from the Latin language, which means a band, bandage or swathe. So, you now have what modern medical science terms a swathe of death on your genitalia, but those in charge of medical science terminology decided English words like swath and death weren’t dramatic enough, so they dug through the origin of words to come up with the scariest sounding disease they could find. It’s so scary sounding that it’s almost funny. It’s “holy crap!” funny. You can’t just hear it once either. 

Hey, Bob, what was the name of Huey’s disease again?” you ask Bob at a party, “because these guys think I’m making it up.” Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia. You might think some marketing team in Hollywood thought it up to sell their slasher flick. My guess is that that team of medical professionals who made it up, never had to deliver that diagnosis to patients, because the terms swath of death and flesh-eating bacterial disease have comedic and horrific appeal, but necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia is box office.

We love our big words. They make us sound and feel large and meaningful. We also love Latin or Latin terms, like necrotizing fasciitis that make our ailment sound like an apparition that escaped an Egyptian pyramid when they opened it up for the first time in thousands of years. 

Have you ever heard people do this? “I just went to the doctor’s office, and she told me I have a mean case of singultus?”

Singultus, we say repeating it with her, as she slowly pronounces it for us, ohmigod! Judy! I don’t even know what that is, but I feel so bad for you. Just know that you’ll be in our prayers. Judy, you later find out, has a mean case of the hiccups. Damn it Judy, you had me really worried. I had another friend, named Teresa, who told me she has tremors. Tremors, Teresa? Holy crud. I understand how tremors from tectonic plates can cause earthquakes, but how does it occur in the human body? It’s the shakes. Teresa had a case of the shakes. If your doctor tells you that you might want to sit down, before telling you that you have a mean case of nasopharyngitis, viral rhinitis, rhinopharyngitis, or acute coryza, wait for the explanation before you run screaming down the hall, because they’ll conclude that presentation by telling you that you have the common cold.

Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia is one of the few names for a conditions that sounds so horrific that the more compassionate in the medical profession chose to go in the opposite direction of giving conditions big, big scary Latin-Greek sounding names. They collectively decided they should call it Fournier’s gangrene. Why did they do that? My guess is they changed the name hoping to limit the number of casualties they saw from men bolting out of the doctor’s office to go jump off the nearest bridge. ‘You have necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, but the good thing is, Stan, that this can be treated. We caught it so quickly that we have a long line of antibiotics we can test to … Stan! STAN!! … Golblast it. Nurse, we lost another one. Remind me, next time, that we need another term for this.’   

The term doesn’t quite capture the horror of the details, in my opinion. Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia involves a slow growth of the bacteria on the penis, until it eventually rots off, and it turns out … wait for it … it turns out that it’s quite painful. What? Yeah, when I heard Huey’s story this element of the story was slowly spooled out to me. I have to imagine that piece of information was slowly spooled out to Huey too. “Wait a second, doc, you mean to tell me that the process of my penis slowly rotting off will involve pain?” Yes, it turns out when the bacterial disease reaches a stage where the penis starts rotting off, it will prove painful. “Well, dadgumit!”  

The Center for Disease Control also lists necrotizing fasciitis as a rare bacterial infection that spreads quickly in the body, and it can cause death. Death? Yes, it can cause death if not treated. Does anyone else think that when the doctor hit Huey with that fatalistic message, Huey regarded that as relatively trivial and anticlimactic information? It can cause DEATH! “I heard you doc, but can we get back to the slow, extremely painful rotting of the penis, until it falls off. How long does that process take? How painful is it? And how much time do I have to get my affairs in order before I go off myself? My daughter and wife mean the world to me. Prior to today, I thought I’d do anything and everything in the world for them. I also love my little beagle Max. He’s my fella, but I’m not sure I love any of them so much that I’m going to try to survive as long as I can for them. I don’t think if I have it in me.

Hey, I’m not a suicide guy. I’ve known people who have taken their own lives, and I know firsthand, the pain and misery it can cause friends and family, so I don’t mean to make light of it. I don’t think suicide is the answer, or the solution to anything we encounter, but if I’m ever in a doctor’s office, and that doctor drops necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia on me, I might be weighing options that I’ve never considered before.  

“The key to treating this deadly bacterial infection is treatment,” our doctor tells us, after he uses smelling salts to revive us. “We must act quickly with various anti-biotics. A hospital stay might be necessary, and it might end up being a lengthy stay, as we chart your reactions to various treatments, and I do need you to consider one other possibility, somewhere down the line, after we’ve exhausted all other possibilities, that there might be a need, as a last resort, for some, some surgery.” The doctor says, “I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to hear that, but it might be a necessary option that we might need to consider some surgery to stop this fast-spreading bacterial infection.” 

The doctor does this slow, dramatic build to the word surgery, as if that’s the scariest word that he’s dropped in his office that day.

“All right doc, well, do you have time for this surgery, this afternoon?” Huey probably asked. “I think I can move some stuff around and be ready in … whaddya say, twenty minutes? No, well check your logs and tell me what time your surgeon is available. I’ll be in the lobby …There’s no way you can arrange it that quickly? Ok, well, is there a way I can do this myself? I know you strongly advise against it, and I appreciate the idea that you cannot approve of it in anyway, but there have to be some YouTube videos out there on this procedure.”  

So, the next time a Geoffrey Guardina, a Teresa or a Judy, steps up on you with their level fifteen pain from the hiccups, their tremors, their stage four, liver cancer diagnosis, their mean case of Ebola, or whatever the hell it is that they think is going to get some sympathy out of you, say those five words, necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, and drop the mic down in that puddle of flesh that just dropped off them, because of their mean case of Ebola.”  

Life’s Not Fair

RilalyLeave a comment

“THAT’S NOT FAIR!” Ellie Stuart whisper shouted to me at the office. She repeated her refrain after seeing a guy eat a tuna sandwich in his cubicle. Sit near Ellie long enough, and you’ll learn how unfair life can be to someone who is forever on the hunt for inequities. 

Ellie Stuart was the younger sister of a star athlete, and their parents catered to him. We don’t know where the three words “that’s not fair” fell in among the first words Ellie learned, but we can bet that she learned the power of them very early on. “If he got a brand new, Nerf football for his birthday, I got one too! If he got army men for his birthday, I got some too. I had a whole bunch of toys for boys, growing up, that I never played with.” She received these toys because her parents feared that if they didn’t give her exactly what they bought her brother for his birthday, they knew their daughter would declare it unfair that he should receive a toy and she didn’t. We can’t fault her for her complaints, she was a young child, but Ellie conceded that she knew how ridiculous it was that her parents catered to her so much. When I asked if her brother received girl toys on her birthday, she said, “No, he didn’t want them.” She made it clear that her brother was the golden child and the twinkle of her parents eyes, and her parents obviously knew that, so they tried to compensate by giving her everything they gave him. The subtext of her complaints was that if she didn’t throw a fuss, they might’ve completely ignored her. Anyone who knows the plight of the other child empathizes with her struggle, but her parents decision to feed into their daughter’s every complaint gave birth to a “That’s not fair!” monster. This woman could sniff out unfairness in every situation imaginable, and from what I could see it diminished her quality of life to some degree.

“Life’s not fair,” I told her when she wouldn’t stop dropping these complaints on me. The thrust of her complaint was that the company we worked for didn’t administer their rules for employee conduct equally. This exchange occurred so often, between the two of us that she began to preface her complaints with:

“… And don’t say ‘life’s not fair’ or try to be objective in any way.” I still said it a couple more times, thinking that if I said it often enough she might see the logic in it. I stopped when I realized she conceded the point but chose not to see it.

That response was not original of course. I heard it from my dad so often that I probably prefaced my complaints to my dad in the same manner Ellie did. He said it as a standalone reply to my complaints, most of the time. Other times, particularly when referencing sports, he backed it up, “Unless you’re Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Tom Brady, or Babe Ruth, there’s always going to be someone better. And you’re right, it’s not fair that some are stronger, faster, and just better, but that’s life. It’s not fair that we have to work harder for everything we get in life, and that there will always be someone better. It’s not fair, I agree with you, but what are you going to do about it? 

“And don’t tell me that you’re going to work harder,” he continued. “Because I’ve heard that. I’ve heard it my whole life. ‘If you run into someone more talented that just means you have to work harder.’ I believed it too. I believed that if I worked harder, I could erase the difference and diminish the advantage. I’m here to tell that you that that’s just not true. Some of the times, you’ll run into someone with God-given abilities that no matter how hard you work, you will not be able to duplicate or defeat them. If you work hard, you’ll be better than most, all conditions being equal of course, but you’re always going to encounter those for whom conditions are not equal. Is it unfair, considering that you work ten times harder than them? You betch your buns it is, but unless you don’t mind banging your head into a wall, it’s probably in your best interests to accept some of the realities of life, and one of those realities is that some of the times life is unfair.” 

“You aren’t as good as you think you are,” he said after I threw a temper-tantrum after a particularly humiliating outing, “until you are. What makes you think you’re better, or that you should be better?  How much coaching have you had to hone your natural ability? How much work have you put in? Why should you be better?” There is this conceit that we all have that we are naturally gifted, and when we find out we aren’t, and how much work we still have to do, it can be frustrating. Learning the extent of our abilities can be frustrating, humiliating, and one of the hardest things to overcome. Sports illustrates this better than any other arena. As we watch those with God-given, natural abilities make it look so easy, we think, ‘I can do that.’ When we try that, it mystifies us that we aren’t as good as we thought we would be when we pictured ourselves doing it. It doesn’t dawn on us, initially, that the incredible athletes who made us think it was so easy are naturally superior, and we don’t think about how much work they put into to honing that natural ability. We just think we suck! 

On the flip side, when we see gifted athletes make their inevitable errors, we love it, and we think we wouldn’t have done that. We thought all we had to do is take the field, and we could accomplish what they do on a regular basis, without having to do all of the work that mere mortals require. We’ve all heard of exceptions to the rules, and we’ve seen those rare exceptions, and before we learn different, we think we’re one of them. Learning that we’re not graced by God with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to natural ability is not only frustrating and humiliating, it can be humbling, and kids don’t deal with humility well. We learn that there are reasons they developed the rule that it takes hard work to get there. Then, once we get there, we learn that it takes more hard work, diligence, and perseverance to stay there. If we fail to get there, as most of us will, we learn how rare exceptions to the rule are, because we’re not one of them. After experiencing so many failures to prove exceptional ability, we see those exceptions to the rule in a new light, and we watch them on TV with the sense that life’s just not fair.

***

Whether we’re younger sisters, the middle child, or just young, we often have to learn the unfairness of the world the hard way. The young spend most of their youth mired in the complaint that they wish they were older, so that they can participate in events forbidden to the young. We spend our youth wishing we were older, until we are. 

“You mean to tell me that just because I’ve been here longer than anyone else that means I’m old.” Yes, it’s called the aging process, and it happens a lot quicker than we think. It doesn’t happen as quick as the unfairness felt by the young, but when we finally make it to the top of the Monster Waterslide, it hits us. It hits us like a humiliating, emasculating slap in the face that everyone around us is forty years younger. “What am I doing here? Holy crap, I’m old!” moments like these take decades to happen, but when they do, we’re not prepared. 

It was just, what, a decade ago, that that Monster Waterslide was a behemoth waiting patiently for conquer. It was a rite of passage we pursued for definition. “I went on the Monster Waterslide, and I wasn’t the least bit scared.” It turns out, we think counting, that that was nearly five decades ago. A couple years ago, we were no longer the youngest person standing in line without a parent, and we fit in with the rest of the teenagers. Looking around at the teenagers around us today, we realize that occurred almost four decades ago. “Impossible!” you say. Not only is it possible, it’s reality, and reality is unfair. A couple years ago, we didn’t care what anyone thought, we were going get nuts! People laughed when we went down the Monster Waterslide. We laughed. We didn’t care that some might consider us too old to enjoy a kid’s activity! That, it turns out, was a couple decades ago. And … what was it, a couple months ago, we were a little uncomfortable standing in line, waiting for our turn on the Monster Waterslide, and the kids around us were slightly uncomfortable, but we were with our kid. Our decision to get in line for the Monster Waterslide was about them, and we wanted to do things like this with them. We could tell some kids and adults thought it a bit strange, and we could feel it, but we were with our kids. Yeah, that was a decade ago. 

The instantaneous moment when we went from old to too old took decades to happen overnight, but it happened, when someone gave us a look that suggested they thought it was sad, maybe pathetic that we were still pretending we were young enough to go down a waterslide. When that teenage employee manning the waiting pool at the end of the slide, looked at us with a slight cringe that she dropped the minute she realized we were looking at her, we thought it was unfair that we couldn’t do this anymore without people staring. Even though we thought we made it passed all of the unfair complaints eons ago, we couldn’t help but think it was unfair that everyone was staring.

“Life’s not fair,” I told Ellie Stuart after her numerous complaints blasted through whatever remained of my threshold, and I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on the definitions of fair and unfair, until something different came along and reminded me how unfair it can be. At some point in life, no one cares that we can spell onomatopoeia, that we can conjugate most verbs, and that at some point it’s just expected and only worthy of note when we cannot. We’re old now, and no one cares what we can do anymore, and there is a sense of unfairness attached to that. Somewhere between being young and old, we switched roles and became the friend of parents, the uncle, and the dad that kids tried to impress. When we reach that point, we might be impressed by an explosive flurry of athleticism or intellect, and the kids loved it so much that they gravitated to us. They began displaying their athleticism and intellect for the sole purpose of impressing us. Try it some time. If you see a kid kick a ball go way overboard in expressing your amazement. That kid will spend the next few years of their life trying to impress you again. Was I that kid, I ask myself now as the adult that kids are now trying to impress. Were the adults around me that impressed, or were they humoring me in the manner I now humor most of the kids around me? At some point in between, we discover that no one, save that precious inner circle, cared near as much as we thought they did. Unless we were excessively attractive in that special pair of jeans, or incredibly unattractive, or awkward looking in them, no one cares what we wear. Even then, most people don’t notice near as much as we think. It’s unfair, because we knew if we were a star athlete, or movie star, more people would care. The only antidote to the ever-present unfairness of life is to get happy. Happiness is the best revenge, someone once said, and it is. You should live your life in such a way that someone says, “Vacation? You’re going on vacation? Your whole life is a vacation. I think people would pay hard cash to live one week of your life. You’re so happy, you make me sick.” And we’ll never get there, if all we’re worried about is how unfair life is.   

The Politics of Human Sacrifice

RilalyLeave a comment

It might sound ridiculous to suggest that the history of human sacrifices involved politics, but to my mind, everything from human sacrifices to modern political theory boils down to the blame game. The United States has a long, documented history of national, state and local office holders blaming someone else for their failures. Inept leaders of other countries blame other countries for their failings, and some of them even seek to blame factions within their own country to explain away their failures, so no one holds them accountable. This version of the blame game often leads to the genocidal slaughter of their fellow countrymen, which often leads to civil unrest, civil wars, and wars with another country. Modern politics, and human nature, is such that politicians often take all the glory for everything good that happens during their reign, and they blame someone else, anyone else, for anything bad that happens, as a desperate means to shift blame and maintain power. If a group of people, a culture, or a society doesn’t know other countries exist, to whom do their leaders shift blame when situations turn desperate and dire: the gods. 

“The gods are angry,” Chief Emmitt says in his State of the Tribe Address. “I mean look at our year-over-year yields in corn and soybean, they pale in comparison to 2022. The Dore family, over here, have sacrificed more than their share of prized goats, and the Stanislavs tried all the rain dances they have in their arsenal to appease the gods, and they’re just not working this time for whatever reason. We’re not sure if we’re doing our rain dances correctly, but we have nothing to compare it to.

“The point is we’re trying,” the Chief  continued. “We’re all trying as hard as we can to bring rain. Our administration has tried as hard as could to do something, anything we can think of, but nine out of ten of our best and brightest economists are now saying that without citizen sacrifice some of their beloved family members all of our efforts will prove fruitless. No one wants to do this, but we need to look within ourselves and call on our friends and family to join together to help their fellow man through these dire times.

“To appease the gods, we all need to be more like our friend and neighbor, Barney Ruffalo. Stand up Barney! Barney told me, the other day, that he knows how much the gods have sacrificed to give the Ruffalo family the precious gift of life. He knows that the gods have blessed him with four beautiful daughters, and he has agreed to share his wealth with us by awarding our tribe his beloved Audra for appeasement. Barney told me, just the other day, that the gods have given him so much that he feels it’s time for him to give back. Please join me in giving Barney a huge round of applause.” 

We can dismiss such notions, and ways of life as primitive, but they were still human, and humans have a whole lot of human nature in them. Human nature does not necessarily equal intelligence, of course, and we can debate whether the primitive things primitive man believed define how primitive they were, but they still displayed a level of intelligence greater than the other animals. They learned how to create fire, how to use tools, and they employed some mathematical principles and science to build homes, cities, and pyramids. They eventually developed complex forms of communication, and some of them engaged in various forms of art. They also developed various complex forms of trade and historically beneficial trade routes. We can also guess that even though we regard many of their practices as brutal, they displayed acts of sympathy, empathy, and some acts of kindness with their fellow countrymen and tribe members to elevate them intellectually and emotionally in the animal kingdom. No matter how many arguments we put forth in their favor, however, we can’t ignore the fact that they insisted that human sacrifices would help them improve crop yields. Why? The people were starving and desperate, and my guess is their leader needed a scapegoat. 

Group thought and historical traditions passed down from ancestors often inhibits rational thinking, but we have to believe that there were some thinkers in these cultures who considered the whole practice wrong, ill-conceived, and illogical. Those people were probably considered troublesome ninnies for focusing too much on the bottom line. 

“I know we’ve all arrived at this notion that sacrifices are mandatory, but if they are, shouldn’t we see some blanking results?” this ninny probably said after their initial sacrifices didn’t pay off. “We’re sacrificing our children, for what? Rain? I don’t see rain, do you? And why women? It just seems so arbitrary that we select our most beautiful young, virgin women for these sacrifices. Does Chief Emmitt select them because they’re more fertile and bountiful, with the hope that that will translate into greater soil fertility and more bountiful and consistent yields of high quality? Or, is it just sexier to sacrifice our young, beautiful people? Is it about soil fertility and consistent yields or is it more about the show?” 

Did they try sacrificing males in the beginning, and the gods replied was that those were just a bunch of fellas. “If you truly want ample soil fertility, through rain, to produce a better harvest, you’re going to have to fork over that gorgeous, little girl trying to hide behind her daddy. She would be a prized possession worthy of me.”

There were probably some, because there are always some in every culture, who enjoyed the inherent violence involved in throwing virgins into active volcanos. They probably wouldn’t talk about it in polite company, because how do you bring that up casually, but there was a secret part of them that found it kind of fun. There were probably others who considered the whole event, and the theater involved, a little exciting. We have to guess that these ceremonies were well-attended. I mean how often does one see a woman thrown into an active volcano? It was probably the antecedent to must-see-TV. Being the humans they were, we can also guess that some complained about their seats. “I was there, but I ended up behind that Monroe kid, and his over-sized melon, so I couldn’t see squat.” At that point in their history, they accepted the fact that sacrifices needed to happen, so why shouldn’t they be there to enjoy the show. 

“Hey, the Andersons are going aren’t they?” Mike Phillips said, during a disagreement with his non-compliant wife, “and they’re pretty smart people, right? Well, they’re basically convinced that it’s mandatory for the future success of our people. So, whaddya say we get the good lawn chairs out.” 

Were those who threw the virgins into volcanoes considered specialists in their field, or were they nothing more than anonymous and replaceable executioners? If it was the former, what kind of qualifications did the chief and his council seek for their specialists? Did the chief and his special advisers conduct numerous interviews and review resumes, or did they have tryouts? If Clark couldn’t hit lava with a ninety-pound woman, because he didn’t have the upper body strength, did they turn to Tommy, because not only did Tommy have the strength, but during tryouts he proved that he didn’t mind all the crying and screaming on the way up the mountain? If Tommy secured the position, how long could he do it? Even the coldest, darkest SOB eventually develops a conscience. They were primitive, but they were still humans with human nature in them. Did Tommy have an experience that sat on his soul? Did he still have nightmares about the time he was commissioned to throw a thirteen-year-old into a volcano after she developed such a cute relationship with his little brother? Did those constant images play on his mind so often that the nightmares led to a level of insomnia that played on his otherwise fragile mind until he was eventually fired? At some point, the Chief and his council knew that Tommy was no longer up to the job, but they were faced with the question, how do you replace such a sadistic person to carry this out?  

Why active volcanoes? I realize that they thought the volcano reached into a deeper part of the earth, but why did it have to be active? If the practice of human sacrifice was to fulfill a need, why didn’t they just shoot the virgin in the heart, or slit her throat? Some argue that while there is archeological evidence to suggest that human sacrifices happened, there is no evidence of the practice of throwing virgins in volcanoes. Proponents state that there is some documented evidence of third-party hearsay provided to explorers and missionaries, but opponents are skeptical, stating that the primary sources likely embellished the nature of the sacrifice to entertain these new faces.

Regardless the method of human sacrifice, the archeological evidence suggests that most human sacrifices were quite theatrical. If they needed human sacrifices to appease the gods, why were they so theatrical? Any time modern man performs a religious service, they do so with some theater, or if you don’t care for the word theater or theatrical, how about ceremonial? Any time a human attempts to praise God or address Him in some sort of ritual, they feel the need to be ceremonial. Did primitive man perform theatrical rituals of this nature in the beginning, or did they amp up the theatrical nature of their human sacrifices over time, and did they do so to create a show that  entertained the people? Did the Chief and his advisers think that they needed more theater to etch “the show” into the minds of future voters, so they would remember the Chief’s efforts come election time? (There probably weren’t elections, but every leader faces some level of scrutiny from their people and they must always be wary of uprisings.) How did they progress to all future shows involving players wearing spooky and theatrical masks and war paint, and when did they decide to add musical enhancements to their production, to add an aura to the ceremony and complete the sensorial elements of current and future productions?

As with all leaders, Chief Emmitt’s reign was tumultuous and it remained precariously balanced on a fault line between factions seeking to unseat him. That also explains why the Chief, and his advisers, commissioned their laborers to create an ornate chair from which he would oversee the events. They needed to enforce, or reinforce, the Chief’s leadership mystique, and the memorable methods he used to try to solve their problems? No matter how great “the show” was, however, the Chief could not silence those factions vying for his throne. They continued to sow discontent among the citizenry.

“I know the gods sacrificed their lives to give us life, but why does Chief Emmitt always pick our Eastside daughters for sacrifice? Is it because we Eastside farmers traditionally produce lower yields? I mean, those Westside guys have natural advantages, living next to the basin and all. It just seems a little unfair, is all I’m saying.” 

###

“There had to be a first,” George Carlin wrote on the act of sacrificing humans. Human sacrifice was a traditional ritual that, in some cultures, dated back hundreds to thousands of years, but as with everything else, there had to be a first. There had to be a first leader, and a cadre of advisers, who persuaded their people that sacrificing prized livestock was no longer cutting it. How does that leader convince his group that, for the betterment of their society, mothers and fathers were going to have to step up and start sacrificing their children? How does a leader convince his people that sacrificing children is the next logical step?

My bet is Chief Emmitt had some smarmy policy adviser step up to reveal the harsh truth of the situation to him, “The people are against you, and our internal polling suggests that you’re going to lose your throne in the next election. To prevent that, we have to face some facts here. The whole bread and circuses campaign we devised has run its course, because the proverbial bread just isn’t there any more. Our people are starving, and no amount of entertainment will resolve their hunger. There’s obviously nothing we can do to make it rain, but I’ve devised a strategy we can employ to silence them until the next election, and hear me out before you poo poo it. We could try throwing our people into active volcanoes? We can start by throwing our more obnoxious people in, like that Murray kid, but we’ll evntually have to work our way up to our more precious people, people that everyone likes, such as women, young, fertile, and virgin women. It’s not a true sacrifice if you’re not sacrificing, right? We can tell them that by doing so, we’ll be appeasing the gods, so they’ll finally make it rain.” 

“What if it doesn’t work?” the Chief probably asked. “What if it doesn’t rain? The people will say I killed innocent children for no reason.” 

“That’s kind of the beauty of this,” Smarmy Adviser replied. “There’s no such thing as ‘it didn’t work’. If we throw a virgin into the volcano, and that doesn’t bring the rain, we can say that that means the gods aren’t satisfied yet, and yet is the key word. We will need to expound on yet, by saying yet means that we’re making strides, but the gods aren’t satisfied yet. It’s obvious to us now that they’re not satisfied with just one virgin. The gods are obviously calling for a second virgin, or a third, and we will probably have to keep throwing virgins into volcanos until the gods are happy, and they make it rain. You are, in essence, blaming the gods without doing it directly. The people will say, “Chief Emmitt is trying, but the gods obvious aren’t satisfied yet.

“And if we do it right, our administration will get all the credit when it does rain,” Smarmy Adviser continues, “They’ll say that thanks to Chief Emmitt’s patient policies we now know that one virgin a quarter doesn’t satisfy the gods. We now know that the gods require four virgins a quarter. All hail Chief Emmitt!”  

If Chief Emmitt finally achieves what his smarmy adviser suggests for his tribe, and it rains, and he’s the hero, the next question his award-winning economists will ask is what then? Is there an amount of rain the villagers and tribesmen consider adequate? More is always more, in the minds of most voters, as long as it doesn’t flood. And if it does flood, they’ll know that they probably sacrificed too many virgins, and they’ll cut back accordingly next quarter.

“It will involve a systematic approach,” Smarmy Adviser will say regarding the question of flooding, “and we might need to monkey around with it to hit a sweet spot for our base. We might eventually need to create some kind of human sacrifice to corn yield ratio over time.”

If they achieve the desired results, what then? If more is always more, wouldn’t some factions call for five sacrifices in the following quarter? If four produced the desired yield, what would five arrive? If Chief Emmitt, and his advisers, try to quell such talk, does that provide candidate Lloyd a campaign issue in their next debate? 

“Chief Emmitt employed the ‘hard times call for strong measures’ campaign, and I think we can all agree that he achieved what he set out to do,” candidate Lloyd opens, attempting to attract Emmitt voters without insulting them for voting Emmitt in the prior election. “I can do better. Let’s look at the PowerPoint presentation I put together. As you can see here, Chief Emmitt produced a quality yield for us in quarter four with four human sacrifices a quarter. Chief Emmitt achieved quarterly results that no one can balk at, but now, now, he calls for an end to all human sacrifices? An end? Why would you propose that Chief? Those policies worked. Human sacrifices worked. Look at the numbers. He wants to change policies, just when times are good? Shane, you farm what 84 acres? You cannot be happy to hear that.

“Now, let’s look at my prospective map, which consists of a projected eight sacrifices a quarter, and …” candidate Lloyd says flipping the page. “Take a look at those projected yields. Phillip, I know you’re the type of guy who always wants to do better. You believe in the more is more principle, wouldn’t you love to add a little something, something in your kid’s stockings at the end of the year? By my projections, not only will we be able to satisfy our needs, until we’re all fat and happy, but we’ll be able to begin exporting our excess crops to neighboring tribes. If you elect me, we will implement policies that will lead us into a bartering era with the hunting tribe with our excess crops. I think we can land enough buffalo and deer carcasses in 2024 to put meat on our tables three to four times a week. And I’m not just talking about putting meat on my table as your chief. I’m talking about all of us eating meat three to four times a week.

“Chief Emmitt is a great leader, and he knows how to make the gods happy. I would never question the results he achieved in 2022. I’m just asking you to ask yourself a question, as you look around at your neighbors, and as you look within your own home, do you think we can do better? I think you can, I think we can, and I think I can lead us into a level of prosperity we’ve never experienced before. Vote Lloyd for chieftain at our next fireside chat, and I promise you that if you’re willing and able to throw a couple more of your daughters into volcanoes, we’ll see a 2024 that we never dreamed possible.”    

If there had to be a first leader who enacted such desperately violent policies, there also had to be a first time a leader gave this whole sacrificing-for-better-harvests ruse up for what it was, in their transfer of power discussions with the incoming chief.

Chief Emmitt did just that with Chief-Elect Lloyd, “Just so you know, this whole human sacrifice for rain thing, was a ruse. I know it, and you know it. We developed it to maintain power over the people and focus their attention on themselves and their relationship to the gods, so that they wouldn’t blame our administration for things that we honestly couldn’t control. You can’t make it rain, I can’t make it rain, and even the rain dancers cannot make it rain. Our people are so irrational at times. Perhaps it’s our fault for convincing them that we were all-powerful, I don’t know, but they believed it. They blamed us for a lack of rain. Then, when it finally rained, they gave us all the credit for it. Your little campaign to increase human sacrifices per quarter, to produce more rain, won the election for you, congratulations and all that, but you basically took our ruse and advanced it. I just want you to know, and I hope you know it already, that if you sacrifice eight women a quarter, as you said in your campaign, you’re basically propagating our sham, and if you come for my daughters, I’ll expose you as the shyster that you are.”