Category: Humor

The Exorcising

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Rachael Noye added a joke to the tail end one of Tyler Drummond’s, while they walked through a Wichita, Kansas mall, hand in hand. He thought her joke was so funny that he held his stomach. He continued walking and holding his stomach, until his face turned laughter to a grimace. “I don’t feel so good!” Tyler said moments before collapsing in agony. He didn’t fall flat initially. Initially, he went to a knee, but when that didn’t gain him any relief, he slowly lowered himself to the ground. When that didn’t offer him any relief, he tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. Tyler had no idea, at this point, how much pain he would experience over the course of the next eight minutes. 

“It happened so fast,” Rachael would later say. “One minute he was laughing his tail off. The next, he’s groaning on the floor. I thought he was playing. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘People are watching Tyler, get up’. He did things like this before, and I didn’t want to fall for it again.” 

Tyler was in such excruciating pain that he could not respond. 

After a couple seconds, Rachael knelt down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. She still wasn’t sure if she was the product of one of his jokes, until he let out his first unintelligible yells. “Tyler was not one to bring attention to himself, and he yelled loud,” Rachael added. “That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”

“Help!” Rachael cried out when she realized how serious this was. When no one responded, she said, “Help me! Help us!” When a few people broke ranks to help, she shouted, “Someone, someone call an ambulance!” over them.  

Two different patrons did just that. Others rushed forward to help in any way they could. Two of them attempted to help Tyler sit up, but he refused their requests. He continued rolling back and forth, holding his gut. Tyler’s face was one of complete agony. 

Rather than say, “Is there a doctor in the house?” One of the onlookers, seeing Tyler Drummond writhe around on the floor in pain, making unusual, guttural sounds of anguish, said, “Is there a priest in the house?” 

A priest happened to be in the mall that day, dining in the food court. “I’m a priest,” Father Danielson said running to the man. “What’s going on?” When the throng parted to allow his entrance, the Father Danielson went to a knee before the man, “What’s wrong with you sir?” the priest said, taking one of Tyler’s hands. Tyler attempted to answer, but his voice was so strained that Father Danielson couldn’t understand him. Tyler continued holding his stomach with the other hand, sweating profusely, and shouting at the top of his lungs. Some say he was probably swearing, but no one could understand a word he was saying.

“What happened?” Father Danielson asked Rachael when Tyler proved unable to answer.

“I don’t know,” Rachael said. “One minute he was fine, laughing, all that, then he said, ‘I don’t feel so good,’ and he just collapsed.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tyler,” she said. “Tyler Drummond.”

Not knowing what else to do, Father Danielson continued to hold Tyler’s open hand and said. “You have to tell us what’s wrong, Tyler. You have to tell us how we can help you.” Father Danielson began asking Tyler more pointed questions, and Tyler either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. The priest began silently praying for the man.

“No,” Rachael. “He needs more than prayers.”

“All right,” the priest said. He then began administering Last Rites on the man. 

“No,” Rachael said, in the throes of panic. “He doesn’t need Last Rites either. He needs an exorcism. I’m Catholic. I know the difference.”

“I don’t think-” the priest said, but Rachael cut Father Danielson off with more pleas for something more.  “I think he needs a doctor-” the priest tried to say, but the growing throng of shoppers around them cut him off this time, imploring him to follow Rachael’s instructions and do something more. At the two minute mark, some proceeded to call the priest out for not doing everything in his power to end this man’s pain, others shouted him down, and some even began screaming:

“Do something! He could die!”

Tyler quieted a little when the priest began praying over him quietly. Tyler listened to the prayers, but members of the throng later said they only made Tyler more agitated and fearful.

The ever-growing crowd around them grew as fearful and agitated as Rachael and Tyler, “What are you doing?” they shouted. “Do the exorcism, like the woman said!” Father Danielson wasn’t sure what they wanted, but they were growing so unruly that he began to fear for his own safety. He wasn’t sure if they wanted him to begin speaking Latin, which would be a problem because he didn’t know any, or what they wanted, but they appeared on the cusp of violence.

“If he dies it’s on your hands!” a man in an Ivy League hoodie shouted, three minutes into Tyler’s agony. Three minutes might not seem a long period of time, but anyone who has experienced acute pain knows three minutes can feel like an eternity.

Tyler then began screaming louder than before, as the priest made up some prayers, he thought might calm the crowd. “Do it again!” one of the women in the crowd shouted at the priest. “It’s working.” The priest continued holding Tyler’s hand throughout, but he began mumbling the prayers, so the crowd around them might think he was speaking Latin. 

“Get it out of me!” were the first words Tyler said that anyone could understand. He rolled to and fro, while retaining a tight hold on Father Danielson’s hand. “GET IT OUT Of ME!”

Tyler’s screaming, and the crowd’s urging that the priest do something more, compelled the priest to mumble faster at the five minute mark. These sounds went back and forth in dramatic waves, until Tyler’s screams began building in intensity. Sensing that, the crowd that had been pushing forward to see more of Tyler’s incident, began backing away in unison. They didn’t know what was going to happen, of course, but they all, in various ways, described how they thought this might progress into something unexpected and something unprecedented.  

When Father Danielson was unable to do anything as immediate as the man in the Ivy League hoodie instructed, the man panicked. He was one of the first spectators on the scene, and he proved one of the mot agitated throughout. His agitation with either the priest, or the situation, progressed until he couldn’t take it anymore. He had been making a sign of the cross on himself throughout the situation, but when the situation appeared to only be growing in intensity, he made one final sign of the cross, kissed his fingers and impulsively and violently pushed and shoved his way out of the throng, screaming, “It’s coming! Get out! Get out while you still can! It’s coming!” If the throng gathering around Tyler, hadn’t been so large, the hysterical man would’ve probably knocked the woman standing behind him flat, but the man behind her caught her before she could go down. The shouting man continued making the sign of the cross, some spectators later said, and he continued shouting, “It’s coming!” until he was safely in his car, peeling out of the parking lot, and driving away as fast as he could. 

Seconds after that hysterical man fled, and three others followed him, one with a small child, it began. It began six minutes after Tyler Drummond collapsed to the floor in the middle of a Wichita, Kansas mall. Some spectators described it as a hiss, a hiss more similar to the sound one might hear from air slightly escaping a balloon, as opposed to the snake’s hiss. This was followed by further evidence of Tyler’s agony, as he began to wail loud and long wails. Two more spectators exited, and the rest backed up more. 

“Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared,” one of the spectators said, “is lying. Straight up lying.”

“Oh, absolutely terrified,” a middle-aged woman said, “I’m a little embarrassed to admit it now, but I got into a screaming match with a woman who had her seven-year-old child with her. ‘Get her out of here!’ I shouted at the woman. I thought it was irresponsible that she kept her daughter there. I mean, we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“It reminded me of the screams a woman will make while in the final stages of childbirth,” another said.

When the hissing sounds “Progressed from hissing sounds to flapping sounds” at the seven minute mark, four more people left the crowd that gathered around Tyler Drummond. Their departure wasn’t as violent as the man in the hoodie, but they were described as bug eyed in their departure. They ducked and weaved their way through the throng and out of the mall. Those who departed would never hear the sounds progress from the unusual flapping sounds to the more familiar sounds of flatulence, and we can only guess the stories they tell of their day at the mall that afternoon, if they didn’t seek out the news stories on what ended up happening.

Some spectators say that the flatulence lasted minutes, others say it might’ve lasted thirty seconds, but the priest said, “It might’ve lasted maybe seven seconds, but it was long and loud, very long and very loud.” It was also, according to all of the spectators there, quite foul. One of the primary reasons for its regrettable, and some say unforgettable, smell was that when Tyler began to feel some relief from his initial push, eight minutes into “the most painful gastro intestinal pain I’ve ever experienced,” he pushed harder. He pushed so hard that some diarrhea followed the flatulence.

When it was finally over, and everyone realized what happened, Tyler smiled an embarrassed smile. His smile emanated through the sweat that drenched his hair and left his face beaming with sweat. The priest also noted that the alarming redness of his face, slowly dissipated, until his normal color returned. While sitting up, Tyler actually managed a laugh. This caused others to others to laugh, until just about everyone was laughing.  

“It was a laugh of relief,” Father Danielson said later. “Euphoric laughter.” Tyler didn’t even mind that the laughter was directed at him. He took it in stride, and apologized a number of times to the crowd if he upset them in anyway, and he thanked them for their concern.

“I’ve never been so relieved to hear another man fart,” a senior citizen said before shaking Tyler’s hand.

“Oh, I know it,” Tyler said. He was laughing while shaking that man’s hand, and his face colored again, in embarrassment. “Thank you, for your concern.”

“Thank you most of all, father,” Tyler said, standing up to shake Father Danielson’s hand. “I really thought that was something far more serious. Thank you for staying with me.”

“Well you’re welcome,” the priest said. “What do you think it was?” he asked. “What caused it?”   

“I don’t know,” Tyler said still holding the priest’s hand. “I just know that I’m glad you were there for me, with me, thought all that. That was a bad one.” When Father Danielson gently pressed a little further, Tyler said. “I honestly don’t know, father, it might have had something to do with the 2-for-1 sale at Arby’s. I took advantage of the sale and downed two steakhouse garlic ribeye sandwiches. I heard someone joke one time about gastrointestinal issues, saying, some of the times food fights back. Maybe that was it.”

The Phallic Car Trope: A Comedy

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Quick. Guy pulls up next to you in a sports car. This beautiful machine is widely regarded as one of the fastest cars on the road, and it’s loud. This car, with its modified muffler, is so loud, you can’t hear anything your wife says in the passenger seat. Quick, what do you think of this Fast and Furious wannabe?

Small penis, right? The guy who selected this automobile to drive around in, and then he modified his muffler to draw extra attention to himself, must have a minuscule member. It’s such an automatic association that it’s almost reflexive now. Guy buys a top of the line sports car, we know it’s all about the hoo hoo. It’s one plus one equals two to us now. It’s the joke we’ve heard and told so often that everyone over the age of 25 knows it when they see that car. In order for a joke to be funny, truly funny, there has to be an element of truth in it, and we all find this joke funny, because we know that knock knock jokes can be kind of funny, but if we want to be hilarious, we have to hit people where they live.

The general premise of the scenario confuses us. Why would a man, average age 29 and above, with, presumably, a full-time job, a wife and kids, and a mortgage to pay plunk down an extra forty to fifty thousand for a method of transportation? Even most irresponsible men, in such financial situations, don’t plunk such money down in cash. They take out a five-year loan with interest or they lease. Regardless, it creates a financial burden on the family that might require little Timmy or Tammy to take out their own loans for college. Why would this man do that to his family? If we know the man, and we know his concerns, it seems so impossible that he would take such an irresponsible risk. We dig for answers, and if we dig deep enough, we arrive at the size of his Gerald (I knew a guy named Gerald, and I didn’t think much of him). We don’t know if it’s true with our friend, but if it is, it’s so sad it’s funny. If his wife drives the final dagger into his humiliation and forces him to return it and pay the penalties for early cancellation of the contract, it’s funny, but is it so funny that it’s hilarious, and if it is hilarious, is it because it’s so sad or so true, or some hybrid of both?

Who cares, it’s funny? Who cares, because men who drive those obnoxiously loud and fast things around are so annoying that we don’t mind it when others take shots at them. We love this joke so much that the minute a comedian starts talking about some ass face in an obnoxiously loud and fast car, we cannot wait until he gets to the joke at the bottom of the barrel involving that guy’s low hanging fruit.

This association gets repeated so often that we now call it a trope, the phallic car trope, and we repeat it with such confidence, that some of us believe it’s 100% true, 100% of the time. We see some guy in a brand new, modified Charger, and we know the size of his Herbie is smaller than what medical science declares average size. Then, when we drop that joke, we do it as if no one’s ever heard it before.

“That thing is an incredible combination of design and engineering!” we say in appreciation of another’s car, not their willy.

“Yeah, you know why he bought it don’t you?” they say with a knowing snicker.

“So, you mean to tell me that if he had a 5.5-to-6 schwanzstucker, at the very least, he might have preferred a more moderately priced sedan?”  

I don’t own one of these obnoxiously loud and fast vehicles, and I’m not here to defend those who do. They annoy me as much as you, and when I hear them drive by my home, jostling my innards, I think that the driver probably has something ridiculous ticking inside. I don’t seethe at them though, like some of you. We all know who you are, and the jokes you tell about his purple-helmet warrior of love running around in your head, with a whole lot of exclamation points to follow. You mean it too, and you mean it mean. I’ve heard you. I know the jokes, and I’ve seen the faces you make when you tell the joke. Me, I don’t think that way, because I knew some gearheads growing up. I called two of them my best friends. They grew up loving everything loud and fast, loud music, fast cars. They started out loving fast bikes, then loud and fast motorbikes, and then cars, and they loved tinkering with them. They spent way too much of their youth modifying, tinkering, and souping them up, to make them louder and faster than anyone else has ever seen or heard, but I can tell you that for them, it wasn’t about the hoo hoo.

One of these gearheads, a kid named Mark, was absolutely crazed at a very young age. Mark raced his whole life, with whatever he could find, because he had what the screenwriter of Days of Thunder called, “A need for speed.” He had little-to-no natural ability. He couldn’t throw, he couldn’t catch, and I used to cream him in foot races. So, I thought he compensated for all that by manipulating the greatest technology his fellow man developed to be faster through mechanical know how. I never looked below his 39th parallel, but other friends informed me that Mark wasn’t compensating for a lack of natural, athletic ability. He was, they said, compensating for his underdeveloped mushroom head. Okay, but he was nine at the time.

He and I snickered at pee pee and wee wee jokes when we were nine, but we loved the well-timed good fart joke, or any joke that contained the words poop or diarrhea in it. You remember that song, “Diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When you’re running down the gutter, with a piece of bread and butter, diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When you’re sliding into home, and your pants are full of foam, diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When your stomach’s feeling wavy, ‘cause it’s making anus gravy diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft!” That was one of our favorite songs for far too many years, and if you tell that joke now, to a nine-year-old, their squealing laughter will tell you that some jokes never die. 

The yoinker is little more than a front tail that dispenses waste to a nine-year-old. Pee is funny, but jokes about the length, the girth, or whatever they might see in showers and bathrooms? They’re not there yet. They’re nine, and most nine-year-olds, with monitored viewing habits, don’t even understand how the size of an organ might benefit one over another. They just don’t think that way, not yet. So, you’re telling me that Mark, or any other nine-year-old, would want, or need, to have a faster big wheel, bicycle, or motorized product to compensate for this deficiency? I can almost guarantee this wasn’t a conscious, or subconscious, concern of Mark’s. He was keyed into speed and racing, as opposed to football, Star Wars, or Lego, because he was just wired different. We’re all wired different, and some of that wiring makes so little sense to us that we grow up making jokes to explain it.

I wanted to win when I was nine. I wanted to win in everything I did. I wanted to win at football, basketball, parcheesi, and I wanted to beat other kids in races. Mark, and this is key to understanding the mentality, didn’t just want to beat me in bike races, he needed it. He needed it, like some of us need praise, compliments and laughter when we’re young. It frustrated me when I lost, and I probably cursed a little with my nine-year-old swear words, but like every other normal nine-year-old, I forgot all about it a half minute later. Mark would rage. He raged so often that someone nicknamed him “rage”. He was so obsessed with beating me in a race on our neighborhood street that he started cheating in any way he could dream up. Then he stole a top-of-the-line bike one day, and he beat me from then on. In my anger, I told him that his victories were tainted by the fact that he stole the bike. He didn’t argue, because he didn’t care about particulars. He won, I lost. Turning around to see me struggle to keep up with him was what the French call his joie di vivre. It was the moment he started to really love life. He was smiling so hard he was laughing so hard he was crying. It took me years to understand how essential this need was to his constitution, and he carried that into adulthood, but it had nothing to do with the size of his dingaling.

A group of psychologists from University College London found out that I am wrong. The research tests they performed didn’t involve nine-year-olds, of course, because why would they test anyone in their formative years? No, their research found that men over 29 often prefer sports cars when they believe that their reproductive organs are smaller than the average male’s. The inference of this test is that these men walked into the research study with little-to-no desire for luxury muscle vehicles, until they found out their members were below average in size. See, the research scientists tricked their subjects into thinking the average size of the male kebob was seven inches, as opposed to 5.5. This deception allegedly altered their subjects’ desire to have a fast sports car to compensate for it. The psychologists performed another test where the tricked the subjects by telling them that their personal wealth was lower than the average males, and they performed another test that suggested that their health was inferior comparatively. Nothing, they found, tweaked the subject’s desire to have a fast sports car more than hearing that the size of their Humphrey was below average. It was only one test, and they only tested 200 men, but they believe they validated the phallic car trope.

Ok, we’ll play then. Let’s say the phallic car trope is 100% correct. If that’s the case, then everything else surrounding this notion must be true too, right? If it’s as true as we all think, with no asterisks or exceptions, then the opposite must be true too, right? If a man is of average size, and he knows it, then this man will probably be purchasing moderately priced sedans that bring little-to-no attention to himself, because he doesn’t need to bring attention to himself. He knows that he is average in size, and that leads to average attention from women. That should be axiomatic and one plus one equals two too. He’s already packing average-sized heat, so why would he want, or need, the attention a luxury, muscle car to attract? Then there’s the man, the big one, the Mount Kangchenjunga of men. He is so well-endowed that he apparently knows what The Beatles went through during the height of Beatlemania. If the phallic car trope is so consistent that we can research test it with a group of men so common they prove the trope, then Kangchenjunga will obviously be purchasing … the Smart car. That’s right, the man with a bowhead whale in his pants (or the baleen mysticetus, for those who prefer the Latin derivative), prefers a car that others find so small that they’re almost a joke. He not only doesn’t need to attract attention, he purchases a car that he hopes might finally give him some peace. If the phallic car trope can be proven and disproven then the opposite must be so true that interested parties should be falling all over one another to get with the Smart car driver.    

Men love sports cars. They love the look, the feel, and the feeling of power is so thrilling that some men, big and small, find them intoxicating. This isn’t to say that some men don’t seek some sort of augmentation. I don’t know how representative such notions are to be honest. The only thing I know with absolute certitude is what I’ve witnessed firsthand, and the gearhead friends I knew grew up in families where the car you owned was everything. Even if they know you well enough to know you’re a relatively happy person, from a relatively happy, loving home, if your parents drive a green on green Malibu Classic, they’re going to think that we’re suffering from delusions of adequacy. 

Are such gearhead families doomed to walk the earth with a diminished downstairs department? I was never so bored, or interested, to check. I just knew that while my family was obsessed with football, theirs were obsessed with cars.

Another theory I’ve heard from another group of psychologists is that most of our personality is formed at around six years old. They go so far as to say that if we knew a kid really well in kindergarten and we met that same kid forty-years later, that man would not be remarkably different from the kindergarten kid we knew so well. If that’s the case, what changes around the age of 29? Nothing, something, everything? Is it all about willy winkus? And who cares anyway, it’s funny.

No matter what we say here today to prove, disprove, validate, or refute this phallic car trope, it’s not going to change anything. You’re still going to laugh the next time Mark pulls up next to you in his brand new, sparkly, modified well-oiled machine. You’re going to laugh at him no matter how many ways we analyze it, but is it funny? Yes, yes it is in that sad but true kind of way. We might even go so far as to say it’s hilarious, because knock knock jokes are funny, but if we strive for hilarious, truly hilarious, we have this sick sense that someone’s got to get hurt. And no matter how much pain you figure this guy must have experienced in high school gym locker rooms, you’re still going to laugh at the next guy who pulls up next to you at a stoplight with the idea that he thought he could drop an extra $40-to-$50 grand for a loud, luxury muscle car to rectify it. Lookatme now! What you think ladies? Even if my rod ain’t so hot, look at the hotrod I got beneath me now.

Necrotizing Fasciitis of the Genitalia: The Comedy

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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.”