Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Hell of a Time for a Colonoscopy




As if having one case of severe genital distress in the family isn’t enough…

As if having the guilty orb surgically removed, delicately deposited into a hermetically sealed ZipLoc bag and rushed via underground pneumatic tube to a top secret high security lab, where it’s innermost cells confessed to their quiet and insidious perfidy, to their random and unwanted dividing into nuts within nuts and then hiding the threat of their poison residue in inscrutable reports isn’t enough…


As if taking a young man’s innocent and relatively unstructured brain and twisting it around and around and around over and over until it’s molecules shimmer and pop like oil on a hot griddle...if all that isn’t enough…

Do we really have to go looking for evidence of rogue cells in the old man’s strafed, raked and chafed colon? Is it really necessary at this point to bring Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch into the picture, even in their microscopic state, to travel up my anal canal in their little white plastic pod with their polyp zappers? Especially now, after David Sedaris has forever ruined the idea of a discreet and gentlemanly colonoscopy, and comics on postcard stages from Rapid City to Parkland to Las Cruces have had garage sales full of colonoscopy jokes dump trucked onto their unsuspecting and too-young-to-know audiences?



Are we saying that, after all the indignity heaped on the small piece of bodily real estate – the scrotum – of the son, that it is now right and just to heap another bucket of steaming monkey puke on the father, as if the testicular cancer was his fault? And to atone, he must forego a day of food and at the end of that day start drinking Fleet soda by the gallon, turning the contents of his guts into a bubbling cauldron of steaming Linda Blair vitashake?

Yes. It would appear we are saying all that and more. For nobody is ever more downright feeble and pathetic than the guilty father of the newly one-nutted son; the ego-maniacal father who feels his historic wrongheadedness about nearly everything and everyone and most especially number-one son is a curse passed down through generations of wrongheaded fathers. And that only he, through the divine intervention of a camera shoved up his ass, can alone atone for the sins of generations of males gone and males yet to come.

But is this wallowing wall-eyed wimp okay with his seriously sickened son grabbing all the attention? Or does he secretly hope the gastroenterologist will find something terrifying deep in his literal bowels – Dobby, the house elf? Pottery shards of the ancient Anasazi? A Titleist 3? A signed copy of Catcher in the Rye? A Troll doll? A vintage P-bass? Or perhaps a note, written on yellow legal paper and stuffed in a tin of pipe tobacco, with instructions and a map showing the way, along with the words he is to say to his boy under repair when he comes back from The Fantastic Voyage.

Then of course it is likely that the old man, true to form, is pretty well full of shit and nothing else.