Something Missing continued
darren
It is not my penis. It is no one's penis. The whole thing is a tabloid job more properly assigned to the province of urban mythology, the origins of which are well known. Urban mythology is born of the fear and tremblings of pre-adolescents about to face the trials of junior high, which everyone has warned them about. Some needs must run away into the trees and learn to talk to the animals. Others simply become comatose. Those who remain make up tales, even rudimentary sagas of wandering organs, things lost... yes, that is the paramount theme: loss. For, indeed, what is being lost by such creatures is their happy country of ice creams and video games, of vague sexual differentiation, of running and jumping and falling down, swimming, sometimes brief hunting expeditions, the dunking of dead squirrels in plastic solutions which harden in God's own good time and exhibiting them as sculptures, experiments with lizards and positive and negative electrical poles which produce interesting if smelly, sizzling effects and actual death at first hand, possibly first sightings of such ... all lost. For of necessity, and due to the "compulsive nature of time", all of that must give way to locker room horrors, tattoo, hair, and ring semiotics, nervous sweat, rampant erectile tissue..
Listen. If I had cut off my penis, wouldn't I know it? The Mistress is correct in assuming that my discomfort would inform my actions. That blood would embarrass my household. That my own wife would show interest, if not distress, at the signs of obvious mayhem. That I would certainly show no interest in food but rather seek out the comforts of morphine, at least some good strong hooch. Yet here I sit at table with my light white wine and white food (shark poached in eaux de tap) converted rice (also white), peas and carrots providing the only color upon my plate. Nothing red anywhere, see? The sanguine is absent. The heart beats slow and true to the rhythm of my wife's reassuring toot and drone whose subject is of little import, even though I nod occasionally, occasionally even shout, "Awesome, babe!" Indeed, this is the familiar early evening ritual at Castle Darren, to be followed by a brief work period of clearing, wiping, loading of the dishwasher, occasional little wet exchanges of affection as we bang into each other in the course of our labors, then off we'll go to the telly for some fun. Now, can a casualty of some rumble before the gates of such Iliums of urban myth remaining to us go about his boring little life in this way? As if nothing had happened? Wouldn't there be whitecoats, stretchers, sirens, looters lurking? Wouldn't there be menacing, Russian modernist music on the soundtrack? Yet there isn't. We have none of this. We only have Darren, and Mrs. Babbitt, with her scissrs and her various sewing materials, the two of us in our cozy den, watching the telly and laughing and crying at the appropriate moments. Soon we will go to bed, perhaps for a little cuddly, perhaps simply to slip into a beatific, dogmatic slumber.
Well, I do remember her saying at table, "Do you feel there is something missing lately in our relationship?" to which I responded in my usual manner to such queries. I told her she could put that with the rest of her pop psychology where the sun don't shine, and that seemed to make her happy. At least she was seen to look down at her plate and smile.
END