Phantom baseball played with a tennis ball

Anyone joining the party here should go back here and read the story from the start. I really wish the blog tool allowed one to write things from the top down.

As you recall, dear Readers, when last we left Tripp he had recently had his jewels shaved, in icy water, but he was recovering nicely under the warmth of a heat lamp. Let us resume the story at that point . . .

I basked in the warmth of the heat lamp, enjoying my relief and enjoying my satisfaction. I felt the relief that one feels when one has had an ordeal, and when the ordeal is over, and I felt the satisfaction that comes from knowing that one has successfully "bit the bullet," that one has "manned up," and that one has "thought of England" (TY, Debbie!), and one has come out the other side.

While I was basking, Dr. Gray, the female Dr. Gray, came into the room, and she sat down and she began examining my now-warm sctrotum. I thought "Now this is more like it," and I was relaxed, but the thing is that I should not have been relaxed. I should not have been feeling good.

Do you recall, back in the previous chapter, how I was thinking about words like "procedure" and "just" and "feminism" whilst being shaved? Do you know what I *should* have been thinking? Hmmmm? Well I know what I should have been thinking. Yes, yes, hindsight is 50/50, we all know that, but still, I really should have been thinking this: "Why is the bastard Barry shaving my balls?!"

You see, the mind is a tricky thing. The mind sees what the mind wants to see, similar to how the heart loves what the heart loves. And with all of my knowledge, with all of my wisdom, and with all of my years of study, my mind had willfully ignored one unpleasant fact. Every time I had seen the illustrations of a vasectomy in a newspaper article, no doubt planted there by some feminist, I saw the blow-up illustration of the vas deferens being looped and snipped like a piece of string and I assumed, yes, I ASSUMED, that the loop in question was taken from an incision somewhere in the lower abdomen.

I had heard talk about a pulling sensation, and I had assumed that they meant a little tug as the vas deferens was pulled out of an incision somewhere near, well, somewhere near the lower abdomen. My mind had fooled itself, and for all of those years I had been willfully ignorant of the fact that a vasectomy meant that someone would be cutting away at my balls!!

Willful ignorance can be a very useful thing. It allowed us to invade Iraq, for example. It allows us to ignore certain unpleasantries that we wish to ignore. But the problem with willful ignorance is that, at some time, our ignorance may bump into reality, and reality always wins. Bless you, reality. Bless you for giving us a reference point.

But let us snap back to the Procedure room, where the female Dr. Gray was examining my scrotum . . .

As the female Dr. Gray was examining my scrotum, stretching it this way and that, feeling the structures that were hidden inside of it, It occurred to me that the female Dr. Gray had more than a passing interest in what she was stretching. I cleared my throat and asked her what she was looking for. "The best place for the incisions," she replied.

I froze. Willful ignorance or no willful ignorance, my mind realized the awful reality that the female Dr. Gray was going to cut my ball! Actually, scratch that idea, the female Dr. Gray was going to cut BOTH of my balls! That was why the Bastard Barry shaved my balls, and that was why my legs were shackled to the chair!

"Incisions?" I asked, and the female Dr. Gray must have heard the fear in my voice, because she looked up, and then she looked down again, and then she picked up a syringe attached to a needle, and then she said "Oh don't worry. There will be just a couple of cuts, but first I will numb the area with this novocaine."

Now I am a big fan of novocaine. Actually I am a VERY big fan of novocaine, provocaine, benzocaine, and any other members of the large caine family. When I visit the dentist I ask for two shots of novocaine, just to make sure I get full coverage. "No sense feeling any pain," that is what I always say. So I breathed a sigh of relief when the female Dr. Gray placed the needle over injection site number one. I averted my eyes, because I prefer not to see my skin being pierced, and then ZOWEEE, flashback number three.

When I was a tween, I had two great friends named Eugene and Dale. The three of us would play just about every sport together, and we would vary the sport based on the season of the year. Summertime, of course, was baseball time. We would play long games, every day, in the field behind my house.

Those of you familiar with the sport of baseball know that it is normally played with nine players on each team, so trying to play a game of baseball with only three players was a difficult thing to do. Our way around that limitation was our invention of "Phantom" baseball. In Phantom baseball there were two players on defense, the pitcher and the catcher, and there was one player on offense, the batter. We played a variation called "Pitcher's hand out," meaning that when the batter hit the ball he had to run to first base, but if the pitcher got the ball before the batter reached first base it was as if the first baseman had gotten the ball, and the batter would be out.

If the batter made it successfully to first base then there would be a phantom runner on first base, and the batter would go back to bat again, now with a phantom runner on first base. In Phantom baseball every hit was a single, and it was impossible to get a double, triple, or home-run. We would play this game for hours, rotating between pitcher, catcher, and batter, with each of us keeping our own personal scores.

The other local variation we used was that instead of a regular baseball we used a tennis ball. The tennis ball allowed us to pitch from a position closer to the batter, and it also ensured that the batter or catcher would not be hurt if they were hit by either a pitched ball or by a foul ball.

My flashback took me into a game of phantom baseball, on a hot afternoon in August. I was pitching, Eugene was batting, and Dale was catching. In general Eugene was the second best hitter, behind me, but I could usually strike him out by throwing very fast fast balls. This particular time I threw the ball very fast towards Eugene, and I remember that I saw him swing the bat, and I saw nothing else before THWHACK! Eugene had hit a screaming line drive back at me, so fast that I could not get my glove in front of it, and that blazing tennis ball hit me right in the Funniest Home Videos Ten Thousand dollar winning location. THWHACK went the ball, and down went me. I instinctively curled up into a fetal position, and the pain around my groin was incredibly intense, and it picked up intensity the closer it got to my groin, so that at ground zero the pain was so strong it transcended pain, and instead it approached the Wrath of God in its intensity.

The ball rolled around my feet, but it didn't matter, because both Eugene and Dale were laughing so hard that they fell down and they had to hold their stomachs. I was holding a different area.

Back in the procedure room, as the female Dr. Gray pushed the plunger, a tiny part of my mind, a very tiny part of my mind, was able to look from outside myself, and was able to be amazed, and yet not be at all surprised, that a novocaine shot to the nuts felt exactly like a rocketing tennis ball to the nuts. That tiny part of my brain thought "I suppose it does make sense, and yet it is a fact that I would have never ever predicted, even in one thousand years."

Thankfully, unlike the shot with the tennis ball, the shot of novocaine numbed itself fairly quickly, but while I felt relief at the lessening of the pain, I also felt a growing sense of dread, because sure as the sun rises in the morning, I knew that whatever I was feeling over on my port side, I would soon be feeling over on my starboard side. I began to feel nauseous, and I knew that this little procedure was not almost over, this little procedure was just beginning.

With that, dear readers, I must once again bid you adieu, and once again I invite you to tune in tomorrow when I will tell you the chapter of when Tripp goes to a backyard barbecue.