Groin Pains: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Vasectomy

As I approach 40, I realize that I have only two significant things to recommend me as a human being. One is an unusually high credit score. The other is being astoundingly fertile.

The high credit score came by way of a confluence of inexplicable events. Or at least I think they were inexplicable. It may be that a closer inspection would reveal all to be completely explicable, but my purposes here will employ no such level of scrutiny.

The condition of my fertility is another matter entirely. I can’t account for it and if ever I wanted to do so I don’t know where I would begin. Actually, that isn’t true either. I do know where I would begin. I would begin where I go for just about everything else. That place is Google.

It is tempting to complain about about having only two successes. Here be the foothills of middle age and yet I never became the next Stephen Malkmus, never found a loophole in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,1 have never sold so much as a single book; and that is all very depressing. But it is occurring to me now that complaining might not actually do any good -lest it would be it’s own cure- and so I won’t be doing any of it here.

Instead I will tell you about how the incredible potency of my absurdly powerful loins will be coming to an end on Wednesday.

I first became aware . . . I mean really aware in a visceral/I can’t pretend like it isn’t happening because it is so far in the future way . . . last week at a car dealership. It happened thus:

My wife and I were at a car dealership. We were on one side of a table. On the other side was the credit manager. My wife’s hands were on top of the table. Mine below. The credit manager had one in each location. The hand he showed was meatier than mine. I assumed the other was so shaped but was not certain until it came out and aided him at sliding a sheet of paper in front of my wife and myself. One of the hands pushed the paper forward. The other pivoted it upon a warbling point until what could once only be easily read by him could now easily be read by us. He spoke. We listened.

“Alright Mrs. and Mr. Galaxy Parker, I have run your credit scores.”

The scores had been written on the sheet. I couldn’t help but notice that the paper was inclined slightly more to her than to myself.

“Mr. Galaxy Parker, yours is 813.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, “That sounds a little low.”

“I can assure you, sir, the credit reporting machine does not lie and it is never wrong. He tilted his head in the same angle at which the paper had been deployed. “And you madam,” With a pen he tapped at at her score, “Have an 835,” He underlined it. He circled it once and then once more. He smiled.

“What’s wrong?” my wife asked.

“Nothing is wrong, those are some of the best credit scores I’ve seen all year. Really, you guys should have a program on TLC or a YouTube account or be running a seminar with Robert Kiyosaki or something.”

“No,” she said to the credit manager, “I meant with him.” She pointed at me. It wasn’t altogether necessary. I was the only other person in the room.

“Oh nothing. I was just used to having the higher credit score. I mean sure you make more money because you’re so smart and all, but because of completely inexplicable reasons I have always had the higher credit score. As long as I had that I knew I could still be a contender. I knew I could still be somebody. But now, now I’m feeling . . . well, I’m feeling a bit impotent.” I smiled. It was smaller than the credit man’s had been.“But hey, I’ve still got my incredible fertility right . . . I mean that’s something, isn’t it?”

“About that.”

“About what?”

“That incredible fertility.”

“What about it.”

“It’s coming to an end in just about two weeks.”

“Already?:

“Yup.”

“I thought that was scheduled for like six months from now.”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

I don’t know what the credit manager thought about this. His face was a cipher. A one-time pad. Unlike the salesman’s promise of unending swag and lagniappe, it gave nothing away. It didn’t seem to have too much of a negative impact though. We got the loan, and at the lowest interest rate possible.