Purpose
June 6, 2012
Over the past year I’ve seen my wife struggle and sweat through pregnancy, scream in searing pain and terror through a day and a night and a day of labor, and become the tirelessly loving albeit perpetually exhausted personal 24-hour 7-11 food store for our son. Witnessing all this in the slack-armed, mouth-breathing pose of the helpless bystander has confirmed suspicions I’ve long had about my gender’s limited biological purpose in terms of furthering human life on Earth. We men have balls. That’s about it. Balls and a dick, I guess.
This leaves plenty of time for other things, such as, chiefly, the ball-draining consumption of porn, but also the following of sports and the customizing of personal effects. The line between balls and porn is self-evident. Though slightly less obvious, a line also connects balls and sports. Sometimes the line in the latter case is made abundantly clear, such as when Derek Lowe, upon recording the final out in a 2003 playoff series against the A’s, looked to the Oakland dugout and histrionically grabbed his nuts. He was saying, I guess, “My testicles are splendid, clearly much more potent and desirable than yours; in fact, my balls are so excellent that they make your own balls irrelevant, and from here on out I will be handling all your impregnating duties, and you will in terms of species survival be rendered purposeless.”
The A’s reacted negatively to this assessment.
In fact, Lowe was generally criticized for pantomiming with such obviousness that he had superior testicles, but it seems possible that all sporting contests between males are aimed, at their core, at determining the relative worth of the testicles of the men involved in these contests and, by extension, the relative worth of the testicles of the men who are fans of the men involved in these contests. Lowe merely made this plain. His act was deemed “classless,” as if one’s place in the social strata is determined in part by the distance or lack thereof you are able to keep from openly acknowledging balls.
And on that note, consider the photo at the top of this page, which features large simulated testicles hanging from the back of a truck. I took the shot with my cheap cell phone yesterday while catching a ride home from work with Rob, author of the Blue Batting Helmet blog. Incredibly, the first thing I’d noticed about the truck was not the balls but the fake bullet holes in the paneling of the truck. Though difficult to see in the photo, there is also a wolf wilderness scene in the back window. An additional feature, not viewable in the picture, is an eagle license plate frame. I don’t know what this all means—wolves, bullet holes, eagles, balls—but it seems to be a distinctly American collection of imagery. In day to day American reality, life is absurd and tedious, like being stuck in traffic behind a moron. But in American dreams maybe life is full of purpose, a gun battle to be won by the wild and big-balled.
Cardboard Gods 
Wow, that pickup and its accoutrements looks like many of the vehicles I see in rural Michigan. Interesting to learn that there are actually hicks in Chicago–or was that pickup just owned by some ironic young hipster?
I love it. For more detail on the truck, check this out: http://bluebattinghelmet.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/the-ugly-blue-green-truck/
Can’t believe I forgot about the curvy chick mudflaps! Such a key component. (You can just barely make them out in the pic; see “sirrah’s” link above for more.)