By Ariel Leal
It all started when I saw Anderson Cooper on TV. I could do little more than imagine that sultry, silver-tongued silver fox drag his meaty tongue all over my yearning, naked flesh. My parents realized this after my dad seized my stash of Playboys only to realize that each of the women’s faces were replaced by the face of Mr. Cooper himself. They thought I was gay. I wasn’t gay, though, I just thoroughly enjoyed professional news reporting. I asked Yahoo if I had to be gay now, they said no and posted some, what I can only speculate are called, reaction jiffys of small men rubbing towels in, near, and around their respective perineums. I think it checked out. I asked my gym bros and they told me they don’t remember any time in which our balls audibly smacked together and I made sure to say “No homo” every time I gagged on my toothbrush. My nan told me that it’s a healthy developmental process for young lads such as myself to be strongly drawn towards doctors and white-haired reporting moguls.
Ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper I would play doctor and my parents would point and laugh until I would persistently try to put the stethoscope in my rectum. It wasn’t gay though, I mean, I didn’t think so. It seems pretty straight to me to want to hear what goes on inside the good ol’ poop shoot. I was never really all that religious either, by the way. The only god I knew was daytime television star, Ryan Seacrest. You know, sometimes I would sit there and laugh to myself repeating the name “Ryan Wannaseemybreasts” but that’s slightly besides the point.
I’m a World War One enthusiast. Anyway, my parents tried praying the gay away but I told them there was no gay to pray away and that my name was Clay and I liked to play on the bay with some hay, okay? But anyway, all that poetry only led to my parents whisking me away to the nearest hospital to be operated on immediately. The objective of the surgery: To remove the part of my brain that made me gay.
As I lay on the operating table, cold and vulnerable, a scrub wearing scrubs told me that I was lucky, that the mysterious and ever-so seductive Doctor RJ Shafty would be operating on me.
“Doctor Shafty? I’ve certainly never heard of him!” I said, feeling even more cold and lifeless for not being in the loop.
At that exact, very, precise moment, the double doors slammed open as Dr. Shafty himself surveyed the room and also my penis.
“Well, you’ve heard of me now,” he said, licking his lips all the while. I’m pretty sure there was some sort of grammatical error in saying that, but I was foolish to question a real, live doctor. Instead, I nervously asked him if he knew about how Harold Gillies birthed the field of plastic surgery during WWI due to the increased demand from soldiers with horribly disfigured faces from shrapnel blasts and gunshot wounds.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” I whispered to myself, because I’m a fucking idiot. Of course he knows! He’s a doctor, fuck crying out loud.
“Alright, let’s cut this bitch up,” he said, ignoring every stupid word that came out of my shrimp-like mouth and making sure to make eye contact with every other person in the room, except for me that is, but I’m not really a person.
“Hey are you sure this is safe?” I asked.
“Of course it’s safe, I graduated from Hofstra University!”
Before I knew it, my scalp was being removed. He figured anesthesia was “for pussies” and so each second was a new experience for me. It was agonizing and enlightening. I was euphoric.
“Doctor, are you sure you know what you’re doing?” asked one of the foolish interns.
“Get the fuck out of my operating room,” replied the overwhelmingly masculine doctor.
The intern stripped naked and left the room as less of a person than before.
“Doctor, we’re losing him!” exclaimed one of those other surgery people that weren’t anywhere near as important as Dr. Shafty.
“No we’re not,” insisted the good doctor while turning to one of the female surgery people. “After all, I’m a doctor.”
She swooned and fainted immediately, leaving a butter knife in my kidney.
After a few more minutes of excruciating agony, Dr. RJ Shafty raised a piece of my brain and shouted “Eureka!” as doctors do, “I’ve got it!”
All other doctors removed their hands from my once innocent body and applauded the good doctor, sobbing all the while.
The good doctor removed the part of my brain that made me funny.
I had to admit though, he certainly was a meaty shaft man. He didn’t notice but several hypodermic needles fell out of his pocket when he was performing his ritual post-successful surgery jumping jacks. Of course, he’s never failed a single surgery. It’s hard to fail surgery when each one of those hypodermic needles were filled with shark testosterone. By the looks of it, they could have only been injected into his scrotum. I wouldn’t know though, after all I’m not a doctor.
Hours later, I left the establishment feeling a little pensive and hating myself a little more than I thought possible. I also kind of looked like a bloated Barbara Streisand but it was lit, nonetheless. World War One? Yeah more like World War Won.
I went back home and my parents embraced me. My father shook my hand unbeknownst to the fact that I used that very hand to masturbate to Anderson Cooper’s cute little half smirk half an hour earlier in the hospital bathroom.
I realized that the parts of my brain that Dr. Shafty removed were my humor receptors when I soiled my pants laughing at the fact that my grandpa mistakenly removed his trousers while looking for the 1956 memorabilia section of an Ikea. The story was only partially humorous.
To add insult to injury, every time I tried delivering a knock-knock joke, I instead found myself advocating for GreenPeace; I needed training.
I had no time to worry about such matters, I had a university to go to. Weeks after that, I found the perfect place to sharpen my sense of humor and cry about my small legs.
Nonsense Humor Magazine adopted me. I’ve been here for a decent enough time but no one has taught me how to be funny yet. This article isn’t even that funny. That’s okay, at least I told an upperclassman to “keep the change” in monopoly and that was the closest I’ve ever been to what my therapist calls an ‘anxious externally induced orgasm uh’ or AEIOU for short.
I really miss my grandpa.
All in all, it was a pretty well-balanced album but I would have to give it an 8/10 at most. It was fairly relatable and you can tell Future is attempting to step out of his comfort zone to deliver content that has been sorely lacking in the ska industry.
Ska is nice, I guess.