Vasectomy

Truth is, I'm the sort of man who doesn't know how most things work, exactly. I'm not incompetent, I have a basic idea of physics, finance, and a woman, and I'm neither stupid or incurious. I might take the charge of lazy from time to time, but that's not really fair. Unpracticed is probably the level aim.

My relationship with my vas deferens probably started and ended in the seventh grade, with Ms. Tufts, the junior high volleyball teacher/stereotypical lesbian who doubled-down as our Health Ed instructor. It ended there, or a period later, in Mr. Gomes incongruous Ecology class. The only black teacher in twenty miles, soft-spoken, a naturalist, and unable to relate, at all, to Sharika. Sharika was a girl, and she killed the flour baby she was given in Health Ed. Killed it on the floor, in a smashing fashion, in splayed out lumps and then grains. Probably some of that flour baby still is on the floor of the science wing.

I don't really know where a vasectomy would start. Without really thinking to much, I don't know where the incision would start. Or stop. Or what it would be trying to do, physiologically. Or even what it would really stop me from doing, physiologically. Admittedly, it's a weak spot. I need to bone up. Because, to my recollection, the vas deferens were named after a Dutchman, a scientist. Let me check Wikipedia. Nope. I was wrong.

Michael Lewis wrote an article in Slate.com about getting a vasectomy. It wasn't very good, it wasn't up to his par, but I don't think less of him for it. It contained this good, and true, bit:

I should have fought for my reproductive rights, like other men. A friend of mine, when his wife suggested he might go and get himself gelded, had just laughed and said, "What if I want a trophy wife one day?" Another had declined his wife's invitation to a beheading by saying, "What if you and the kids go down in a plane crash?" Other men I knew refused on the grounds of rumors they'd heard about the operation's side effects. "I have a friend who had it done and he couldn't feel his dick for 10 months," a guy at a dinner party told me, knowledgeably. "After that I said, 'No way.' "

And these were men who lived in Berkeley, Calif.! Imagine the conversation in the red states, where men were men.

I can only think of one friend who has gotten a vasectomy that I now about, AK, and he is, by far, hands down, the coolest person that I know. Not cool in a sunglasses, jacket, and jeans sort of way, but cool in a kids, wife, and job sort of way, in that, he's got life figured out, better than anyone else I've ever met who wasn't born rich and well-adjusted. I found out over dinner, with a client, a client whom I'd just met, in a Cuban restaurant in Philadelphia. Apropos of something, but not something like a vasectomy, something more like "How much would it cost to retire in Nicaragua?" AK said, "Oh, sure, I got my tube tied. I made a deal with Mrs. AK. I'd get the operation, and she'd let me take a vacation for two weeks every year, to go surfing in the Indian Ocean, while she took care of the kids." And he didn't blink, and ate his ropa vieja.

Now, isn't that cool?