It’s been raining hard again — coming home from church, it was drizzling until it suddenly opened up and I got home in drenched jeans, wet all the way through. It's still warm though, surprisingly, and as I read a series of bad news reports about carbon sinks failing, the hurricanes in the States, and my anxiety from several years about when the end suddenly seemed to be something I might see spikes, I’ve had that ominous feeling of personal and collective failure, of fear for my children’s future. Are we all just pretending to be normal, are we not constantly on the edge of things falling into chaos. I saw the Israeli drone footage of Sinwar before he died, sitting in a blown-out building and hurling a stick and wondered what he thought, having this thing he’d waited his whole life for finally come to him, tired and defeated: now, is it? Is it now? How far is the rest of the world from this same moment.
I’ve, meanwhile, been feeling pain again in my left ball, similar to what I had some two years, a story that I find myself telling every so often when the topic of vasectomies or men’s health comes up. It was still Covid then, and I was wearing a mask and I needed to go to the hospital to have an ultrasound. The story turns on this unexpected twist: Several young women trainees were there, and looked at my medicalised body, and I felt embarrassed. The good news, of course, was that the pain was the result of a cyst in my epididymis, the part of the male architecture where my body is dumping my spermatozoa into the body rather than marrying it up semen. This is a common problem for men with vasectomies and allowed me a sense of noble suffering having done my part to add no more children then I have to this burning world.
The pain returned this last week and I used the app to triage my problem this morning and was immediately given an appointment option a little after 11, the sort of urgency that I tend to love and hate about the NHS because it means that the system thinks this is potentially a serious issue. I trudged up the hill again, thinking about the several weeks before I had done this for my hearing and how that problem seems to have gone away mostly on its own, and wondering about the language I should use for my own body, how I can't seem to say testicle or epididymis without feeling overly serious, like I'm I'm fifteen again, worried someone might call me a nerd, or hushed by someone afraid we’ll be overheard talking openly about the penis without the perfunctory and necessary humour.
I checked in at the surgery and waited for some time before the doctor came out and seemed slightly awkward before I launched into my routine, this solid forty-five second joke, minus the punchline and pretending to forget what the epididymis was. He examined me and we fell into the same conversation I had last time with a different man engaged in the same performance of empathy, no, there is nothing to do really, no one wants to operate on it. Reversing the vasectomy is unlikely to help, although I could be, he used the word, fertile again, and I held myself back from launching into the whole story, the next series of jokes a forty-two-year-old man makes about sex after 18 years of marriage, the kids, the mortgage. We finished and he didn’t offer a closing conversational move, no goodbye, or well, or sorry about that, something I realised as I sat awkwardly waiting for him I needed, like permission to leave. I thanked him, and got up to open the door, realising he locked it right before the examine.
When you believe and then you don’t believe, all the ways you made sense of things, your whole heuristic structure falls apart and you have to come to grips with the fact that you even have a heuristic structure and you aren’t just seeing things the way they are. I’ve been thinking about this as I edit my book manuscript and try to tell some story about my loss of faith that isn’t a stereotype, and that isn’t also a litany of complaints against all the people and texts I’ve felt wronged me. About a vasectomy that I don’t need, about a life that seems predestined by a faith that seems trivial and ridiculous as I edit the writing I did when I believed. I want to edit it out, I want to delete every dumb sentence about how I'm trusting God. It’s all so nonsensical at times, like I’m trying to listen to music in a frequency that I can’t hear.
Twenty years later, it’s just this, the GP and I staring at each other, waiting for the other to say it’s okay, the conversation can end without any more resolution than this. Take a pill and don’t ride your bike so much. Some people out there are dying, the next guy is going to find out he’s actually got cancer. I don’t know what to tell you. Deal with it. Your whole life is dealing with it, you'll be fine.