Scrabble, Ecstasy, & Fertility Clinics

David Fiore and I pushed our nocturnal proclivities to the limit that semester. Went weeks and weeks without seeing the sun. We’d sleep all day, read and write all night, and meet for a game of Scrabble at three in the morning. Scrabble, ecstasy, and fertility clinics: so much human, all-too-human striving. And yet I can’t help but wonder: Were we pushing the limits of human nature or trying to figure out where they might be?

I was dying for a good game of Scrabble as I sat there in the fertility clinic, waiting for some stranger to stick a giant needle into my nuts. Of course they told me to wait, the doctor told me to take it easy. But I didn’t because I was 29, and, like most guys in their twenties, I still secretly suspected that I was a superhero. So I carried that kid, popped the stitches, and that’s why the vasectomy can’t be reversed.

And that’s why I’m sitting here in this stupid waiting room, under these stupid fluorescent lights, reading these stupid magazines filled with stupid questionnaires. The one on Page 18 says it comes down to this: “Are you a dog person or a cat person?”

“Dude,” said Jimmy, “could swear I just saw a big lizard walking across your living room floor.”

The sun was coming up, we were coming down, and Samantha, the four-and-a-half-foot-long iguana who lived with us, was making her way like a snob to the windowsill to bathe in the morning light.

Jenny giggled to herself: “Bees are so furry and cute up close. They’re like little kitty cats, flying brainwashed kitty cats, living in totalitarian societies.”

Jimmy nodded in agreement: “And moths are butterflies on crack who flunked flight school.”

Scrabble, ecstasy, and fertility clinics: so much human, all-too-human striving. And yet I can’t help but wonder: Were we pushing the limits of human nature or trying to figure out where they might be?

The grownup me wants to march right back in time and protest in front of each one of these magical moments with a placard that reads: IT WON’T WORK! HERE’S WHY. But then Joy wells up within me, laughs, and says it already has.

—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)