A Real Kick in the Balls

It’s a real kick in the balls when you feel like you’re being penalized for being different. (You don’t have to have balls to feel it.) Needless to say, cripples feel this way all the time. And I bet amputees are the subspecies of cripple that feel it most often. If a person with one leg goes to buy shoes, they are forced to buy a second shoe they will never need. The same goes for one-armed people buying gloves.

I mean what the fuck, eh? Shouldn’t amputees get shoe and or glove discounts? Or how about a tax break? Blind people get tax breaks just for being blind so why not?

As far as I know, the glorious free market has not responded to this injustice with a chain of specialty boutiques that sell shoes and gloves by the each. Historically, when the glorious free market doesn't give a shit about the piddly little troubles of certain groups of people, those people often take matters into their own hands. So probably some enterprising amputees have formed shopping clubs where, for instance, a guy missing his left arm goes shopping with a guy missing his right arm and they go halvsies on a pair of gloves.

At least people missing one leg get a chance to feel superior when they buy socks. Since you can wear a sock on either foot, a pair of socks lasts them twice as long. I bet the smuggest amputees of all are the ones who are missing all four limbs. They don’t have to be bothered with shopping for gloves or shoes at all. They can spend their time, money and energy on more important pursuits. They scoff at us sad little losers with the proper allotment of limbs who are slaves to our hands and feet. I bet quadruple amputees are insufferable to be around. That’s why they have no friends, except each other.

There’s a guy rolling around my neighborhood in a raggedy wheelchair and I call him the asymmetrical beggar. I call him that because he’s missing an arm and a leg on opposite sides and he panhandles. His life must really suck. Even if he joined the amputee shopping club, he’d have to hook up with someone missing a leg on one side to split a pair of shoes and then someone else missing an arm on the other side for gloves. Or he'd have to find an amputee who's his asymmetrical mirror image. What a pain in the ass!

One day the window of the 7-11 downstairs was boarded up. The guy with the patchy beard who panhandles outside 7-11 told me the asymmetrical beggar smashed the window in a fit of anger. “He dranks that gin and it makes him crazy,” the guy with the patchy beard said. “And he crazy anyway.”

I think the asymmetrical beggar just snapped. He was probably fed up with being kicked in the balls.




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