Aporia (a-po’-ri-a): Deliberating with oneself as though in doubt over some matter; asking oneself (or rhetorically asking one’s hearers) what is the best or appropriate way to approach something [=diaporesis].
Time was running out. It was almost my birthday and I couldn’t face it it. I was old: I was getting deaf, my legs were wobbly, I had developed a double-vision malady and could no longer drive. I got up a half-dozen times at night to pee, my teeth were coming lose, I was chronically constipated. An MRI had shown white spots on my brain. My right pinky was frozen in a 90 degree angle to the palm of my hand. I wear a brace on my hand to retrain my pinkie to go flat. Probably, if I thought about it a little longer, a few more signs of age-related body-rot would come mind.
I said to myself “Billy, you’re only 62. You ought to be able to overcome all this crap and feel young again. Chin up. Damn, that was stupid, my wattle buried my chin 5 years ago. Hmmm. Do some research. You’ll find something. I felt a little like Humpty Dumpty trying to put myself back together again.”
I went where everybody goes when there’s an urgency in their lives: Google. I made a boilerplate search document listing my malady’s and asking for cures. I sent it off to Google. I got one of those blue responses asking “Do you mean you are dying and want to be cremated?” I tried again with less detail. I spent all day going through the responses. As you can imagine, a good number of them were bizarre. I think the weirdest was the recommendation that for a week to stick a lit Christmas tree light in my butt every-other day, leaving it in for six hours each time. When I read that, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. One recommendation was to “scoop out” one of my eyes, precluding being cross-eyed. That one almost made me turn off the computer. But I didn’t.
What came up next was a site selling supplements. My daughter takes supplements and they don’t seem to hurt her, except for the barely visible mustache that looks like a shadow on her upper lip. So, I ordered a bottle of “Youngy” ground “Gods Nuts” for $200.00. They came in the mail the next day. They smelled a little funky. I took the recommended dose of 12. Nothing happened right away. Eventually they kicked in and ALL of my malady’s evaporated! I went wild celebrating non-stop for two days. I woke up on my birthday ready to rip. About halfway through singing “Happy Birthday” to me, I started feeling funny. My stomach was bulging out. I went to the bathroom and was shocked to see my penis was gone, replaced by a vagina. I was going to have a baby! It all moved so fast! My pregnancy lasted a week. I have a beautiful little girl who looks like my late mother, and my penis returned!
Now I am a very young looking celebrity. I was on FOX News the other night. Tucker Carlson interviewed me and said he had already given birth to 3 babies, but he has to keep them out of sight. What a liar! I’ve Googled “Youngy” and “Gods Nuts” hundreds of times and they’ve completely disappeared from the internet. My daughter Athena has grown four feet in two months and has started to speak. She talks in a monotone like one of those outer space creatures in a 50s sci-fi movie. But, who cares? We love each other and are living a good life together.
POSTSCRIPT
After writing what’s above, Billy was found dead, run over in his own driveway. Athena was suspected of his murder. She stole his car and was reported by some drug-soaked hippy losers to have boarded a flying saucer along with Jimi Hendrix, Kieth Moon, and Janis Joplin. According to the hippies, the flying saucer “like shot off into the sky like a big flat jet, man.” The hippies said she was 8-feet tall and was wearing a t-shirt that said “Gods Nuts.” The police ignored the hippies’ “insane ranting” and the case was listed as unsolved, and remains so today.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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