(Until I can post again on my own two legs, here's a substitute post as timeless as tastelessness...)

I’m on a roll with the whole castration issue lately. It must be the stress. But here’s a pet peeve worthy of discussion. Well…maybe not, but here goes anyway.

Have you seen those big macho trucks on the road? The ones with oversized tires, Playboy-stenciled mud-flaps and perhaps a windshield sticker of a cartoon child urinating on something. You know the trucks I mean—they’re the self-styled suburban bad boy’s answer to the family-on-the-back-windshield SUVs crowding the roads.

Maybe you live in another dimension—urban, perhaps, where these vehicles don’t exist. But in my neck of the woods they’re increasingly common. Problem is, there’s a new accoutrement on the market made just for these too-macho-for-my-truck men of the road: a whopping pair of fleshy, stretchy, falsified testicles meant to hang just under the obligatory tow hitch. They’re variously referred to as “TruckNutz,” “DodgeBalls” and all manner of crude variations on the theme anyone with a limited imagination could readily conjure up.

I became aware of these nasty trimmings when my nine year-old asked what the heck was hanging off the back of that truck we spied on our way to school. Ummm…that’s a pseudo-scrotum, I answered matter-of-factly. I guess people decorate their trucks with them when they want to show they’re so manly that even their trucks have testicles. You mean they’re balls? Ummm…yes, in un-polite language, that’s what we call ‘em.

He was fascinated and giggled giddily all the way to school where he no doubt talked them up enough that I’ll get a nasty look from the homeroom teacher sometime in the near future—if not a phone call. Boys will be boys, I guess.

But the next time we saw them—after we’d had a long discussion as to why Vincent was going to be neutered and, in answer to his many questions, why that didn’t happen to people (with a few segways into the role of the castrati and the history of eunuchs)—my son was more somber about the issue. Knowing I’d disdained the practice of hanging body parts off the back of vehicles, he asked: Mommy, why don’t you just neuter those trucks, too?

Yep. That’s my boy.