The gymnasium’s locker room–when it is taken outside the warm Vaselined lens of a Porky’s film–isn’t very glamourous or exciting atall.
In fact, I spend a great deal of my time trying not to let my bare feet touch the floor. When not obsessing about athletes foot, I have a fighter pilot’s focus on my own gear–both the gear I carried in, and the gear I was born with–with the idea that my great focus will mean a swift turnaround time. I’m certainly not like some gentlemen–generally men who have greening Marine tattoos and bellies that prohibit any clear and unobstructed view of their own genitals–who could while away an entire day sitting on a bench that, in time, will stick to their sweaty scrotum like a cheese slice wrapper (as it has done to countless other scrotums in the past with, one doubts, anything like a thorough clean between exposures), their feet bathing in the stagnant fungal water of body runoff pooling on the tiled floor. Just the thought makes my feet itch, and my dinner rise a few inches in my esophagus.
BESIDES all the unsavoury characteristics I’ve mentioned, my particular gym is rife with fathers who think its hunky dory to trot their pre-pubecent daughters into this morass of soggy dongs and drip-dried chodas–a practise that, pardon if I sound too much like Adam in the Garden of Eve, will have a profound affect on these young girls psyches. Not profound, as is implied in the sentence:
Doctors Banting and Best did not yet realise the profound affect their discovery would have on the daily lives of millions the world over, and for many generations to come.
Profound, as is implied in the sentence:
A profound sense of grief overtook Tom, as he realised the designs those two girls had for that lowly cup–a cup that no amount of bleach would ever clean. A cup so profoundly dirty that it would have to be dropped in a Goodwill box if it was ever to get a fresh start employed in someone’s pantry as a cup.
In short–a men’s locker room is no place to raise your daughters. I didn’t think this would have to be stated explicitly–but apparently to those living in the Marda Loop/Killarney region it does. So to them I say:
Soon enough your daughters will have plenty of opportunity to get boys’ tiny pink wind socks dangled in their faces; leave at least some mysteries for their teenaged years.