My tribe, men, are notoriously averse to making use of hospitals, doctors’ rooms or any other health-care facility.
By the time we decide it’s time to consult, it’s because strangers at the mall are tapping us on the shoulder and saying, “Sir, did you realise that your pancreas dropped out of your abdomen at the Tops exit?”
About the only activity that goes on in those places that we feel really good at involves a teaspoon.
Please stay with me.
“Every generation blames the one before.” I would never pooh-pooh Messrs Rutherford and Robertson’s songwriting skills, seeing as I’ve never written a smash hit like The Living Years. That said, my only humble suggestion to the great musicians would have been that the second line of that great song should have been “And every generation despises the next.”
My generation’s pet peeve is about the Gen Zs. You would swear that we didn’t go through the trauma of our own fathers looking at us as if we were soft-bellied, useless and poor excuses for human beings. I would imagine that our parents’ forebears, who straddled two world wars, probably verbalised their nausea because our folks couldn’t grab a log from the fire by its red-hot end in Botha’s Hill and run to start another fire in neighbouring Inchanga, some 20km away.
But I quite enjoy the notorious “ama-2000″, as those of us from the townships and villages call them. It does help that I really have no choice in the matter. I have three of those, fruits of my loins, occupying studio apartments in Parktown, Braamfontein and Brooklyn in Pretoria.
I wanted to tell him that I, too, harboured the same silly beliefs when I was his age. Just two years later I was pushing a pram around Sanlam Centre in Pinetown
So when a strapping 20-year-old Tuks student decided to sit next to me during a recent minibus taxi ride from Benoni to Pretoria, I rubbed my hands in anticipation of the stimulating conversation. This is, after all, precisely why I use taxis as often as my schedule allows — to immerse myself fully in an anecdote-rich environment. And Zach (“Old timer, I’m Zach without a ‘k’”) didn’t disappoint. Before we even hit the N12 we were in deep conversation about what he referred to as “the ridiculous expectation that every human should reproduce”.
I wanted to tell him that I, too, harboured the same silly beliefs when I was his age. Just two years later I was pushing a pram around Sanlam Centre in Pinetown. But, I thought, why ruin a potentially great conversation with Zach with an injection of reality?
It was only a matter of time before Zach and I got to the subject of vasectomies, a subject I soon discovered he was particularly passionate about. Consistent with his “ama-2000″ tribe, he shared how he had tried to make an appointment to have his progeny-producing pipes decommissioned but had been waved away because he was only 19 at the time. Big “woke” words like “personal agency” got thrown around the Quantum as I listened to him.
However, it was my time to shine, seeing as I know a bit about the practicalities around the process. I felt it was my duty to lighten up the conversation by asking him if he knew what was involved. After he gave me a decent, technically correct description, I asked him how the urologist would know that the procedure had been successful.
He hadn’t thought that far. So I described to him how he would have to produce a specimen to the doctor to be checked for any of his “boys” still swimming. “Oh! Kinda like they do it at fertility clinics?” “Yes,” I responded, “except that at the fertility clinic the fellow is hoping for Chad le Clos and Roland Schoeman in there, while back at the snip farm success looks like an empty pool.”
I shared with him how they give you the option of generating a teaspoonful of a specimen on-site or at home. As every man reading this knows, if there’s one thing we’ve been training for since we were 13, and sometimes even younger, it is just this task. It has been encoded in our DNA since Abrahamic times when, in Genesis 38, a fellow named Onan defied the Lord, who had instructed him to make babies with his departed brother’s widow.
After my detailed description of all things onanistic, Zach abruptly changed the subject. Maybe after three months, he will be able to take sips from his teaspoon without remembering the strange old man who gave him a moment of pause inside a Quantum.
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