Newfoundland Was Having a Great Week Before These Unlicensed Dick Surgery Headlines

Newfoundland is never allowed to keep a shred of dignity for longer than a day, tops. This is an immutable law of nature, like gravity or the grave. Anytime a Proud Newfoundlander steps up to the spotlight, there—lurking in the shadows, half in the bag on blow and Blue Star—is the Goofy Newfie, loosed from his shed party and looking to get tangly.

We were having such a good week, too. Brad Gushue won the Brier (aka Canada's biggest curling match, which is a big deal in Canadian curling circles) on home ice in St. John's, sealing his destiny as our national treasure and hopefully also sealing the promise that the highway bearing his name might be finished soon. We survived a hurricane-force windstorm that blew houses to pieces where a lesser people (Toronto) would have perished. A musical about how nice Newfoundlanders were on 9/11 premiered on Broadway to rave reviews, which definitely has nothing to do with liberal America's thirst for the Justin Trudeau™ Warm and Fuzzy Canadiana and everything to do with our rustic spin on the death knell of the old world order.

Lots of things were going well, so obviously a shoe had to drop. Given that the province is broke and the government is accidentally filibustering itself, most of us assumed it was probably coming in the budget.

Instead, it came from news that a 23-year-old aspiring mortician in Carbonear was charged with allegedly performing black-market circumcisions at his cabin in the woods. Which, all things considered, is fucking bonkers.

The story is almost too bizarre for malice, honestly. I genuinely want to understand how and why the sublimely named Joshua Chubbs allegedly got started in the illegal dick surgery business. (Unfortunately, as of this writing, he did not respond to my interview request.)

Read More: This Newfoundland Man Is Charged with Performing Unlicensed Circumcisions

Let's have some sympathy for the devil. Here is a young man trying to make a living like the rest of us. He doesn't want to give up his saltwater joys to go to the city or the mainland and get a quote-unquote "real" job; he wants to burn around the bay with his buddies forever, as the good Lord above intended. But it's a brutal racket these days to live the Newfoundland dream, so you've got to hustle if you want to make it on the hard knock streets of Carbonear. Chubbs is allegedly making a go of it the only way he knows how: by performing under-the-table cosmetic surgery on his friends' foreskins.

It's scandalous that this is a big deal, actually. Bioscience startups are vital to the future of Newfoundland and Labrador, which is totally what playing a real-life game of Operation on someone's genitals counts as for grant purposes. If true, he simply saw a void in the marketplace of penile cosmetic surgery and he filled it faster than the bureaucrats at Eastern Health could. Provincial finances are strained enough as it is, and our healthcare system is already overburdened with unnecessary medical treatments, like cancer medication. If anything, Chubbs' alleged subterranean sausage surgery business was just helping to ease that pressure. It's just a shame this this alleged entrepreneurial spirit was bogged down in such dark illegalities. The wrong thing for the (hopefully) right reasons, and all that.

It's an old problem. When Norwegian anthropologist Cato Wadel studied rural communities in Newfoundland at the height of Resettlement, he noted it wasn't strange for un- or underemployed men to trade their skills for favours down the line in the outports' largely cashless economy. The spirit of this Masterless Man, free of the burdens of needless red tape and/or health and safety licensing, has largely been lost in the island's jarring transition into modernity. The idea of a semi-trained mortician's assistant slicing up his buddies' mangly old birds at a cabin in the woods may seem nightmarish, but it hearkens back to the hardscrabble way of life that made our people great.

All told, Chubbs' biggest problem is his public relations. It's impressive that he's allegedly got over 50 satisfied customers, but he could probably smooth out the marketing a little bit. I'm not an expert, but your brand probably shouldn't involve reportedly messaging total strangers on Facebook asking if you can do surgery on their kid's genitals—as the CBC reported. But I don't have the same keen sense for business as a backwoods ball-butcher from Freshwater, so, who knows.

Like I was saying: can't keep any shred of dignity in the national media for more than a couple days. We should be celebrating small businessmen for everything they're doing for regional economic development, and instead have to deal with a guy who is up on charges for practicing medicine without a license. This is that "culture of defeat" thing all over again. Shameful.

Dassit b'y. Can't have nothing with a Newfie, I tell you.

Lead photo of Newfoundland license plate via Flickr user Ik D.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.