The Brutality Report – Flung Condom

A few weeks ago, I peeled a used condom off the road in front of my house. I'd been politely ignoring it for the last month. Perhaps I'd been hoping that at some point the used condom would get bored and move on to the pavement in front of someone else's house. In the interim, it'd baked in the sun like a lizard cadaver. As I pried the dried rubber off the asphalt, it made a sickly sucking noise; sssssshluuuuuuuuccck! I was wearing latex gloves, and used several layers of paper towel and a plastic baggie to do the deed. Afterwards, I disposed of the latex gloves with a second pair of latex gloves, which I also tossed in the trash for extra hygienic safety before scrubbing my hands as if I were an important surgeon.

Although the condom format has many faults – fallibility, bummerness, the random impenetrability of their foil wrappers – no one ever talks about the inability of prophylactics to simply vanish from existence after use. But they're not going anywhere. If you flush enough of them down the toilet, you are just as bad a polluter as Exxon, and you will eventually suffer the wrathful mockery of your neighbourhood plumber. Polyurethane condoms are capable of surviving in distant landfills long after our bones have disintegrated and leeched into the ground water.

As to the mystery of the condom in front of my house, I've narrowed the culprit down to four possibilities:

1. POLITICAL ACTIVIST

Wackier things have happened (especially in the last month) than some do-gooder group driving around at night shellacking unused rubbers to various random streets all across America in an effort to "raise awareness". If so, it's a hideous backfire. As I was peeling up the flung rubber I realised I was starting to doubt my own liberal commitment to affordable birth control. Could the pope be right?

2. TRIUMPHANT UGLY PERSON

This too has the ring of plausibility. Perhaps the rubber is the handiwork of some nebbishy 49-year-old virgin who works for the county clerk's office and lives with his elderly stepmother. Perhaps this man, having long since given up on sex, suddenly meets a woman of equivalent ugliness and, against all odds, attains copulation. Then he finds himself racing through the streets in his used Corolla, the used jimmy hat tied to his car antenna in victory, shrieking out the window, "I AM ALIVE!" At some point the spent sheath slips off the antenna, sails through the air, and lands in front of my house with a wet plop. Totally possible.

3. PERSONS HAVING SPONTANEOUS SEX IN CAR AT CURB

I can understand Marlo from The Wire rolling down the window of his SUV to casually deposit a worn French tickler on the pavement outside. I understand this because Marlo wasn't parked in front of my house. Thing is, there's a big old-timey street lamp in front of my house. So anyone committing whoopee in a car out there has to brave the bright lights of municipal righteousness, or the even brighter light of the sun. There's never really a good time for sex in that spot. Unless, of course, you're in a deviant relationship with someone who can only achieve arousal in a brightly lit car with a near 100% chance of getting caught. The world is full of people like this, making this option entirely feasible.

4. PERSONS HAVING SPONTANEOUS SEX WITHOUT CAR AT CURB

Actually, the world is full of people, period. This is the month we hit seven billion, thus officially doubling the Earth's population within my lifetime. In such a real life Soylent Green scenario, is it so hard to imagine a pair of toothless night freaks going at it in the street, committing that most sacred acts of human love while just a few dozen feet away I slumber, blissfully ignorant of the brutal, ghastly, zoolike squishfest taking place in broad lamplight???

Seriously, if anyone knows who left the condom there, let me know.

Previously - Knowledge of the Bug Pit

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