Dear Mr. Sarcasm,
Can you please tell me what a “helter skelter romance” is and if you’ve ever been involved in one?
Tricia has a question- Do you know what my balls look like?
— Lyra Silvertongue
Dear Lyra:
In keeping with my “second question first” policy (I once read someplace — I think it was in Sun Tzu’s Art of War — that keeping your questioner off-balance is the key to victory for any would-be General in the advice column battlefield), I’m going to have to deny any involvement with your daughter’s balls. No, I don’t know what they look like, smell like, sound like… none of my senses have experienced your female offspring’s “balls” in any way.
(Incidentally, it should be noted that I do have five senses like every other human being, despite my repeated attempts to be recognized as a deaf person with a certain kind of ESP that allows me to interpret vibrations of air molecules as “sounds.” Hey, if Daredevil can be a blind superhero whose power is that he can see… why not? In his alternate identity, Daredevil is a lawyer, so surely he would appreciate the legal precedent I’m attempting to use here.)
So, no. Sorry. You won’t lure me into that old testicular trap involving underage girls. Not again. My prison tattoos are now perfectly symmetrical, so if my actions get me sent up the river again, my OCD demands that I get incarcerated a further time to maintain that balance. And who has that kind of time these days?
As for your original query, the “Helter Skelter romance,” I’m afraid the answer is also “no.” While no less an inspired intellect than Charles Manson has found hidden meaning in this song (which is really about an innocent piece of playground equipment), I’m afraid I can only appreciate it for what it was: an attempt for Paul McCartney to prove to his rock ‘n’ roll contemporaries that he wasn’t a pussy.
Perhaps somewhere in my past, I may have been involved with some image-enhancing tough girl who, as the song goes, put “blisters on my fingers,” but that, if it even happened, was a long time ago. I only date nice girls now. Which I mention because of its total veracity, and not at all because she’s looking over my shoulder as I compose this.
There is certainly a measure of psychological complexity in the seemingly whimsical musical stylings of the Fab Four, however. As I have mentioned previously, my mother would frequently sing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (in which the titular device “made sure that” various undeserving souls were “dead”) and “Rocky Raccoon” (in which the legs of Rocky’s rival are shot off) to me as a young child.
And while maybe I didn’t grow up to become the household name that Mr. Manson is (nor did I develop an intellect capable of interpreting a song about a simple playground implement as a call to an apocalyptic race war), I do have bright orange hair and a terrible night job. Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything. But the important thing is, it also has nothing at all to do with your daughter’s balls. Hooray!
Thanks for writing!
