Ask A Genius 1026: And these are some of my most painful things
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/27
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: One of the most painful things I’ve ever done. One time, I… This takes a lot of setup. It’s stupid. But people are stupid. I’m foolish in a lot of ways. So I’d met this girl in Boulder. The semester was over, and we hit it off. I met her in a bar. I think she was underage, but I liked the way she looked. She was muscly. We spent the night talking and then writing to each other.
She went home to Florida the day after we met. I said that I wanted us to go out when she got back. She didn’t want to be cornered that way. She wanted us to date other people. I didn’t know how to… I was 22 and hadn’t been dating long because I was nerdy. I needed to understand that as a power play. No, I didn’t. Because what I did was I dated a woman I met while stripping in a strip joint. She was a divorced mom with at least one kid, and I dated her only to say that I was dating somebody so that the girl I wanted to go out with would continue to entertain the possibility of it, would continue to write to me or whatever. It was all dumb psychodrama.
But I didn’t want to have sex with this perfectly lovely woman that I’d met in a strip joint, and I needed an excuse not to. I couldn’t tell her what the deal was, so I decided to give myself a fake herpes sore by burning my dick with a wood-burning set. I didn’t know what a real herpes sore looked like, but I figured if I gave myself an angry scabby thing on my dick, that would look convincing if the woman needed to see that I had something terrible on my dick. So that was pretty painful. It didn’t work at all because as soon as I told her this bullshit story, like, I’d picked her up for a date, and she brought a bunch of sex toys. We were maybe supposed to go to a hotel and have kinky sex.
As soon as I told her, she sniffed it out as being ridiculous bullshit. She got all sad, and that was the end of that. So that was pretty painful. I slashed myself with many feet of scars with a razor blade because I thought chicks dug tough guys. Tough guys have scars. But it was also fun to see if I could withstand cutting myself. This was when I was about the same age, 20 to 22. So it wasn’t that painful. I used a very sharp razor blade, a Wilkinson bonded. My dad had Wilkinson bonded. For some reason, I thought those blades were especially sharp because you don’t want to use a dull razor blade that would hurt.
There you go. That’s all. What’s the most painful thing you’ve done? Horses have stepped on you.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: tearing my ACL was the worst.
Rosner: That sounds terrible.
Jacobsen: It was fucking cool because it didn’t just tear. My kneecap subluxed, whatever you call it, subluxation of the patella. It drifted to the side, so it did a 90-degree wrap around my knee and then flew back into place. That fucking hurt so bad. That leg went from the front to the side of my knee.
Rosner: How did you do that?
Jacobsen: I don’t fucking know. I was playing soccer. I went to kick it forward. This ended my soccer career. The ball was passed to me on the left front, and I was supposed to kick it with my right. I was going to kick that ball hard because I wanted to score. I missed the ball. My legs went up in flexion and then down. But since I was kicking from the left side, my leg came down at an angle, wrapping the back of my right knee to the front of my left knee. That force loosened everything up. The kneecap went around, the ACL tore, and that was it.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: So that was the end of baseball, soccer, snowboarding, everything.
Rosner: That sucks. My efforts at sports were… well, I’m shitty at sports, and I didn’t do them for very long, so that protected me from catastrophic injury. I joined a few rugby teams and was on the C team. They have the A and B teams, and if they have enough people, they have a C team. I never made it past the C team. I sucked and was usually where the ball wasn’t.
I was on the swim team for a semester. You’re not going to get significantly injured doing that. I sucked. Did intramural basketball. I scored two baskets in an entire season, and one was in the wrong basket. So I’ve been lucky not to have suffered a lot of terrible injuries. Plus, I lifted weights stupidly early on, where I would do weights that were way too heavy and see if I could act. Scar tissue would take up as much space as muscle. If I tore something, it could make everything thicker. I probably have thick joints, and my ankles are very caveman-like. So, I’ve never had a severe ankle sprain because of the sheer diameter of my ankles and the size of my feet—they’re always well-planted. They’re wide and slabby—such a hypothesis.
Rosner: He was one of the first presidents elected after women got the vote, and they picked a guy who’d look good for the ladies. So, Nixon versus Kennedy was at least partially about who looked creepy and who didn’t. So, alright.
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