~ Speaking of gock. I kicked a man in the nuts last Sunday.

I was doing sound at the Wintersleep / Brian Borcherdt show when I was introduced to a friend of a friend. I came in right in the middle of a conversation about nut-kicking.

“You can totally kick me in the nuts,” this guy was saying. He turned to me. “Go ahead. Kick me in the nuts.”

He explained that he had a special ability, a physical quirk, as it were, that allowed him to pull his nut-sack up into his body an instant before a possibly harmful impact.

Out of curiosity, I asked the guy if he’d ever been kicked in the nuts when he hadn’t had a chance to prepare for it. He said yes, he’d been hit by a hockey ball or something, and he’d reeled in nausea and gone outside to puke.

It reminded me of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. There’s a legend about Houdini that he used to go around bragging about how tough his stomach muscles were. He would get people to test his muscles by punching him in the stomach. That is, until someone socked him when he wasn’t expecting it, and he died shortly thereafter with a ruptured appendix.

I half-considered pretending to turn away, and then turning around and laying into the guy with a big, vicious kick in the nuts.

I don’t think I could catch him off guard, though. He stood with his arms at his sides, his feet shoulder-width apart. Clearly he’d done this before.

“So, anyway,” he said, “go ahead and try it. Kick me in the nuts.”

Some men would be reluctant to kick another man in the nuts, and it’s safe to say I was feeling some of that hesitation.

On the other hand, I believe there is a natural order to the world; whereby, if you go around asking to be kicked in the nuts, then you’re just asking for a kick in the nuts.

So I kicked him in the nuts. Poomp.

“Didn’t hurt a bit,” he said.

We stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

I said, “Aren’t you afraid they’ll get stuck up there?”