Do you have a penis? Is it feeling okay at the moment? Wrong: It horts. And that’s not even how you spell “peanus.” Fortunately, you are not alone in your pain. We face a pandemic of peanus horting on the scale of… well, the other pandemic. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Or maybe our peanuses have always hort, and we had not the courage to say so — to admit our weakness. We suffered in silence or lashed out in agony. We grew depressed. Even now, we distort the words to give them the appearance or cadence of a joke. But it’s deadly serious. Don’t you know that a severely horting peanus is a possible symptom of COVID-19?
Of course, the hort radiating from your peanus is both physical and existential — perhaps it horts because you’ve contracted a venereal disease, or maybe it horts from a lack of sex. It could hort from both the need to urinate and your disinclination to get up and go to the toilet.
At the same time, this phenomenon is clearly about much more than genital distress: It’s a collective trauma without any particular anatomy. You are alive, therefore your body horts. The “peanus” is merely a totemic appendage, the expression of our vulnerability in these vessels.
Fuck! Just passed out for a few minutes… that’s how bad my peanus is horting. But you know what? I play through the pain. I realize that some peanuses hort even worse than mine, and those people don’t complain. Aside from noting their discomfort, that is — the announcement less a demand for sympathy than a motto of solidarity. We’re all in this together, and always have been, at least since the early 19th century, when some kept journals detailing the hort.
Will we discover a cure for this affliction? I can imagine medical relief in various forms, though nothing to assuage the psychic wound, which is inextricable from human identity. No, without the sensation of a horting peanus, we cannot relish the pleasure of a peanus that feels good.
There is no choice but to accept it, grow stronger from it and, ultimately, transcend it. My peanus horts so freaking bad, and that’s how I know I can withstand anything in this world.
Miles Klee
Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’
