Thursday, May 04, 2006

What Is Hip?

They announced on the radio this morning that medical science has resolved one of my most pressing concerns.  For years it’s troubled me - hindered me - held me back.  It’s made my days painful and my nights shameful.  Drugs didn’t help, nor exercise, nor diet - not in any meaningful way.  I thought nothing could help, but now I know the research dollars have finally paid off.  Doctors can now slick up my hip. 

I’ve always known my hip was sadly lacking.  Whether I was dancing, fitting myself into clothes, or simply walking down the street, unhipness hung over me like a shroud of dorkitude.  There was no way to hide it as I stumbled between tables at a cafe or steered conversations with beautiful women toward military history or old Monty Python episodes.  I use three latin words when a simple hand gesture would suffice.  I hum commercial jingles in crowded elevators.  Me and hip have long been estranged. 

For a while now the medicos have been able to replace hip.  They somehow go in and insert hip where, theretofore, hip was not.  People do say it’s an effective procedure, returning their ability to undertake many ordinary life functions without humiliation or stigma.  However, the undeniable truth is that it’s not actual, personal hip that’s being installed - it’s an invented product, some sort of syntho-hip, developed in a laboratory by chemists and engineers .  And, needless to say, such persons are not renowned for their inherent hipness.  I’ve never felt comfortable having some tech geek’s version of hip being imposed upon me like so many D&D hit points.  Maybe I wasn’t hip, but it was my own unhipness that dangled like an albatross with a mullet around the collar of my Member’s Only jacket.  I owned my nerdhood and could take comfort in that - cold comfort though it might have been.

But now, the orthopedic brain trust has developed a procedure to revitalize one’s own natural hip.  Using space-age polymers, they can create smoothness and flexibility where previously there was only the stiff-legged waddle of the inveterate waffle-stomper-wearer.  They can inject discretion, subtlty, and grace into a joint that once could only be counted upon to embarass me in the most public possible way.  And when it’s all over, the hip will be intrinsically mine.  It will be the hip with which I was ostensibly originally endowed, but which I’ve always struggled clumsily to access and utilize.  It’s better than drilling for oil in my own national parklands.  It’s the end to a long national nightmare.  It’s the beginning of a bright, new, hip tomorrow - and I want in.

Some point out that this is merely a resurfacing exercise - that the hip repair procedure won’t do more than put a gloss over ruined, riddled, cystic material, merely hiding essentially diseased unhipness under a patina of smoothness. I’m okay with that.  Hipness may run a bit more than skin deep, but not that much deeper.  Once I’ve achieved slick, though superficial, hip, I can move on to other inherent personal deficits.  I do have a few that require attention.  So, when are they going to beta-test that tact implant?  In the alternative, I could use an injection of athletic capacity.  I understand all the cool kids are doing it.