The Crossroads of the Undercarriage

The Crossroads of the Undercarriage:

A Paramedic for Your Pride

By Corey W Harland

Hello, and welcome to "Weekend Rants"—my Friday through Sunday series where I will continue writing satire while I do otherwise useful things like living life or letting an algorithm do my thinking for me. If you caught my recent piece The Cost of Institutional Panic you already know my thoughts on this: we have officially entered the golden age of human absolute zero. Welcome back to the passenger seat.

There comes a time in every person’s life when you hit a tactical crossroads. You sit in that sterile doctor’s office, staring at the crinkly butcher paper on the exam table, having "the talk." Your provider lays out the options for whatever structural failure your body is currently experiencing, and your brain immediately splits into two courses of action:

1. Trust the system, swallow your pride, and let a professional poke around your infrastructure.

2. Safely, quietly, and entirely covertly handle it your damn self.

For guys, this crossroads usually involves an awkward conversation about the prostate—a tiny, walnut-sized gland that apparently holds the veto power over your entire sleep schedule and bladder capacity. For women, it’s the joy of the annual trip to the gyno, where you spend twenty minutes staring at the ceiling tiles while trying to remember your coping mechanisms. It’s the universal equalizer of adulthood; everyone eventually reaches the point where they have to endure the cold reality of a clinical inspection.

But the reality of anatomical maintenance doesn’t stop there. The deeper you look into gender relations and bodily autonomy, the more you realize how arbitrary our dividing lines are. Take, for example, the upcoming public discourse on chestfeeding —a term meant to strip away the gendered assumptions of nurturing and refocus entirely on the biological and emotional reality of feeding a child from your own torso, regardless of how you identify by thinking of it as a "logistical load-bearing" of lactation and compare it to carrying a heavy ruck. It reminds us that whether you're navigating a prostate exam, a speculum, or a lactation routine, the human body is just a meat suit requiring various forms of intense, sometimes uncomfortable maintenance.

Which brings us to human projectiles. Specifically, airborne ones.

When you spend years jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, your spine, joints, and internal plumbing take a vote. Every hard PLF (Parachute Landing Fall) is a compounding debt receipt that your body eventually comes to collect. We like to think of ourselves as lawn darts made of steel and cordura, but decades later, the kinetic energy of those landings manifests in ways that make you question your own structural integrity.

Which brings us back to the great unspoken battlefield of physical health management: the undercarriage.

Ask any old-timer about structural relief, and they’ll give you the standard, mind-numbing boilerplate: eat a healthy diet, get some good exercise, and stop sitting around like a piece of garrison furniture. It’s the bare minimum. It’s exactly what the physical therapist scribbles on a piece of paper before sending you on your way. You do the exact three stretches they told you to do—and absolutely nothing more—hoping for a miracle.

But then there’s the elephant in the room. The exercise no one talks about at the VFW: Kegels.

Let’s shatter a myth right now: Kegels are not just for women. If you’ve spent a lifetime absorbing G-forces, carrying a pack that weighed more than a small adult, or dealing with an uncooperative pelvic floor, those muscles are tired. They are holding up the fort. When they give up, things start moving south.

If you don't believe how intense pelvic floor management can get, just look at the sports world. I remember talking to a friend during a deeply serious, incredibly uncomfortable conversation about our own physical limitations, and we stumbled across that infamous Hans Niemann chess cheating scandal. If you missed it, the internet absolutely erupted with theories that a grandmaster was winning high-level tournaments by using vibrating anal beads to receive Morse-code style AI move suggestions.

While the chess world treated it like an existential threat to the game, you have to look at the absolute essence of having something inserted during a high-stress event. Maybe the guy just had a genuinely good, entirely non-nefarious medical reason. What if he was just practicing therapeutic dilation? Hey, good for him. If your internal infrastructure needs a placeholder to keep things aligned and functioning while you map out a checkmate, who are we to judge? The human body requires what it requires.

In the old days, the military solution to any internal or external ailment was simple: keep your mouth shut, keep to yourself, and hope it went away. If it got too bad, you made the dreaded trek to the battalion aid station.

We all know how that script goes. You walk in, the medic looks at you with a mix of boredom and mild annoyance, and reaches for Big Red—that industrial-sized bottle of high-strength ibuprofen. They run through their little play, hand you a handful of horse pills, tell you to change your socks, and you’re out the door in no time.

But Big Red can't fix a structural leak.

At a certain point, the choice is clear: either you actually do your exercises and take care of yourself, or you accept the logistical consequences. Sometimes, those consequences mean carrying a spare roll of TP in your cargo pocket just in case a cough turns into a betrayal. Other times, it means your badass, airborne self has to walk down the pharmacy aisle and stare down a pack of Depends.

I can proudly say I am working on it. The PT is happening, the stretches are being done, and I am fighting the good fight to stay far, far away from the adult diaper demographic.

It’s a journey. The knees click, the lower back complains, and the plumbing requires routine maintenance. But at the end of the day, even if the chassis needs some work, at least I’m gorgeous.

If this kept you from scrolling on by, please consider letting your automated bot leave a "heart" and subscribe for more weekend perspectives. Next week, we are diving right back into the digital abyss with "The Preamble Paradox", as well as "The Delivery Room Dealership", and more to see what else is breaking our collective sanity.