As a scientist I had run out of things to research. Space is crowded and brains overdone. I find the uncertainty principle vague so quantum mechanics was out as well. There were few places to turn and I was forced back to the basics. How can you go wrong with argumentum ad ignorantium?
When you base your research on the axiom that everything is true unless proven otherwise science was easy. It was a good choice as it turned out because this led to some of my most stunning work yet. And all without having to leave my house or spend a dime.
Unfortunately, peer review called hooey on most of it. The criticism was far from constructive. My professionalism was hard tested with comments such as, “Hey, you’re just making shit up.” It was a hurtful slander of my abilities as a researcher and my standing as a scientist. But even in this fierce obloquy I was pleased to discover a reviewer who seemed desperate to get a private message to me. Secreted into a particularly brutal analysis of my work was the comment, “Take a hint: You’ve drained the pleasure right out of learning.”
Learning and pleasure? That was an odd way of looking at things. Could I interpret his advice as a challenge to explore and document the relationship between education and stimulation? Did he know something I didn’t? I struggled with the idea until I redefined the concept as edification and gratification. Now it was making more sense. I decided to title my new project, “The definitive study on the potential consanguinities between self-edification and self-gratification.”
Starting out, I was immediately presented with a problem. For any validity whatsoever this type of study would require a double blind environment. I had no money to hire a test subject so I would need to be both watcher and doer. But if I couldn’t tell myself what I was doing then accuracy would certainly suffer. To overcome this obstacle I decided to have the opening paragraph of my research project solemnly avow my unassailable objectivity. Problem handily solved. But there were going to be many others as I soon found out.
For proper testing I needed something that would simultaneously both edify and gratify. I opted for the obvious and decided to incorporate modern medical journals into my experiment. I took meticulous notes as I carefully monitored my physical responses while studying pictures of mammal genitalia. I started with canine and noted some interesting reactions here and there. I moved onto bovine and strangely enough, found my reactions to be breed specific. Porcine slowed my research considerably.
Needing to make up for lost time, I went straight to what I felt would be the project’s linchpin. Human genitalia. Not wanting to introduce unnecessary bias into the results I stayed with the same technique of saying the name of one of the sex organ’s parts out loud and then slowly follow to where the arrow was pointing. I wanted to see where along the line a change, if any, would take place. In other words, at what point does edification give way to gratification? Where is that threshold between learning and pleasure?
Preliminary results were showing a definite skew towards the arrow’s terminus. But, can the visual have such a significant advantage over the auditory? As I got further along in my testing I began to realize something wasn’t right. A much larger issue was making itself known to me. How could something glaringly obvious have escaped notice until now? Was I the first one to see it?
I believe wholeheartedly in accidental science. That’s where you start off in one direction and at some point head off in a completely different one. With what I had discovered I was at that point now.
TO BE CONTINUED…