According to the study, tiny plastic fragments were found in human testicles.

—^ “CNN: The Secret World”.

(For Leonard)

Who am I? I’m a nobody. I got kicked off every team in high school. I didn’t go to an Ivy League college. I don’t make six figures. My wife cheats on me all the time and keeps telling me. My teenage children don’t speak to me.

All I have in the world is an aunt on my father’s side and an aquarium full of fish that love me. And my job. I’m a nobody.

But for forty years, I have gotten up every morning trying to figure out how to insert tiny plastic shards into human testicles. More specifically, into the testicles of a very resilient test subject, Leonard W.

I’m not sure when we humans first seriously tried shoving a piece of plastic up a man’s testicles. The 1971 horror film Little Plastic Army Man in My Testicles may have given us the idea, although that film deserves no further awards and should probably be classified as a hate crime due to its portrayal of the Vietnamese. But it did rile up the U.S. government, which has given us more than $500 million to shove a piece of plastic up a man’s testicles, ideally before the Russians do.

For our first experiment, with the help of the best doctors in the US and England, we put a little soldier in Leonard’s testicles. Leonard complained of swelling in the area and discomfort when cycling, so we had to take the soldier out and start all over again. We took his complaints seriously, by the way. But remember that Leonard also said that the tissues in our offices “scratched” his nostrils. So we were sometimes afraid that we had chosen a whiner as our only test subject.

Next, we had Leonard place his testicles in an upside-down toaster with a dozen plastic soldiers tightly wrapped around it. We set it to a bagel-sized amount of toast. The soldiers did indeed melt around Leonard’s testicles, but unfortunately none penetrated his epidermis. So we had nothing. No one was mad at Leonard, but at that point, we just had nothing.

Around this time, our government funding was being questioned. We had promised to insert plastics into human gonads, which would theoretically lead to a buildup of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the body. Yet after a decade, we still hadn’t delivered.

To make matters worse, Leonard said he wanted to leave the study. He said his wife had become pregnant during one of their conjugal visits (a bit “straightforward” considering all the work we had done, if you ask me) and claimed the compensation for the research study was not worth the physical harm he was suffering. He did not use the word “suffered,” of course. That was me. I can’t remember his exact words, but I don’t think he knows that word.

We explained to Leonard that while he could leave at any time, if he did, we would have to throw away all the data we had collected on him and his testicles and another man would have to start over. Also, Leonard would have to pay back all the compensation. He said he no longer had that compensation because he spent it on the baby or whatever.

So we kept going. We put Leonard in stirrups and blasted his testicles with shotgun blasts from chopped-up Michelob six-pack rings. At one point we gave him tiny silicone breast implants. When he woke up from this he was completely drunk. We hadn’t told him about it beforehand, although we probably should have. He said, “I missed my son’s baptism because of this?”

After further failed tests, a chimpanzee I knew from another study asked me in sign language: “Have you ever checked whether already Plastic in his testicles?”

We didn’t have any. So we did a test and sure enough, Leonard had microplastics and nanoplastics in his testicles! And in his lungs, his blood and his brain! In fact, we all have them!

This was definitely a “Dorothy moment” for us. What we were looking for was inside us all along.

I was fortunate enough to make the following call: “Mr. President,” I said, “there are little bits of plastic in your nuts right now, sir. A bunch of tiny, broken pieces. And there will be more next year. And the year after that.”

So who am I? I’m nobody. I’m just the guy who has to tell the President he’s got a little soldier in his balls. Who are you? ♦