Rites and Wrongs of Passage

I found this while doing an image search for "penis diagram." That will teach me for trying to do research!

Every culture since the beginning of time has had a rite of passage marking the male maturation process. One day you'll just be a boy sitting around and wishing you were a man, and then bam, suddenly you're a man who wishes he was a boy again. If I remember my science classes correctly, this point in time is called "puberty" and is marked by the following physical events:

1. The testicle wad drops from the abdomen and splits in half, turning into two separate testicles on either side of the penis, one of which is smaller than the other and results in embarrassment each time you're at a party and you decide to put your balls on the dessert platter while shouting "hey, look everybody, a gopher got into the dessert tray!" At least that's what happens to me, and I have no reason to believe it would be any different for any of you.
2. The penis sheds its outer skin (the foreskin), revealing the Eureka, dorsal fins, and vas deferens. The dead layer of outer skin is then absorbed by the penis, nourishing it in case you ever get trapped in a meat locker and you don't like to eat frozen meat.
3. You begin the magical process known as "maturity," the point in time which you realize Jim Carrey isn't funny.
4. Your views regarding the opposite sex, whatever the hell it may be, radically change. Instead of pushing them into mud puddles while laughing at them, you now push them into mud puddles, laugh at them, and then rush home so you can masturbate to fantasies of you licking their toes in the mud while they weep like your mother did the time dad came home and smelled like his secretary.
5. You discover hair growing in places that you didn't used to have hair, such as your elbow, knee, and liver.
6. After working out or running from the police for an extended period of time, you notice that you suddenly stink really bad. Fortunately, this smell can be covered up by spraying Windex in your armpits or driving with the windows down, allowing the wind to knock the stench right off of you.
7. You find a corpse in the woods and your sense of innocence becomes lost forever. I'm not sure where the sense of innocence goes to, but I can imagine that there are roughly 68 million senses of innocence currently floating around various forests, starting fires and hibernating during the Winter. If you see one, take a photo of it and send it to the National Inquirer, claiming it's the Yeti. They pay big money for that kind of shit, especially if you claim you were being chased by Batboy during the photo shoot.
8. Your skin begins secreting mysterious fluids which add a luxurious shine to your face. Sometimes red bumps filled with gooey white liquid appear on your cheeks or forehead. This is a clinical condition known as "Crater Face" or "Zit Factory," and is simply your bones and cartilage being liquefied and attempting to escape through your skin pores. You can reduce the amount of pimples you get by scrubbing your face with a Brillo Pad drenched in that pink liquid soap that is dispensed in gas station bathrooms across America. If that doesn't work, you can seek refuge by playing a lot of pen and paper roleplaying games and casually saying things like "THAC0" in conversations with people wearing Chewbacca t-shirts.

I'm sure there are plenty other highly technical scientific things that I'm forgetting about puberty, but fortunately I don't care. I'm fairly certain most people don't come to this site to read accurate medical descriptions or learn new and exciting facts about my views on testicles. Actually, I really have no idea why anybody visits this site at all. I'm leaning towards the theory that a lot of you lost a lot of bets and had to come here as punishment.

The exciting and mysterious event known as puberty is often celebrated differently through various cultures. Every civilization has a distinct "rite of passage" that marks the ascendance from childhood ignorance to adult stupidity. Way back during caveman times (50,000,000 BC - last month), our primitive ancestors would require the newly adult male to run out into a field and stab some sort of animal with a spear or stabbing club or primitive gun that shot bullets which stabbed whatever they hit. Then the male would come back victorious, holding the head of the animal they killed and brandishing it as a trophy while women fawned all over him and took his picture in front of a sign that says "I reached puberty and all I got was this lousy severed head." The male would pick a suitable mate and they would proceed to make a herd of babies in whatever process it takes to make babies. I think it involves mitosis.

This guy is like King Germany or something, all the cool kids want to grow up to be like Chip German!

While our culture is no longer threatened by savage animals that have heads, we still maintain a healthy and intensely stupid rite of passage that signifies manhood. This procedure has mutated and adopted to various cultures, taking on a new form as it grows and spreads, just like that moth monster thing from Dean Koontz's "Phantoms." Some of the more popular rites of passages can be found in the following exotic locations:

GERMANY - Teenagers are given one of those dorky wooden rifles from the 1800's and are locked out of their houses until they have successfully invaded another country. Poland is usually an easy target, mainly because nobody else wants to take over a country whose main export is orange circus peanuts. I don't even know what the residents of Poland spend all day doing, assuming there are still people who voluntarily choose to live there. It's like Texas, only there's snow and the people speak much more coherent English. So the kids from Germany get their flimsy rifles and invade Poland, causing King Poland to turn over the country and the three remaining salt mines to the Germans. Then the German kid comes back as a man and their village welcomes them by taking a pig and turning it into some kind of spooky sausage which also has ground up wheat, pepper, onions, mud, shoelaces, and rubber inside it. This causes them to remember why they left Germany in the first place.

JAPAN - Japan is a country that has deep roots in history and honor. You can't walk 10 feet without tripping over some history and honor over there. As a result, their adulthood process is what us cultural scientist people call "stupid." Every teenage boy in Japan must walk around town for two years with every picture of every dead relative in their family stapled to their torso. At night, these youths must sit on a couch pillow and bow their head to the History God, known as "Doujinshi," who rewards them with the privilege of being able to buy comics that feature women with huge penises trapped in jail cells. The women are trapped in the jail cells, not just their penises. After hitting puberty, they magically become men and are given an extra six minutes off at lunch break, which they usually spend weeping and counting the various ways they have disappointed and shamed their elders.

AFRICA - While the rest of the world has progressed and achieved significant technological advance, the citizens of Africa still live in poverty and / or bleak despair. They often use this as an excuse to get out of doing chores or mundane tasks. Somebody will say (in African) "hey, can you go out and catch a large scary bug so we can eat it?" and the other person would say (in African as well) "I can't because I'm living in poverty and / or bleak despair." The other person won't hear them because there are usually 50,000 National Geographic photographers standing around in their dirt hut, taking noisy pictures and stealing their crappy mud pots so they can bring them to the US, enclose them in a glass case, and hang a sign that says "THE POVERTY AND BLEAK DESPAIR. OF AFRICA" above. So I think it's safe to say that I don't know what the male rite of passage is in Africa, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say it has something to do with shitting in a giant hole or perhaps spending the night in a cave haunted by the Great Space Ghost of Water Buffalo or whatever. I don't even think they celebrate Valentine's Day in Africa... that's how backwards they are!

While these foreign and crazy foreign cultures certainly do provide an explanation as to the current popularity of reality TV shows where contestants run a strong risk of being fatally injured, they do not teach us anything about the passive rite of passage which all Americans go through during their maturation process. You see, political correctness and Saturday morning "educational" shows have completely demolished any possible cool rite of passage which involves fighting Native Americans (known as "Indians") or traveling to dangerous and possible haunted places (known as "Indiana"). This cultural degradation has resulted in forming a society which only has one telltale characteristic that lets the entire world know you've become a man: the adjustment of the thermostat.

If my dad was black and looked like Carl Winslow, this would be a very accurate photo.

As anybody with half a brain has ever noticed, the male authority figure in each family is absolutely nuts about his home's temperature. Nobody can touch the thermostat but him, the punishment being a verbal assault that would leave most NFL coaches crying in a dark corner for hours. Now as a child, most of us didn't really give a shit about the thermostat. We didn't care if it was too hot or too cold, as we had much more important things on our mind, such as wondering who would win if GI Joe fought the Decepticons (GI Joe would win). While we sat in our room and smashed various plastic things against our heads, dad would be frantically pacing back and forth, gently applying pressure to the thermostat in the vain hope that he'd be able to decrease the heat by that precious .0004 degree which would somehow catapult him into the fabled comfort zone. Yet paradise was nowhere to be found, forcing good ol' dad to spend countless hours obsessing over the plastic box which somehow giveth and taketh away central heating. We would continue to ignore him and his seemingly inane antics, unable to comprehend what was going on in his mind. Then, on one innocent day which seemed like any other day, something in our brain would snap and we'd suddenly become intensely interested in the temperature around us. Scientists are still unable to precisely define the thermostat effect or its results on the male mind, but they all recognize its existence and credit it to being the one true sign declaring that a boy has taken the giant leap into manhood, a leap which will probably result in the straining of some goofy leg muscle.

So buck up, American males! Our rite of passage is still very much alive and healthy, taking the form of a small lever that sits between the numbers "50" and "90". Continue playing with your Super Nintendos and Jem and the Hologram dolls, content in the knowledge that one day you'll suddenly become really interested in the temperature of your bathroom, and the reigns of manhood will be passed from father to son. The future is in your hands, and it's either far too hot or cold.

Cliff Yablonski Bringin' the Pain

Master of disaster Cliff Yablonski has updated his gallery of the grotesque with three new pages!

THESE CHOMPERS ARE ILLEGAL IN 49 STATES!!! And her head looks like a greased egg. WHERE'S MY SKILLET?!? I'VE GOT A GUTTERBRAIN OMELET TO MAKE!

You had better read what Cliff has to say about three pages of you worthless shitheads!

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)