And no, I don’t mean a rooster.
Listen, you know you have a GREAT friend when she dismisses tired gifts, like a girls’ weekend in the Bahamas or a mug that says “Fifty is Nifty,” and she goes straight for the gold: a carrot that looks like a cock.
Because that’s what my friend gifted me for my 50th birthday, and let me tell you: She NAILED it.
Firstly, unless you’ve ever opened a FedEx package with a carrot that looks like a cock, you haven’t really lived. And isn’t that what 50 is all about? Finally LIVING since death is one bungled colonoscopy away?
I must confess that when I first opened the package containing The Carrot That Looks Like a Cock, I wasn’t sure if I was gaping at a carrot or a parsnip. I’m not well-versed in tubers (#lifegoals). It could have been a very anemic carrot. Or simply a phallic parsnip. (I mean, you should see the balls on this thing. The girth! The tubular tumescence!)
Also, I was distracted by the elegant wrapping since my friend had carefully rolled up the carrot cock in shimmery white tissue paper with silver snowflakes. Even though my birthday is mid-March, I appreciate that my friend reused tissue paper from Christmas. She CARES about the environment, you see, and likely asks herself: What Would Greta Thunberg Do? Although now that I think about it, what Greta would have done is walk to my house and hand deliver the carrot with a knowing wink instead of using FedEx. But alas, I digress.
My friend has since confirmed that my carrot cock is indeed a carrot and not a parsnip since that is what her 96-year-old neighbor Phyllis said it was when Phyllis gave it to my friend to give to me. I neglected to ask my friend if she does all of her gift shopping through Phyllis. I imagine that might make for interesting stocking stuffers, like Sweet’N Low packets from the bowels of Phyllis’s pocketbook and empty cans of Aqua Net.
It’s also important to note that my friend has a definite cock fixation since she gifted me a cock-shaped charcuterie board for the half-duplex I bought with my boyfriend last year. And with it, she is teaching us a particularly important lesson in couples compromise.
See, I have no problem keeping said cock charcuterie board displayed prominently in our kitchen. My boyfriend, however, prefers to take it out “for special occasions,” by which I suspect he means his death. For now, we are playing a very odd, yet erotic game of Where in the World is the Cock Charcuterie Board? I take it out and display it. He hides it. I find it and display it somewhere new. Lather, rinse, repeat. No one told me this is what hide-and-seek would be like in middle age, but here we are.
Anyhow, when my boyfriend spied the mighty tuber sitting erect atop its wrapping paper in the middle of our kitchen island, the all-too-familiar why-can’t-she-just-collect-garden-gnomes look of horror flashed across his eyes until I reckoned he realized one essential difference between this gift and our cock charcuterie board: The Carrot That Looks Like a Cock™ will eventually shrivel up and die. (Like some other things, I might add.)
This is assuming, of course, that I don’t figure out a way to preserve it in perpetuity. Apparently, this is a thing—people shellacking root veggies so they can be forever part of the home’s décor.
But for now, I’m content with declaring 2023 the Year of the Carrot Cock. Which completely levels up the whole “Year of the Rabbit” thing, don’t you think?
