Melting Brain. Oh, NO!

2024, Yvonne (for details,click here)
2019, COVID-19
2015, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)
2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
1976, Ebola virus disease
1918, Spanish flu
1346, Plague | Black Death

As you can see,
humanity has experienced various lethal infectious diseases,
and we have survived.

I, too, have experience battling a deadly disease.
Today, I will talk about that.


That secret I have kept tucked away in the corner of my heart, never telling anyone until now.

That was when I was 12 years old.
I had grown 20 centimeters in height over two years.

It was what you call a growth spurt.

In the prime of my 12-year-old growth spurt, where my pores could only be seen with an optical microscope, I was suddenly struck by a strange disease.


My brain had been excreted.


It was truly a strange disease.
As I learned later, there are surprisingly many people who secretly suffer from such a strange disease and escape death by a hair's breadth.


The number is about 4 billion. That is half of humanity.

Whether they can't say it, don't know it,
don't notice it, or can't notice it,
even if there are slight differences in each case,
that strange disease was spreading all over the world.
No, it is still spreading even now.

That strange disease occurs on a morning when spring arrives.


An educated man calls it a 'nocturnal emission'.
It makes you feel somewhat dreamy. Moreover, it feels a bit intellectual.

A precocious brat shouts it as 'dopyaru'.
It's pure vulgarity. You snot-nosed kid. Just stick to letting out your snot.

When I first realized I was suffering from that strange disease, this is what I thought.

My brain...
My brain... dopyaru-ed from my penis!

I was the latter.
A snot-nosed brat. (Oh no, I've been found out)

I thought that because I had vaguely heard somewhere that the human brain is something like whitish, squishy fat.
(Probably from the lecherous older guys in the neighborhood)

It was often said that if you drink too much carbonated soda, your bones will melt.
However, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with my bones.
Besides, my best friend Ma-chan's house always had Kokekokko Cola in stock, and Toru was a guy who only drank carbonated drinks.
If those two were fine, there was no way my bones, living in a house with a high Engel coefficient, would melt.

With this meager information and thinking with a head spinning like a little chick chirping away, I don't know how or why I thought that, but it was truly,

Melting brain. Oh, NO! It is.

Not Yoko.
Not Shinji, either,
and not Yasushi, either.

Now, a problem arises here.
(My articles are nothing but problems, aren't they?)

The question is, what to do with the disposal of the underwear.


This is a problem that half of all humanity grapples with. It is now an international issue.
At the 28th Conference of the Parties to the Pants Framework Convention, this issue was unanimously voted as the top priority, so since it's long, I'll call it the 'Pants Problem'.
(For those who want to abbreviate it further, use 'Pan-Mon' to get that funky, monkey feeling.)


This Pants Problem,
for a 12-year-old me, was too difficult to solve alone.

Throw it away. Where?


The options were few.
It was also a race against time.
With my pupils spinning around, the options (or rather, commands) given to me as I spun around in place were only two.


LV.1.


My equipment, having just set out on my journey, was
only a 'Cypress Stick' and 'Cloth Underwear'.
So, the commands were like this.

▷Discard▶︎Into the pit latrine
　　　　　Vacant lot ahead with www

(w, of course, stands for grass.)
(In other words, overgrown with weeds.)

In that case, it has to be the vacant lot with www!
(Hmm, I wonder about that.)

The tactics were decided.

I threw it.
I threw the underwear that my brain had melted into.

(The underwear flew.)
(It flew away fluttering, fluttering.)


I threw it.
Every time it melted, I threw the underwear.


(The underwear flew.)
(It flew away fluttering, fluttering.)


I kept throwing.
It was one pitch after another.

(The underwear was gone.)

One day,
finally, my shoulder screamed.
My shoulder made a cracking sound and broke.


Coach, I can't throw anymore! (tears)


I feel like a high school baseball player.
A buzz-cut kid dedicating three years of high school just for one summer.

'Number 3, Pitcher, U-kun'

The stadium announcer's voice echoes through the grounds.
The big stage I dreamed of, Koshien Stadium.


I am standing on that mound.
The swaying summer sunlight beats down on my face.

The opponent is the perennial powerhouse, Pants Academy, aiming for consecutive spring and summer championships.
In the Alps stands, scouts from both leagues are keeping a sharp eye out for the upcoming Draft Pants Meeting.

Yamada (pronounced Ya-ma-da with a rising then falling tone), who is my battery mate, comes running over, his protector clattering.

'Smile, you gotta smile!'
'O-okay. (sweat)'

'Let's enjoy this!'
'Yeah. (bitter smile)'

I've been catching your pitches for three years, so take my word for it. You won't be hit that easily—no, I won't let them hit you.
Yamadaaa... (tears)

You've gotta trust your teammates. Now, go ahead and give it everything you've got!
You got it! (crying and laughing)

(BGM -Fade in-)

To-mor-row
will be stronger
than to-day
The overflowing feelings
won't stop♪

Back to the story.

The number of panties discarded in that way was about a dozen or so.
In the overgrown vacant lot in front of my house, a pile of used panties, stiffened by my melting brain, was built in secret.


No one knows that fact.


A few years later, it was decided that the overgrown grass in the vacant lot would be mowed. A buyer had appeared.


I wondered.


Where did that pile of panties I built and the memories of that summer go?

Well, they probably went to the town's waste disposal site.



My stiffened panties were lumped together with other collected items, burned in the waste disposal process, turned into white smoke, and vanished into the distance of the sky above the town.

And that white smoke rose high into the sky due to the heat, mixed with water droplets in the air, and became fluffy, billowing clouds.

When I looked closely at one of the fluffy clouds floating in the sky, the cloud gradually changed its shape and became the shape of panties.

Yes, that's right.

My melting brain had, in the end, become a cloud in the shape of panties.

And so, I gazed at it endlessly, never tiring of it.

☁️☁️☁️ ☁️☁️☁️☁️ ☁️☁️ And they lived happily ever after ☁️☁️ ☁️

I am twelve years old,
and I will soon graduate from elementary school.

I
have climbed one step up the staircase of adulthood.


The world felt a little closer.
So, I reached out my hand toward that cloud.

I wondered if I felt like I could reach it now.

Swayed by the wind, the cloud changed its shape.

It was an event in the spring of my twelfth year.

-End-

Waste issues and SDGs Goal 12
"Responsible Consumption and Production"
⬇︎
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
⬇︎
Reusable pants should be reused
⬇︎
Your actions protect the Earth