What's your favourite brand of underwear?

The only thing worse than insipid questions asked at parties are the appeals to get you to answer them. Don't giggle and tell me that you and your bobble-headed friend are doing an "impromptu survey," unless you want to be on the receiving end of a lifetime of enmity. Please also don't preface your flawed statistical endeavour by saying you're doing "research" or a "scientific investigation." I already hate you and your amateur data collection. Appealing to the spirit of scientific progress won't help.

Nor is adding the senseless condition: "what if you had to choose?" This often follows the Would You Rather (WYR) family of Fun Questions to ask at mixers and other social gatherings:

Bib: Would you rather have sex with your dog, or murder one of your parents?
Bub: Both seem pretty abhorrent to me. I think I'll pass on both.
Bib: No, no: what if you had to choose?

What the fuck? Now look, I understand the intricacies of these dilemmas, and I'm not oblivious to the entertainment value in dissecting them. (An aside: a girl in our circle once revealed that she would sooner fornicate with a horse than with her first cousin -- in marked contradistinction to the other respondents. I immediately dubbed her Horses Over Cousins (H.O.C.) and she became a pariah overnight.)

What I take issue with is :

• the kind-of-insulting notion that I might actually someday, somehow, be forced to confront such an asinine issue, and
• the use of imperative-language addenda as a strategy to encourage a response to a question someone doesn't want to/can't be bothered to answer, and
• the fact that I am forced into a bizarre Kubrickian thought experiment to suit the content of the inquiry.

(I suppose I don't really have to bother with this last bit. But I do.)

It was a simpler question, and not a WYR, that prompted one such thought experiment last weekend. It went like this:

"So?"
"I don't actually have a preference."
"Sure you do. Everyone does."
"I don't. In fact, I really don't give a rusty fuck."
"C'mon. What if you had to choose?"

Fuck me. I picture myself... as a secret agent perhaps. Not James Bond, though. No, this mission won't be so easy. Instead of a tux, I'm almost naked -- in ripped pants and bare feet -- crouched on the floor of a Turkish prison cell. My wrists and ankles are bound tight with thick prickly rope and I'm soaking wet. The guards douse me with a bucket of water almost every hour. I haven't been dry since the moment I got here, three days ago. At least I think it's been three days. It's hard to tell. There aren't any windows, only a few bare bulbs dangling dimly on the other side of the bars. My stomach growls, but I've already eaten the parts of the bread not black with mold.

I wake up to the rapping of a nightstick against the cold bars of my cell. The mustachioed guard yells my name, and some other words I can't understand. I raise my eyes slowly to meet his. He is gently laying boxer shorts by Tommy Hilfiger on the stone floor on the other side of the bars. Another guard walks up behind him, a bouquet of Jockey briefs trapped in his thick muscled fist. I watch the guards in a daze. I am covered in sweat and my ribs ache from the nightly beatings. I ponder the plastic capsule tucked in the recesses of my anus.

"Fine, Fruit of the Loom." I took a long sip of my drink.

The Turkish prison was wiped away, and my thoughts inevitably filled with stock images of grown men in fruit costumes, cavorting without shame. And just as automatically, my memories floated back to the discount stores of my youth, to bins overflowing with boxers and briefs and what-have-you. And for some reason [drugs --Ed.] I amused myself with the thought of a beast slowly arising from one such bargain bin of underthings: a monster of unmentionables. Standing in the bowels of Biway, me and the other customers feel a low rumbling under our feet. The pile of undies ascends, and the rumbling grows louder, finally escaping as a roar, through a hole near the monster's bulbous head. Dozens of puckering mouths form in the writing body of the beast, a protoplasm of gussets and elastic waists --

I blinked, reminded of FTL's low quality elastic.

"Wait, can I change my answer?" I asked out loud, but the girl was gone. I took another long sip of my drink, but it was gone too. I absently swirled the ice at the bottom of my glass.