SnapChat
Not that I'm in any position to critique anybody's fashion, but why wear tall socks when you're not even going to bother with clothes?
SnapChat is a smartphone app that lets you take a picture or
video and send it to one or more friends who also have SnapChat. Once opened,
the picture or video will delete itself in a matter of seconds. This app seems
to have been designed specifically so people could send pictures of their
private parts to one another without fear of them being leaked onto the
Internet. Since I don’t know anybody who wants to see my private parts, I never
bothered downloading the app.
Most of my friends do have SnapChat, and the fact that I didn’t have SnapChat became a regular
topic of conversation. A couple of times a week somebody would ask me if I had
SnapChat, and when I told them I didn’t, they’d proceed to lecture me about how
I absolutely needed to get SnapChat. Life without SnapChat, as they put it, was
not a life worth living.
To me, SnapChat seemed redundant. Right out of the box my
phone is little more than a highly advanced machine that allows me to take
stupid pictures and send them to my friends. The big advantage to SnapChat, I
guess, is that it would allow me to send my friends a grainy picture of my
testicles that would delete itself mere seconds after they looked at it. And
while that’s mighty enticing, it wasn’t enough to get me to try and remember my
App Store password.
My friends insisted that I get SnapChat because that would
be the only way they could share their SnapChat pictures with me. I was
hesitant because I suspected that if I downloaded the app I’d just be opening
the door to an avalanche of grainy pictures of my friends’ testicles, which
isn’t the sort of thing I want to have on my phone – even if it’s only for
three seconds before the image self destructs.
Eventually, it was my friend John who convinced me to
download SnapChat. I didn’t put up that much of a fight, because he promised
that if I downloaded it he’d send me tons of pictures of his mentally retarded
homosexual Boston Terrier, Milo.
I love this dog more
than any human I have ever met.
I figured that I could just quietly download SnapChat and
use it as a private pipeline that would deliver cute dog pictures directly to
my phone whenever I needed them. Unfortunately, SnapChat accessed my contacts
and Facebook information when I downloaded it, and soon all of my friends knew
that I was now able to receive their SnapChat pictures.
Within hours, I opened a picture that turned out to me one
of my friends’ scrotums, pulled through the open fly of his jeans while sitting
in a car.* The picture flashed on my screen for three seconds before
disappearing forever – from my phone, but unfortunately, not from my memory.
*I’m not sure if he was in the driver’s seat or the
passenger seat; if it were the driver’s seat, one wonders how many people he
endangered pulling his nuts out while driving. If it were the passenger seat,
one wonders who was driving while he was photographing his nuts. Also, you
shouldn’t pull your nuts through the zipper of your jeans – that’s just a
disaster waiting to happen.
I realize now that SnapChat has really revolutionized and
reinvigorated America’s long dormant flasher community. From what I’ve heard, exposing
yourself in public was kind of the 1970s equivalent of Harlem Shake videos –
everybody was doing it, even if they didn’t really get why. At least a quarter
of all the stories my Dad has told me about his college fraternity involve the
word “moon,” “mooning,” or “mooned.”
SnapChat has essentially created an extremely convenient
form of flashing. No longer do flashers have to drop big bucks on trenchcoats
or spend hours hanging around in the bushes at the park. SnapChat makes it
possible to show someone your nudity instantaneously no matter where you are –
and because the dirty picture immediately deletes itself afterward even shy people
can be flashers without exposing themselves to a wider audience than they mean
to!
The problem is that I’m not really sure how to respond when
one of my friends beams four seconds of unexpected nudity directly into my cell
phone. “Thank you” doesn’t seem
right, and “Wow, that sure is a penis!”
doesn’t quite do the trick either. I suppose the polite thing would be to
respond with some nudity of my own, but I don’t want anybody to see that – not
even for a couple of seconds – unless I get a free meal and maybe some flowers.
Quite honestly, I don’t have any use for SnapChat. I don’t
send a whole lot of pictures from my phone, and when I do they’re usually
pictures that I want people to be able to look at for longer than a few
seconds. I think I’ve sent maybe two SnapChat images since I downloaded it, one
of which was just a picture of John’s dog Milo.
My friends, on the other hand, continue to send me images –
and after receiving a selfie of one of my old roommates sitting on the toilet,
I’ve recently decided to quit looking at them. Unseen images are already piling
up in my SnapChat inbox.
So that’s what SnapChat is for me: An app that allows me to
briefly see images of my (male) friends’ privates no matter where I am, for a
couple of seconds at a time.
We live in an exciting era.
Truman Capps hasn’t received one picture of Milo so
far.