When the orthopedic surgeon showed me photos from my recent meniscus repair surgery, I was a little shocked. The images looked like something you might find on a porn site dedicated to prurient naughty part closeups. Every image was salacious in its detail and quite revealing about the inner workings of the human body. The inside of my knee actually looked quite like a well-known erogenous zone of the female anatomy. And thanks to actual pornography, which is a multibillion dollar industry, there are very few mysteries left in this world.

Sex education

The world is certainly rife with images of nakedness. That’s both a good and bad thing. Getting over taboos about the human body is a healthy way to approach life. Yet the release of hacked celebrity nude photos and invasion of privacy is not so nice. Others discover themselves exposed by a former lover or sexting friend. Such is the digital universe.

Yet there are also zillions of naked selfies that are shared willingly through the Internet by far less famous men and women. This constitutes a massive zone of uncontrolled exposure that has created entirely new industries and markets. There are people who engage in these channels for the affirmation and the thrill. Then there are those who learn to exploit these channels for fame and profit.

Sex and death

I’m not about make any money or get many likes on my Instagram for the naughty-looking pictures of the inside of my knee. Because when you look at the photo below and see the hole where my ACL used to be, the dark void tells a sad story.

And here is it. After my first tear in 2003, the orthopedic surgeon installed a cadaver part to replace the ACL I tore during a soccer match. I named the cadaver part Jake after the anonymous donor, but two years after the ACL repair surgery, the cadaver part gave out as well. Jake died all over again.

Shred of truth

Thus these photos have a strange relationship to sexual pornography. Some people refer to sex acts as“a little death.” (le petit mort) . The rush one gets from sexual pleasure can lead to transcendence or can bring on a bout of morbidity. The Little Death comes about as a result of exhausting some part of yourself that can never be recovered.

Sex is the type of peak experience that brings on such philosophical considerations. But in truth we experience the process of death every day of our lives. Even newborn babies are already dying the moment they come into the world. Despite what Republican legislators might have us believe in trying to parse who gets health insurance and who doesn’t, life itself is a pre-existing condition. There is a dark hole at the end awaiting us all.

We try to deny this fact with all sorts of pleasures. That’s how we get fat from eating and drinking stuff that isn’t all that good for us. We bury our sense of mortality with our appetites.

Yet those of us who engage in endurance sports seem to sense that there is transcendence gained from the trials of denial and perseverance. But even this pursuit can be viewed as a pornography of sorts. During one of my intense periods of training years ago, a friend of mine grew exasperated with my single-minded devotion to running. “You know,” he told me, “Self-indulgence is not the path to self-fulfillment.”

I shared what he said to me twenty years later. “I said that to you?” he responded. “I apologize for that.”

My indulgences have had their share of costs in life. There were times when I got carried away. But as the wrestling coach in the book Hotel New Hampshire (John Irving) once said, “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

And so I have, at times, been over-indulgent. But my knee injury came about not as the result of wear and tear from years of obsession, but from a moment of ebullience and good health when I hurdled a street cone during a race on a snowy day in Southern Wisconsin. It was a stupid mistake to do that, but I got away with two full years after the meniscus was likely torn that day.

Finally the knee did start to hurt. Which led to the visit to the doctor, and the MRI that showed a chunk of meniscus torn inside my knee. That led to surgery and these before and after photos of the excision being performed on a torn meniscus. What a delightful little montage of knee porn.

I find my knee porn images somewhat funny. If these were dick pics or a closeup of some woman’s vagina, this blog would be Rated R and the content considered scandalous. The second image does look quite a bit like a shaved mons venus. But since these images were actually taken inside my knee, they have no scandal value at all. In fact, they mean very little to anyone but me.

Credit where credit is due

Okay, so maybe my knee doesn’t have the same allure as a sex object. But that left knee has helped me triple jumped more than forty feet, long jump nearly twenty, high-jump over six feet and win more than a few steeplechase chase races including two college conference championships.

That left knee has also helped me cover tens of thousands of miles in both running and cycling. So it’s a pretty damn sexy knee to me, both inside and out.

So I’m showing it the respect it deserves, and in the process, perhaps I’m helping you appreciate what you’ve got as well. In the end, pornography is all in the eye of the beholder. In the end, it’s the naked truth of our most earnest pursuits that really matters.