If you've ever tried to jam a dried sausage into a crack in your drywall for reasons that are irrelevant to the rest of this article, you're well aware that this is not going to happen without the addition of some lubricant. It's been our friend and helper ever since the first caveman spit on his fist so he could jam it into a Stegosaursus' heiny to facilitate wielding the animal like a mighty, screaming weapon.

In the present, we all appreciate what lube can do for us, and it's barely even worth a giggle anymore. I think they sell it at Wal-Mart. It's so unremarkable, you can lube your junk at Wal-Mart. But here's the thing: As a society we've never questioned lube before. We see those terrible KY commercials and we wish that the actors in them and the writers behind them would never know the joys of love again, but we don't ask for details because it's assumed we know the gist of what's going on and that, in turn, also implies that we know said lube may one day be used on a solo run. It's cool. We all know it, and the world keeps on turning.

And then someone made a product called "Masturbation Cream." Is that a proper way to start a paragraph? Gods no. And it's a horrible way to name a product. Listen, anything with a viscosity somewhere between tap water and toothpaste is properly masturbation cream in waiting, it doesn't need to be called out publicly though. You just use it for that purpose and then go back to Star Wars Angry Birds after petting the dog to clean your hand like a normal person.

The website for Stroke 29, which is the proper name for the lube du jour here, features this image:

gunoil.com

Hey soldier, nice foxhole.

Now there is definitely a population of dudes who will see Captain Stabbin' here and think, "Hey, that's just swell" and want to try giving an Indian burn to the Commish. But is that the core demographic? Shouldn't that be a lady? And instead of the words "solo mission" shouldn't "Why not spend five minutes looking at clips of girls who went to L.A. to be in a Fall Out Boy video" be emblazoned on the screen?

Marketing strategies aside, we now live in a world where someone was all, "Let's sell dick-rubbing cream" in front of a room of coworkers, and they all nodded and shook hands.

The name suggests this pillow is to comfort a crier. So maybe you just fought off some terrorists John McClane style and one of them shot you in the liver and now that they're dispatched and the EMT's put a bandage on your shoulder or forehead or wherever doesn't mask how totally bad ass you still are, you go home and lie down after drinking a warm scotch (which is a terrible idea just now) and you weep a little because getting shot in the liver hurts. Lucky you, the pillow has Kleenex right in it!

But of course that's not what this pillow is for at all. First, John McClane would never cry from that, he would just patch it with a bit of wood. But also, this is for someone who just broke up with their boyfriend Atticus and needs a good cry to remember they're still a good person. And what kind of boyfriend never asks if you want extra quinoa anyway? Or. Or this pillow is for the lazy, multi-tasking masturbator who would like to jack it but doesn't want to worry about remembering to bring an extra half-crusted sock or roll of TP into the boudoir with them. Neither one of these people are good in a spiritual sense. And not because they need to have a good cry or masturbate -- hell I save time by doing both at once most days -- it's that they optimized the experience with this pillow. They knew that, in the future, it would be handy to have a pillow that had the ability to sop up bodily fluids, so they bought one. That's so sad Steven Spielberg should make a black-and-white movie about it.

In Asia (also in other places but of course it seems to have started in Japan) there are services where you can now pay to rent a boyfriend or girlfriend for an hour or two. This is a person who will pretend to be in a relationship with you, engage in small talk, and attend events as your date. I want to now sit with you for a small but very important aside. A tangent, if you will.

The rent-a-girlfriend services allow you to pay to experience the feeling of being in a relationship, for an hour. To have someone attend a wedding with you or a dinner date with coworkers. Or just a Friday night out, whatever you'd do with a real boyfriend or girlfriend if you had one. A hooker is a person who will taste your genitals if you pay them to. One of these is apparently considered socially acceptable, and one is not.

You can go to dinner with a prostitute, or a wedding, a bar mitvah, you can even pay a prostitute to reenact scenes from movies with you. Plus, they will still taste your goodies. A rental date will not do that last part. Who's being silly here?

I'm not begrudging lonely people their loneliness or the ways they seek to overcome that loneliness, but if you have to choose between a prostitute and a rental friend, the sadder choice is the rental friend, because at least your prostitute relationship is based on honesty. Even if they escort you out as a date and you lie to your friends and the wait staff at Red Lobster, you still know the score. If you pay to rent a girlfriend you're pretending you have a relationship and you're still ending the night with your Stroke 29 on a tissue-dispensing pillow because you can't stop lying to yourself. That's like Hyper-Lonely. Physicists can only study lonely like that if it's held in place with electromagnets. Don't ever do that to yourself.

Do you still use Facebook? Oh God, that's adorable. Yes, Facebook is the largest social media platform rotisserie jiggling tarsier flapjacks zzzzzzz. Hmm? Oh, sorry. I dozed off in the midst of mocking the cyber teat from which we all suckle.

Anyway, Facebook is arguably a way to keep in touch with friends that's not the same as the 1,000 other ways, like having friends or being with friends. But it's clear some people let the concept of "friends" go to their head. We probably all have one person on our friends list who in turn has several thousand friends on theirs, because anyone who even sat in an adjacent stall at a public restroom somehow gets friended by them and they don't think it's weird in the slightest to have 4,500 friends. I have literally never even met that many people in my life, mostly because I spent my formative years on an emu farm.

Sadly, it turns out not all these friend collectors even come by it honestly. They're not just sharing contact info with people down at the methadone clinic, they're going to sites like Usocial and paying actual money to have people friend them. Some may even wander to Cloud Girlfriend and pay to be in a relationship. You could literally just make up fake accounts and do this yourself but something tells me the people who pay for Facebook friends have trouble thinking. Or they feel doing it themselves is like, extra dishonest, like how it's OK to take cell phone pics of your date's boobs if she passes out on her own but not if you have to spike her drink.

This is the cyber-aged equivalent of telling your friends you have a girlfriend who is a model from two towns over and she's busy on a shoot in Fiji right now so they can't meet her. Also, does anyone say "cyber-aged" anymore? I used my Netscape to look it up on the Alta Vista and couldn't find anything. Ha ha ha, old references!

Picture this: You're old. Oh my God, look how old you are. You're skin feels like onion paper wrapped around prosciutto. Stuff inside you pops when you stand and when you sit. You smell like Irish Spring and you don't even bathe with it and your whole body is covered in a fine, downy white fuzz except for your pubes, which are like tiny corkscrews carved from porcelain. So old. So old that you're just done. It's totally time to die. All your inside bits are crapping out on you. Lay yourself down, beautiful dreamer. Rest those sharp curlies. It's all growing dim.

But what's this? Where are your loved ones? You don't have any. Or maybe they just don't like you, which technically means they don't love you, so really you still don't have any loved ones. You're alone. What's to happen now? Who can shepherd you into the great unknown? Who will rifle through your drawers for change in 10 minutes? No one?

No. Not no one. Someone. Who isn't a someone, but a something. The Last Moment Robot, a cold and sterile friend to rub you as you die. OK, it's not really a real thing. It's more of an art project, but it was inspired by a real thing -- the Paro Therapeutic Robot. It's a robotic seal. It's for the insane and elderly and enfeebled. Basically it's a therapy animal without the hassle of having to deal with a real, biological thing. So it's like saying "Hey, damaged human, I want you to feel better but not in a way that is inconvenient to the rest of us. Please use your time as a damaged, possibly dying individual, who may or may not have bowel control to bond with this synthetic thing, the only friend you have right now. You'd probably find this glorified Furby patronizing if you had all your faculties about you, but of course you don't. Look at the cute seal! Now quiet down."

Paro.jp

I am programmed for maximum clubability

The Paro is a very real and actually pretty celebrated invention, while the Last Moment Robot is more of a social satire. But both represent the utter sadness of being a person alone, institutionalized and so desperate for a friend that something with an ass full of batteries is apparently another person's best guess at how to deal with the situation.

Are you bummed out now? Yay, comedy!

Check out more from Felix in The 5 Creepiest Things Ever Done With a Fake Medical Degree and The 6 Grossest Anti-Smoking Ads of All Time.