Aging well
I used to post a lot of dumb little jokes on Facebook. Occasionally people ask me why I don’t do that very much anymore, and I’ll usually explain with some combination of growing up, needing to maintain a more professional public face, a better developed sense of which thoughts are supposed to stay inside, and so on. And that’s all true, generically speaking. But there’s a more specific reason, which I was reminded of about a month ago when the our Nation’s foremost malevolent octugenarian, Addison Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell III, fell over and hurt himself.
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This wasn’t the first time McConnell has had a health scare, of course. For instance, in the summer of 2019, back when he was a spritely 75, McConnell suffered a shoulder fracture. Believing many might want to know my thoughts on the matter, I decided to commemorate the occasion as follows:
Now, if you don’t get the joke: don’t worry, the next few paragraphs should serve as explanation enough. If you do get the joke, then you also surely appreciate why this is not the sort of punchline you want to have to explain in polite company. To set the stage, my life in the summer of 2019 saw me engaged to my now-wife, spending near every Friday night in the approach to our wedding having Shabbos dinner with her (now also my) family. Those family dinners included my now-mother in law, who having seen this post, confessed she didn’t really understand what I meant and asked me if I could decipher.
To be clear: my mother in law is a person whom I love dearly. She’s both warm and kind, but also funny. I don’t want to give the impression that we don’t laugh about things together. I would not say, however, say we have the sort of relationhip (and certainly did not back then, still in the hello-may-I-marry-your-daughter stage of proceedings) where I relish the idea of having a converstation about urban legends surrounding Marilyn Manson. I do not want to have to say the words “fellatio yoga position” or “dick sucking surgery” to my wife’s mom. If you want do know what I did say, I don’t really recall. As best I can remember I just sort of froze, mumbled something about how McConnell’s health was in the news, and tried to dissasociate until the moment passed.
But what I do remember is not wanting to be in that position ever again. I’ve learned that just because there might be funny things to say does not mean you should say them. Try to post like mom is watching, because she probably is.
