It’s a funny goddamn thing, getting old. It’s not one big event. It’s a series of quiet, pathetic, and completely humiliating little surrenders.
Yeah, you get the “benchmarks.” The day you let out that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest old-man grunt when you get out of a chair. The first time your hand, that old, traitorous bastard, just grabs the stair rail without you even telling it to.
But that’s not the real signal, is it? That’s just the polite, respectable warning shot.
The real moment, the one that kicks you right in the goddamn soul, is the day you’re taking a piss, you look down, and you see it. The first, beautiful, silver, and completely insolent gray pubic hair.
A quiet, little, “fuck you” from God, right there on the handle of your own goddamn weapon.
And you do what any proud, stupid, and completely terrified animal does: you fight back. You pluck it. A tiny, satisfying, and completely pointless little victory. Gotcha, you bastard. But the next day, it’s back, and it’s brought two of its goddamn friends. And you realize, with a quiet, cold, and completely devastating clarity, that you can’t pluck them all. This isn’t a battle; it’s a goddamn invasion.
So you escalate. You go to stage two. You grab a handful of shaving cream, and you go commando. You mow the whole goddamn forest down. A beautiful, clean, and completely scorched-earth policy. And you stand there, admiring your work, and you realize you just look… pathetic. A quiet, pink, and completely ridiculous “baby elephant trunk,” sitting in the middle of a bald, empty landscape. It’s a stage. A sad, hilarious, and completely necessary stage.
Then the war moves north. The face. The beard. It starts to go white. And for a while, you fight that, too. And then you just… give up. You embrace it. You let it grow, a beautiful, white, and completely honest flag of surrender. A goddamn Santa Claus for the spiritually bankrupt.
I’m looking forward to shaving the whole goddamn thing off for New Year’s. A final, beautiful, and completely symbolic shedding of the old skin. A clean slate, a fresh-shorn sacrifice to celebrate the weight loss and the new goddamn life I’m about to steal.
But the universe, that old, drunk, and completely sadistic bastard of a comedian, he always saves the best, most humiliating joke for last.
You think you’ve made peace with the gray? You think you’re done?
The eyebrows.
You wake up, and there they are. These long, white, and completely insane-looking wires, sprouting out of your goddamn forehead like a couple of albino spiders.
And now what do you do?
You can’t shave ‘em, you’ll look like a goddamn alien. And you can’t pluck ‘em. You pull one, two, ten… pretty soon you’ve got no eyebrows left at all, just a quiet, surprised, and completely permanent look of a man who’s just been goosed in a bus station.
It’s the final, beautiful, ugly, and completely unwinnable war. A tiny, quiet, and completely hilarious patch of hair that you can’t fight, and you can’t surrender to, without looking like a goddamn clown.
Getting old, my friend. It’s a beautiful, ugly, and completely ridiculous joke. And the punchline is always on you.
