Don't Try This at Home

Once in awhile, I get a reminder (aside from the gray hair and paunch) that I’m getting older. Many of these reminders leave me glad to be older.

For instance, I can’t laugh at videos of people hurting themselves. If it’s a video of someone getting hit in the balls or the cinnamon challenge, it’s harmless and I know the person isn’t hurt so I can laugh. I’m not so old that I’m too mature to enjoy people doing stupid shit.

What’s not so funny to me anymore is some videos where the person might be seriously hurt. On Tosh.0, they showed a video of someone who had wiped out on a motorcycle during some kind of race. While the rider lay on the ground, another motorcycle plowed into him. Both motorcycles then left the frame of the video so we don’t know how he ended up. He might be OK or he might be dead. That just isn’t funny. There was another video of someone blowing out birthday candles when his friend slammed his head into the cake. The birthday boy then just lay his head on the ruined cake, motionless. His friend picked his head up and the head fell right back down again. This person was probably unconscious. It just wasn’t funny.

Meanwhile, the studio audience is just yukking it up. Maybe shows like Tosh.0 have a disclaimer that nobody got seriously hurt but I’ve never seen it. There’s usually a disclaimer of “don’t try this at home,” but it’s still too elliptical for me to find funny.

I also am increasingly verifying that drugs have zero appeal for me, every time I read an article by someone on drugs or who got off drugs. There’s this former magazine editor Cat Marnell, who quit her job so she could smoke PCP and sit on a roof looking at the stars. This is literally what she told a magazine. I’ve read some of her memoirs of smoking PCP and running around at all hours and that lifestyle has no appeal to me. It’s not in the least glamorous. When people write recovery memoirs, even though they detail the horror their lives became, they still acknowledge the fun side of drugs that led them to addiction. I just don’t see the fun side in any of it. It sounds sordid and undignified. Every depiction of drugs makes me glad I don’t do them. Whenever I see an episode of Breaking Bad, I am thrilled that I never got into meth or anything else because the high isn’t worth it.

So I’m never going to look back and wish I had misbehaved more. I may have led a boring life but at least I have a house, a steady job, a mind that isn’t addled and I don’t look 10 years older than my age. I’ve seen what drugs can do and I’m quite content to sit home and read a book, thanks.