O P I N I O N
Leave your wife then schedule a colonoscopy. Your wife, quite obviously, has kept you subdued for decades with bills and kids and vacations to Florida, and now it’s time for you to rise—a phoenix ascending from your Man Cave—and reassert your primal self into the universe.
After you schedule the colonoscopy, of course.
Download a dating app then buy a box of Just for Men and dye your graying hair black. Look like a parody of aging, like Eddie Munster’s bastard son—know that no one young will get the allusion. Check the messages on your dating app while sitting at the bar where you hang out with your friends every night. Know that your friends are laughing at your hair coloring debacle when you get up to use the bathroom. Most nights, play it safe: Wear a baseball hat.
Then go to a hairstylist to wash it out.
Meet a girl on your dating app, a girl who wasn’t born when you graduated high school. Chill with her at your place. Start using words like “chill” to describe your relationship status. Speak her language. Only call her “baby” or “sweetheart” or “darling.” Deny the fact that not one girl in your graduating class had her first name, which is either Jenna or Amber or Madison. When she asks you for “pics,” pretend like you know what she means. Wink and tell you will send them as soon as you get home. Look it up on the internet and realize there are some acts that you are, indeed, too old to perform.
Remember to fast for 24 hours before the colonoscopy and drink a gallon of the putrid concoction that will clean you out. The doctors will need to see everything clearly.
Buy a vape pen from the corner store and a marijuana cartridge after your girlfriend tells you that only Boomers still roll joints. Tell her you’re Gen X, and she can thank your generation for…well, nothing.
Listen to ’90s grunge and The Foo Fighters when you’re stoned. Especially The Foo Fighters. It’s a paltry midlife crisis without The Foo Fighters as a soundtrack. Buy your weed carts from your oldest daughter’s boyfriend who attends Plymouth State. Make him listen to “Everlong (Acoustic Version)” after getting high. Tell him you remember when Dave Grohl was the drummer for Nirvana.
Nod when he looks at you cluelessly.
When you gain weight from the beers and late-night burgers at the bar, join Planet Fitness. Start with some light cardio. Listen to The Foo Fighters on your iPod Nano while you walk on the treadmill. Work into a light jog. Call it a day after 20 minutes and return to the bar.
Know that your girlfriend will dump you for a guy her own age—a guy who shares her interests, a guy who speaks her language. Don’t text your wife when you get home from the bar at 1 a.m. while having a nightcap at your kitchen table. She already thinks you’re ridiculous. Listen to Jeff Buckley.
Make sure to arrive an hour before you are scheduled for the anesthesia. In the seconds before you’re knocked out, know they’ll likely to find something during the procedure—something scary. Know they’ll find that it’s your head up your rectum.
