Opinion

Wake up, Mr. Seinfeld. Mean-spirited humor isn’t cool anymore.

From where I sit, firmly in the grasp of late middle age and hurtling toward oblivion, I am confident in only two things.

The first is that my body will soon give out. It has already started. My knees have become my enemies, and my skin has begun to wrinkle in places I barely knew I had skin. The noises I make in the morning as I rise and stretch my muscles seem foreign but somehow familiar. And I remember now that they are the same sounds my father used to make when he would stand or sit at my age. Nature has whispered in my ear: “This is your new body. Good luck.”