The Goon Line 011: You look like shit

I started getting Botox when I turned 30, and did so religiously for the following eight years. I have not had it since late 2019, and… it shows. LISTEN: I am aware that aging is a gift, and I have a lot of supercomplicated feelings about it. But I can’t wait to once again be gainfully employed not so I can feel “professionally fulfilled,” but so I can resume paying someone to blast poison into my skull in the vain pursuit of trying to look five and a half months younger than I actually am.

Many mornings, then, my affirmations in the mirror are not really that full of self-love; rather, they are the lamentations of someone who is careening into middle age with zero chill, poor discipline and a bad attitude. In other words, they sound an awful lot like this video, a five-minute movie clip compilation of people telling other people that they look like shit.

The Huffington Post published this video 14 years ago (before I started getting Botox, even!); an updated version would be much longer, of course, and probably 90% sourced from episodes of Succession and Veep. WHY IS IT SO FUNNY? Perhaps part of my evolution into the next phase of my life will be to lose my filter, as many people do, and just say “you look like shit” to at least one person a day. Or two, if you count the mirror.