Those Bashful Tinder Kids

As my body sinks further and further into late-middle-aged rot, I’m spending more and more time at the gym, working furiously to halt the growth of my rapidly expanding man boobs. I don’t have a full-time office job — in fact, I don’t have a job at all — so I have plenty of time to swim or pump iron at the Olympic Athletic Club, whose clientele is half aging geezers such as myself, half tattooed hipsters who look like they could jog up Mount Rainier (elev. 14,411).

The club’s bustling locker room, which smells like dirty socks dipped in rancid bath water, showcases the sharp contrasts between aging Baby Boomers confronting their rapidly approaching mortality and the techie Millennials who are overrunning Seattle and driving up the prices of everything from housing to toothpaste to T-bone steak.

With a few buff exceptions, the older guys have sagging buttocks, drooping pectorals and great difficulty bending over to tie their shoes. Some of them have varicose veins, which I find even more disagreeable to look at than a decomposing posterior. The hair on their lower legs has disappeared — but their bushy pubic hair is as unshorn, robust and wild as ever!

The firm and fit Millennials, meanwhile, seem to spend as much time grooming their nether regions as they devote to sculpting their pretentious mustaches. Most prefer a hairless look down there, while others maintain a tiny patch of fur trimmed after their own unique fashion — a sort of peculiar pelvic branding.

At least half of them have stained their body with ink. I often recoil while viewing these epidural canvasses, which typically feature trite images that transform their owners into walking, talking cliches for all eternity. Every now and then, someone disrobes to reveal a stunning work of creative genius, but this is disappointingly rare.

But here’s the funny thing:  Most of these youngsters who spend so much time refining their bodies seem ashamed to display them to the viewing public. These Tinder kids — no matter how well hung — always cover up with a towel. Some of them even wear shorts in the sauna.

Meanwhile, the older guys waddle around in all their decrepit glory, heading to the showers or the steam bath with their unapologetically protruding potbellies swaying back and forth in tandem with their unabashed willies.

I don’t know what all this means. But in this Age of Irony, here’s one more to add to the list.