For the first time in five years, we do not have a kid preparing for the Massachusetts All State Wrestling tournament this week, meaning that our Presidents’ Day had no agenda. Graham had to work at Chick-Fil-A, so it was up to Lauren and me to entertain ourselves. If you haven’t learned by now, there’s literally nothing that makes Lauren happier than a breaching whale. If I could buy her a giant stretch of ocean and populate it with her own personal whales . . . I mean, there’d be no greater gift.
So today, we went to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which we’ve been to before but not in at least a decade, and it has changed a lot. They had three floors of exhibitions and covered topics ranging from religion and how Quakers came to be such prominent whalers to slavery and how ships both facilitated the slave trade but also provided an avenue for escaped enslaved people to get jobs and put distance between them and pursuing masters.
Lauren was like a kid in a candy store, and I have to emphasize kid. You see, not only does Lauren love whales, but she has the sense of humor of a thirteen-year-old boy. For example, one of the great disagreements of our marriage is the movie Dumb and Dumber. To me, the review is the same as the title. To Lauren, it is a cinematic masterpiece. So we started off getting photos like this.
That’s me in front of a scale-sized model of a blue whale heart.
And that’s Lauren in all her glory in front of a blue whale sculpture.
But then, it got weird.
Looks mundane, right? That’s baleen ear wax. And of course, Lauren took a picture because next to whales, Lauren loves extracting globs of ear wax from herself or anyone else. She trades pictures of ear wax extraction and pimple popping with her sisters. (Did you know there’s a Dr. Pimple Popper YouTube channel with 8.24 million subscribers? Our country is in serious trouble.)
But it gets worse. There’s this.
I’m not even going to write it. That is what you think it is, and it used to belong to a sperm whale. Because of course. Lauren sent that photo to the Goons, and in the absolute height of hypocrisy, Grant, who taught his younger brother every phallic joke in the book and also taught his brother to say “Nice!” every time “69” was ever said or spotted, wrote back, “Ah, children.”
Me? I went to the observation deck and took this lovely photo of the docks where the fishing boats are still at work. Because I’m that type of person and not the other type. And I’d like to remind everyone that the government keeps releasing information on UFOs. Just imagine the aliens taking over our planet. Just imagine them ruthlessly exploiting us. What do you suppose is going to wind up in their museums?
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His Smile Lit Up a Room and Other Things to Say at My Funeral 