Mike Tyson's Ass & The Ravages Of Time
I didn't want to see it but it made me consider the fate of my own body
*Don’t worry I am not going to spend this newsletter pontificating about other people’s bodies. We, very rightly, don’t do that anymore. It is important not to slip into the strange, communal sport of inspection and evaluation - where body size becomes a shorthand for worth, and weight is another way of saying "good enough." This is not just the activity of tabloids or comment sections. It is also those moments when we think we’re being funny or honest or even caring. We are moving beyond the belief that a body’s shape can somehow tell you anything meaningful about the person inside it—when, in fact, it tells you nothing but the arbitrary results of genetics, culture, and the whims of metabolism. I am merely using it as a springboard to talk about my own body and my thoughts and feelings around aging.*
The Mike Tyson v Jake Paul fight was not about the art of violence. The punches that landed lacked either conviction or malice. It was about theater, a clash not of generations or talent but of economies. Jake Paul, all forward momentum and algorithmic cockiness, strutting in the way that only a brainrot goober can, versus Mike Tyson, who long ago became more a problematic symbol of Gen X nostalgia than a fighter.
Their meeting was as much a collision of eras as it was a spectacle of bodies. Tyson’s fists, freighted with the ghosts of a brutal past, met Paul’s studied bravado, his moves calculated as a clickbait campaign. The ring, a stage framed in sweat and LED lights, bore witness to something much less interesting than sport: the machinery of fame, grinding gears at full tilt to its anticlimactic conclusion.
What happened in the ring is already beside the point, a footnote to the noise surrounding it. It wasn’t about victory or legacy - despite the proclamations to the contrary - it was about the now, the live-streamed instant, packaged and monetized before the sweat dried. Tyson’s expression between rounds was not of focus but bemusement, watching a youtuber rewrite the rules he once owned.
The entire evening had me pondering my age in a the changing world. The biggest fight of the year was between two men who can’t really box. It was shown on a low-def stream that lagged for the watching world. Everything is objectively worse but costs even more than ever. I felt the curmudgeon in me rise.