WASHINGTON — Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started his workday with a massive rip from a smoking manhole cover on the way into the office this past week, reported local sources.
“Taking in ‘exotic,’ untested substances is key to how I operate,” said Kennedy between phlegmy, hacking coughs. “If you’re consuming what everyone else is consuming, you’re putting out what everyone else is putting out—it’s that simple. I don’t want ‘simple.’ I want to zag when others zig. Internet supplements, fat rips of manhole smoke, uncooked mystery meats—it’s all of that that lets me do this job in the way Americans have come to know and expect. Would I be able to improve vaccine policies for hard working Americans if I wasn’t fried on the kind of urban vent gas you can’t just go out and buy? Absolutely not.”
The Secretary’s ever-present sheen of sweat and general disdain for established science has long been assumed to be at least partially a product of his esoteric consumption habits.
“The man I wake up next to every morning is unrecognizable,” said comedian and wife to Kennedy, Cheryl Hines. “He’s calm, he has respect for facts on how much tallow any one person should have day-to-day, he’s essentially your basic 72-year-old guy—it makes me sick. But when he gets a few lungs full of our capital’s hole chiba, he turns into the splotchy-skinned doctor-skeptic I married, thank god.”
Experts have expressed skepticism of the upsides of manhole cover smoke, including D.C. Sanitation Engineer Grady Forester.
“If you’re not built like RFK Jr.—which is to say, ‘alive,’ but confusingly so—we recommend not sticking your head into the manhole steam columns and inhaling,” said Forester. “His constitution can only be achieved by surviving a worm to the brain and belonging to a family seemingly cursed by god himself. For RFK Jr., who appears to be running some sort of life-long experiment on what one body can endure, it’s all right. But for the rest of us, it’s best to steer clear of D.C. gutter gas.”
At press time, Kennedy was seen gargling water from the Washington Monument reflecting pool before joining a press conference to bash people who use electric wheelchairs.
