They Say It's Your Birthday!

There's been a lot of talk about birthdays lately. Actually, there hasn't, but I needed a way to open this story. A while back, I wrote about turning 40. As the year moves along, more and more of my college friends are falling under the black curtain of a new personal decade, and with it, the lament of "I was just 25 yesterday! What the hell happened???" Well, I'll tell you what happened. Tomorrow happened. And it's going to happen again. And again. And again.

I'm not much of a student of the Bible or any other religious literature. I know enough to get me by, however. For example, I know that Charlton Heston WAS Moses, that Noah forgot the unicorns, and that Pulp Fiction's Jules Winfield was a "Bad Mutha-F*r" when he'd recite Ezekiel 25:17 before popping a cap in yo' ass. I also know that Adam lived to be an old man. A VERY old man, like 900-years-old old. I also know that some cat named Methuselah was supposedly the oldest living man - ever! What was he, 969 years old? Thanks to the folks at Wikipedia.com, they have information that Methuselah actually only lived until he was 78 years old. Not bad, considering the life expectancy of a man in Sierra Leone is only 44 these days, but a few days short of 969 years. Now, I'm no mathematics genius, but 78 is roughly 8% of 969. Now, if Jesus was supposedly 33 when he was crucified, if the same math was applied, he'd have been a little over two and a half years old upon his death. I don't know about you, but, from all the paintings in my grandmother's house, he looked a little older than his classmates.

But, enough of all that. Before you know it, I'll be accused of being something I'm not. Instead, I'd like to focus on that time-honored tradition of birthdays - or more specifically, birthday parties. I remember the birthday parties from my youth. Funny hats with elastic string, cartoon animal napkins, and presents that were far more enjoyable back then than they would ever be today, such as coloring books, Super-Elastic Bubble Plastic and Silly String. And tell me you didn't used to press Silly Putty onto the comics page and try to stretch Beetle Bailey's face in a thousand directions. Back then, you weren't self-conscious about opening gifts in front of people. You just tore into them. The gifts like socks and underwear from some tuned-out relative were met with the miserable "Thank you, Aunt so-and-so..." that your mom used to whisper into your ear. And money. Nothing beat money. I don't care if it was a dollar bill or the crisp ten-dollar bills my great-grandmother used to give me, money was a win-win gift to give and receive. I'll always take cash, thank you. And speaking of my great-grandmother, those bills were so crisp and so sharp (she said she would always insist on a "new" $10 bill from the teller) that you could use it to cut a hole in the fabric of the time/space continuum.

As we grow older, we become a bit more selective and demanding about our birthday parties. We insist on having them at places away from the home and we pester our folks for the REALLY expensive stuff. Placating us with cake, ice cream, and those damned trick candles that would always light back up wasn't going to do it for us anymore. In addition, being invited to a "cool" kid's birthday party did more than just put you in esteemed company for the day, oh no. What it effectively did was elevated you to the "in-crowd" that so many of us longed to belong to when we were young. Of course all of us now say, "Oh, I didn't belong to any specific group. I kinda got along with everybody." Right. Pinhead.

As I got older, the parties kids my age had subtlety changed. There was always at least one kid whose parents were of the mind set, "What's a beer or two going to harm?" as they upended another bottle of Jack Daniels into the punch bowl. These parties were the social event of the season until summer came around and peoples' parents went away on vacation and left the teenagers home. But that's another story. Many people's first kisses happened at these parties and more than a couple of lucky jerks went to sleep that night knowing what a girl's boob felt like. Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Capture the Flag, and Duck, Duck, Goose were replaced by Spin the Bottle, Post Office, and Puking in the Azaleas.

It's of little use to go into the typical person's 21st birthday party, because the only way you truly remember it is when other people told you how much fun you had until you woke up the next morning with one of your eyebrows shaved off and peanut butter on your scrotum. After that, there were no more birthdays to look forward to. Now came the inelegant slide into meaningless birthdays. The dreaded 29th birthday, where you said, "That's it! I'm not having any more birthdays." Well, of course you did, sunshine. There just wasn't much more to celebrate. Jack Benny made a career out of poor violin playing, effeminate mannerisms, and being 39. Life goes on, amigo. With modern science and medicine, we are now effectively living twice as long as we were 150 years ago. Hell, at the rate we're going, the average expected life span for a human being will soon probably be over 90 years old.

I'm 40 now. In another 40 years, I'll be 80, which, if my math is right, would make me older than Methuselah.

And I'll still take cash.