A year closer to death

It is, as a good many people here in our happy little burg keep reminding me, my birthday, specifically my 60th birthday,  for those of you who like to keep track of such things. I generally do not keep track of such things, either for myself or for other people; birthdays after age forty are simply an annual reminder that you are now officially one year closer to death. And I especially do not like birthdays that come in years that end with eight, as this means that the number on my age year clicks over to zero. This is an enjoyable experience when you turn ten or twenty; in the first instance it means that you are no longer a little kid, no matter what your mom and dad think, and in the second instance you are a.) no longer a teenager, b.) two years past the point where you can indulge your baser instincts with an adult without penalty of law, and c.) just a year short of being able to drink legally everywhere in the United States; but beyond those two points the accumulating zeroes are just annoying as hell—to find out how annoying, simply ask any woman in her late twenties just how many times she intends to turn twenty-nine before reality forces her to turn thirty—and the fact that I can now take money out of my IRA without accruing sizeable penalties is not making me feel better about reaching this age. 

So I am stuck, it seems. I was going to mark the day by buying a bottle of tequila, going home, and then getting completely hammered, but my coworkers tell me that this is more than vaguely inappropriate for a man of my gathering years and that my head will hurt like a son of a bitch tomorrow morning, so I think I will skip the tequila and just make myself a baloney sandwich instead. I have enough age-appropriate aches and pains without adding new ones to the mix. I do wish, though, that people would stop wishing me a happy birthday; I keep asking that they not do this and they keep insisting on doing it anyway, which is starting to get on my nerves, very frankly. I am waiting for next week, wherein people will stop with the Happy Birthdaying and even the belated Happy Birthdays will go away, and I can be chronologically miserable without everyone's best wishes making me feel even worse.