Memo to the powers that be who run this loathsome mold pit in the Vampire State's bougiest town.

 

​To:  Personnel Department

From: Akaky

Subject: Your suggestion that I do work related stuff on 26 July this year.

 

 No. Not just no, but hell no! I am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NO TWO DAMN WAYS ABOUT IT NOT going to be available for anything work-related on Sunday, July 26 of this year. I will be in New Jersey attending my step-niece's (assuming that being a step-niece is an actual thing and not a ploy by the wedding industry to expand the number of people whose weddings I must attend) and not celebrating my birthday. Carly can do what she wants in New Jersey on my birthday; she's a big girl now and if she wants to spend the weekend getting married then more power to her, although I don't understand why anyone would choose to do anything in New Jersey, but that's on me. Frankly, and this is also something that is just on me, while I think Mel is a very nice guy, no two ways about it, she could have done a lot better, even in New Jersey. Just my opinion, you understand. No disrespect intended. Like I said, Mel is a very nice guy, but Carly is a deeply attractive young woman and Mel is a deeply…well, he is a very nice guy.

 Be that as it may, my uncle Peter chose to die and be buried in New Jersey, for example, but I ascribe that choice to propinquity—he was already in New Jersey when he died and the cost of shipping him home to Ireland so he could rest with his people was beyond whatever counted as prohibitively expensive at the time. What I really do not understand is why he would choose to be buried behind a McDonald's franchise. This could be a case of extreme brand loyalty; Uncle Peter was very fond of the Filet—o—Fish sandwich, or so people tell me—but whatever the reason, the idea of a cemetery directly behind a McDonald's is somewhat disquieting on a number of different levels, the first of which is that it makes me wonder just what that particular McDonald’s is putting in their Quarter Pounders with cheese.  I do not want to go there; the gag factor is the gag factor, after all; but it really does make you think, doesn’t it, and not in a good way.

 

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.

BIRTHDAY: So everyone here and there is reminding me that it's my birthday and saying congratulations and the rest of it, and there's even some that are telling me that your fifties are probably the best time of your life: you're not a kid anymore and when you have something to say people just assume that you have the life experience to back up what you're saying. So I know that turning fifty shouldn't bother me; it just does, though. Being fifty is like being on the top of a steep hill in a gold 1958 Cadillac convertible: you see the great view, you can see where you've been and where you're going, you can feel the wind in your hair (or what's left of it), you can feel sunshine warm upon your face. The trouble here is that the Cadillac is starting to inch down from the top of the hill, slowly picking up speed as it goes, and on this particular 1958 model Cadillac, there's no seatbelts and the brakes are shot. Somehow or other, this does not bode well for the future.

NEW EXCUSES: No, I don't really have any excuses for the hiatus here. I could say that it's because of the weather or because of writer's block or because of the upcoming birthday, but it's not: I'm just being lazy. Sorry about that. I will try to get something new up here in a couple of days; I have something about half-written, but finishing the thing depends on a bunch of things, not least of which is me getting off my lazy ass and actually finishing it.

This is what I wrote last year; this year I am too depressed about the event described below to think of anything new to say about it. Next year I think I will be positively suicidal.

26 JULY 1958: As a general rule, I dislike birthdays; I have nothing against those who enjoy this sort of thing; they are certainly entitled to their opinion, but I still dislike birthdays, and I especially dislike birthdays when the birthday in question is my own. I guess I wouldn’t mind birthdays so much if they stayed they were when you were a kid. Kids can’t wait for birthdays; it’s their own very special holiday and there are cakes and games and parties and presents and whole slews of other good things happening, and best of all, it's all for them. I still remember my fifth birthday party; half the neighborhood showed up for cake and ice cream, the other half turned up for the free liquor, and my father and my Uncle Mickey got drunk and tried to beat each other’s brains out over something that happened in 1951. That was a great party, but the thing of it is, after you’ve accumulated more than a few birthdays, the day seems less a commemoration of your arrival here on Spaceship Earth than it is a reminder that you are now officially another year closer to becoming a protein source for invertebrates.