HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

When a person reaches the monumental age of thirty, they often fall victim to Logan’s Run Syndrome. I’m not talking about being hunted by a group of goons dressed in tights and slippers. I’m talking about the madness. The endless mental torment you will put yourself through as you reach the three-decade mark. Turning thirty will fuck you up. Up until this point, we’re relatively happy with our lives. Or so we thought. Then that question creeps into your brain: “What have you done with your life?” No matter what you have accomplished, your panic-stricken brain will not allow you to believe that it’s enough. I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be OK. Sort of like your wizened uncle that drunkenly spouts life lessons and dirty family secrets at family gatherings. Unless you’re a total fucking loser that hasn’t ventured beyond the limits of your own area code, you might benefit from this. The first eighteen years of your life are wasted in the school system trying to figure out who you are and how cool you appear to others. After graduation, some realize that none of that matters and that you are, in fact, a moron. You have no skills, no life and a personality that only appeals to your equally dumb-assed high school friends. The next four to six years are spent in college, the military or lame jobs you had when you were in high school. This period is known as “Letting The Monkey Out Of The Cage.” All of your repressed energy, sexual frustration and aggression run wild on the streets of independence. You ingest everything you think reality is: love, sex, alcohol, drugs, books, music, work and people. Only to vomit it all back out on the carpet of your first apartment, forfeiting your deposit all for the sake of becoming you. Before you know it, you have a real job, a significant other, maybe a kid or two and some sort of domesticated animal. But in the last days of your 29th year, a voice whispers: “Who are you? What have you done?” “I don’t know!” you sob as your chin hangs on the wonderfully cool porcelain of the toilet. Your spinning mind will ponder the “What-ifs.” What if I had become a peripheral rapper? You know, the guys with no legitimate purpose other than strutting thuggishly around stage singing “Yeah” and “Ugh, Ugh.” A surgeon? Honorable, but my untamed spirit for practical jokes would get me into all sorts of legal troubles. Wouldn’t it be fun to hide objects inside patients’ bodies, like PEZ dispensers and little LEGO people? When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, but I’m really bad at math and NASA really hasn’t gotten too far off the planet to make it worth my while. I’d be up for it if there were green chicks aplenty to bang Captain Kirk-style, but all they ever find are rocks. What if I had invented the Internet like Al Gore? What if I were a hot superstar that won awards and had women flocking to me like a half-priced carnival ride? What if I had my own TV show? Could I make millions exploiting the dysfunction of America’s air-time-hungry morons? More importantly, what if I hadn’t downed those Jell-O shots like a giddy Bill Cosby? What if you are just you? No apologies, no hype, no regrets? When you wake up on the first day of the rest of your life and the haze of grain alcohol has dissipated, realize that you are nothing special in this cold, cruel world. It is highly unlikely that you will ever gain entrance into the one percent of those that truly impact the world. Accept that, regardless of the capabilities of your Palm Pilot, golf handicap or cell phone, you are and will always be nothing to the world as a whole. Deal with it. Be comfortable with the skin that you’ve spent the last thirty years growing into. Resign yourself to the fact that no one outside of your friends and family gives a flying fiddlers fuck about you. So happy birthday, asshole!