Birthday

My birthday.  I feel no particular anxiety about it.  Although I will now be closer to forty than thirty– who gives a shit, really.  I mean, you get concerned that your life isn’t going in the right direction, but, the only direction any of us are going is the fucking grave.

I have all my limbs and my family loves me and I have sweet wonderful friends.  So there you go.  I look pretty fucking good for my age.  My hair is turning gray but it actually looks kind of good.  My nut sack hairs are also turning gray.  One would think this would be horrifying but it amuses me.

I have noticed that I do not recover as quickly from drinking, weight lifting, or the stresses of work.  These are the early signposts of impending death.  I have  a great deal of difficulty achieving an erection when drunk, which is the only time an erection is truly useful to me. But this may have always been the case.  I still ejaculate extremely quickly when masturbating, and produce copious amounts of semen.

My bowels are in good health.  If my bowels had a State of the Union address, it would be the 90’s Bill Clinton State of the Union where he said the state of the union is stronger than it’s ever been.  I take shits with remarkable ease and consistency.  This is regardless of what I have eaten.  Thank you, bowels and asshole, for doing such a remarkable job.

My joints and tendons are weak and are constantly in pain and making popping noises but this has always been the case.  I have never been any kind of special physical specimen and in fact have always been clumsy and weak; always in  the bottom ten per cent of physical fitness criteria in childhood, not able to do even a single pull up during the hideous and humiliating President’s Physical Fitness Test initiated by Reagan in the 80’s.  I’ve been lifting weights for 15 years now but still I compare my merely moderately in shape physique to the horrendous pathetic image of myself as a child and come off winning.

I make no money, and I hate my job, and I’m never going to go anywhere in my career, but fuck it, because the only reason I even have this job is so I can sound cool when people ask what I do.  And it turns out I hate it so much that I tell them I’m a farmer. So fuck this; I’m going to get out of my job.  You feel trapped, having no money, but you have the option of moving to some small town where nothing costs anything and the two or three attractive women in the community would be very happy to see you.

The point is, there is still hope when you’re 36, even if you’re alone and have no tangible hope of not being alone, and you earn forty thousand dollars a year and are ten thousand dollars in credit card debt, and your day to day life is so bad that you have constant nightmares about your work, and every girl you date turns out to be just really boring and has no hope of sparking any kind of lasting interest in you.  I mean, I am a fucking caricature of failure– the sad aging guy who comes home to his cat and jerks off to internet porn and plays Xbox and then drinks himself into troubled sleep– every failure you fear as a man, I have achieved.  And yet there is still hope.  Not even hope that things will get better— I could have a billion dollars and a brilliant model for a wife and I would probably still be whining at great length into my laptop; that’s just who I am.  But there is still hope that no matter how bad things get I can still come out in the park on a Sunday and it just rained and the grass is nice and green and it’s seventy two degrees and my cat comes and sits next to me and there are cool looking birds bickering over berries in a nearby tree and you know, no matter what happens, presumably there will always be little moments like this. Where you realize there is beauty in the world and it’s worth going on to see some more of it.  You don’t get a lot of birth of your first child moments in life, but you do get a lot of man, those birds are cool looking.  Shit is pretty generous that way.