the numbers game

i’ve always thought it was odd how birthday’s get less significant the more you have of them…

…and the sweet spot seems to be you late teens/early twenties.

the first “cool” one i remember is turning ten, because they made a big deal out of being in the double digits. i don’t get that – it’s not THAT big an accomplishment. now triples? different story!

then comes thirteen, as now you’re a teenager. then sixteen – you can drive! and seventeen is the r rated movie thing (i guess), eighteen you’re an adult (and usually graduate), nineteen the last teen year, twenty no longer a teen, and twenty-one all adult privileges are yours!

except renting a car – that’s twenty-five. and then? you just mark the decades, really.

thirty i was shit faced for the first hour of a three hour radio co-host with james after drinking my face off for free at the backroom with shane for hours prior. then came the ill gotten ‘surf and turf’ at a local gentleman’s club (when your buddy from maine says the lobster ‘should have been thrown back’ learn from my mistake and listen to him) so i was sick from bad shellfish the next day BUT due to my radio “performance” where i pretended to be intoxicated my boss wrote me off as hung over and made me come in the next morning. this was the only moment in the time i worked there i didn’t like him.

forty i was with a girl who on a matrimonial hiatus. we had great sex about an hour after the stroke of midnight (my fortieth was on a sunday but, per usual, i worked fourteen hours on saturday and she met me at the house after) and i took the next day off to host a killer poolside juneteenth bar-b-que. her son got accosted by an uninvited guest – sailor jerry’s only female apprentice, shanghai kate, who was trying to get on with atomic. i got her on, she taught taylor how to draw tattoo style, and now he’s a successful tattoo artist. kate passed last year at the age of eighty something. r.i.p.

fifty was a fairly chill affair at trudy’s followed by several non chill days in vegas where i had fun with a fun mix of my friends and nik’s friends and worried about budnik almost to the point of killing my mood.

so now i’m at fifty two. by this point mom had gotten her bone cancer diagnosis which was the beginning of the end for her. i don’t THINK i have cancer, but haven’t been to the doctor for a proper appointment or check up since the 1990’s so who knows? one year for each card in the deck at this point – we’ll see what life deals me, i suppose.