Fuck the usual disclaimers, let's get straight to the asinine bullshit.
So. Birthdays. Hip hip and tally ho! What is a world without a little celebration, yes? We get together and we do things and occasionally those things do us, or maybe we do those things to each other and it's great. Why? Because you reluctantly slid out of what will eventually become an angry vagina for a very long time afterward, or were given the old birthing ice cream scoop procedure as I like to call it. Caesarean Section for all you folks with more than two brain cells to rub together.
I like my way better personally but then I would, wouldn't I.
I like my way better personally but then I would, wouldn't I.
Anyway. This is your day, man or woman or whatever. Eat, drink and be merry, for on this day you are more than a hairless monkey baby. Oh no. Today, you are a golden eagle soaring majestically over the land. We take all the shit you've dumped on the world over the last year and just shovel it down our necks for you. Forget that time you got way too drunk at the Halloween party last year and tried to finger my girlfriend. It's okay. It totally doesn't matter that you backed over our dog when you made good your drunk driving escape either. Water under the bridge, pal! Because IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY, BRAH! LET LOOSE!
Or at least, that seems about the jist of it sometimes. Even without all that sweeping of shit under the carpet for an evening, as far back as I can remember I never particularly cared for birthdays. Oh sure, like any kid I was receptive of the gifts I totally didn't deserve, unhealthy snacks and cakes, and the absurd activities that can go hand in hand with the potential onset of diabetes. But deep down, there was always this sense of dread there for me. I still don't know exactly where that comes from to be honest. Maybe it's the reminder that death is a full waltz closer to asking you for your hand as you sit against the back wall, nursing a warm glass of life. I really couldn't say. Anyway.
People tell me it's to celebrate ones life and the like, and indeed that is a very sweet sentiment to put across. I can dig it. At the same time though, I wonder why everyday we spend with one another isn't celebrated, excluding the days when you're an asshole naturally, because there are those days, right? You need to vent, you need to chill, you need time to stop pondering how hard of a punch the offending party deserves and sometimes it's you but that's okay. We make mistakes and we punch each other for it and maybe we don't do that offending thing again.We probably will but look, we forgive. WHY CAN'T THAT BE A THING, WORLD?
Y'know, it's funny though. Even with all that shit I just said, and how much I truly believe it...sometimes I remember someones birthday that I no longer spend time with and I get a little sad. I start obsessing about it until nothing else feels solid and it's at this time that I start to see my own little piece of beauty in what I consider a yearly spit in the face. I don't feel sad for the parties we'll never have, or that I couldn't celebrate that particular day with them. It's not even that I'm grateful for the day their parents fucked and gave my old friend life, though serious kudos go to them for that.
No no, mine is a sadness altogether more fucked up, but potentially far more sweet if you're broken enough to see into this shitty mirror I use to reflect.
I'm sad because I'm reminded that we aren't slowly dying together anymore. I loved slowly dying with you. You died in ways I'll never know or get to share in this year, and that's a bummer. I still celebrate your existence everyday, but it's just not the same.
So this is me, Mr. FuckBirthdays saying Happy Birthday, old friend. Wherever you are.
Derf out.
7 comments:
My birthday isn't for years and I haven't had cake in even longer than that. Sometimes we have to make our own occasion, sometimes, occasionally, or they will put a sign up to warn everybody when they're supposed to surprise you, and when you come in the door the floor drops out and you find yourself hung from a balloon noose.
Are the balloons filled with helium? I refuse to partake unless they're fully capable of literally lifting spirits...and their carrion luggage.
This is a little strange, so bear with me: the balloons are made of gold, 18 karat gold, only it has been processed in some proprietary, patented way so that it's been spun out filament-thin formed into the shape of a normal party balloon! This balloon shape is rigid (to the extent that gold - one of the more malleable metals - has rigidity), and would be retained under most normal conditions traditional balloons endure without popping. If punched it or whatever, you'd probably cave in a big ol' dent and/or tear it along the impact-crater, possibly, depending on your punch and whether the balloon was backed against a wall or free to bop away like a speed-bag.
These balloons would then be filled with helium.
Whatever gas had occupied the hollow inside of the balloon would be forced out, as the helium is pumped in. There is a special nozzle developed for this, with its own built-in outlet. The nozzle would be forced through the balloon's belly button (what's that thing called?) and after sufficient helium had been pumped in to "flush" pretty much all the original contents out, you'd half-pull the nozzle out, flip the little crimper onto the balloon-stem and clamp it crimped shut! Then, seal secured, the nozzle is withdrawn the rest of the way and you've got your golden helium balloon!
The nozzle itself and its crimping mechanism is really clever, actually - you would think it would be hard to crimp gold foil (essentially, although the patented process leaves it looking beautifully smooth and brightly burnished) shut so securely, but nope.
That's all very well, but do they even lift, bro? Structural integrity and shiny material are all well and good but it is essential that they lift! I wonder what a gold balloon actually weighs. Perhaps something a great deal lighter than Helium will have to be mercilessly brought into the fold, and with that, any dangerous properties attached to them. (vis a vis Hydrogen) Our children will come to look at us as cruel for this bold act, steeling their hearts for what hell man hath wrought. Their children, however, may be better for it. Who can say?
Slap a patent on that nozzle, though. That's a money maker no matter what the future holds.
It's kind of complicated. They will lift, but it's just barely if we can't get the right permissions and rights lined up. At issue, we need negotiate an upgrade from development license to an agreement we can go into production with on one damn patent that's involved in the last stage of making the damn thing. We could leave it out, but the final product's a knockout if we can get it. (There are five patents wrapped up in the blown-and-spun-gold technique that lets us make those balloons smooth and round and perfectly balloony. Four of them, the ones that actually make it possible to create the thing, the object itself, a balloon that looks and acts just like a balloon - we own those four patents outright. Christ, we invented that shit - but the fifth, ah the fifth patent. Stumbled across it after we thought we already had a winner! But when we saw how much more lift and lifespan we could get by applying this ingenious doping process to the interior surface of the balloon, it suddenly became inadequate to go to market with the as-was Mark I prototype. That last patent is the one that's going to tip us over to full, reliable, and reasonably long-lasting aerobuoyancy. In retrospect, without that process it's fifty-fifty we've got a product at all. For the price we're going to charge.
Guess who owns the thing? Bill Walton! Can you believe it? Former NBA great and current ace affable commentator Bill Walton. Came up with it in his garage!
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