Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Celebratory Overload - or an Old Man Can’t Party Like This Every Weekend
You could say I have plenty of time to come up with something - as of now, just about 10 days. That’s more than plenty of time, much longer than I need for most decisions. But I suppose I’ve been putting the decision off for longer than that - more like most of 40 years: because that’s how old I’ll be when the deadline hits.
I remember when celebrating my birthday was as easy as inviting anybody who hadn’t actively been beating me up out to Traveltown to play amidst the defunct steam engines, but that’s too much of a schlep for me now. There were the birthdays when I lived on campus and all I had to do was drop a hint or two and my friends would see to my entertainment with enthusiasm and sensitivity to my, shall we say, special preferences. But now, it’s a little different. This event is more auspicious, for one thing - birthday # 40 cries out for a festive fete, moreso than any I’ve had in a long time. Thirty was no big deal to me, I was already much older than that in my bones so I don’t even recall having a party ten years ago. But this birthday I feel due for some festivating. The time is ripe - as, indeed, am I.
And then again, having a party for myself would be almost superfluous now. I like a party as much as the next guy, if not more, but there is no reason whatsoever for me to try to stage one now. One week before my natal day - this coming weekend, in fact - my dear friend Dr. Andy is having a huge party. I’m counting on him never reading this journal because he’s not supposed to know that his friends, including the executive chef and the owners of one of the finest restaurants in north america, are setting him and ourselves up for a staggeringly memorable feast for his 40th, which precedes mine by a mere four days. I will revel and carouse with all my oldest and dearest friends, to and beyond my heart’s delight. Consequently, I don’t feel the need to call them all back to get together again one week later to my flat to have frozen fish sticks and instant muffins with me for my birthday. I could never match the splendor of Andy’s party, and franky it would be too much for me if I were able to. His will do just fine for me.
Then again, one week after my birthday I get to attend a party with some of my favorite imaginary friends from blogdom, confirming some nascent relationships and, I hope, starting some new ones in an authentic rollicking gazebo-rocking mountain town bash like my youthful spirit hungers for. It’ll be the gin-soaked fiesta that my liver fears but my heart craves.
And then again, in a few months I get on a plane to a tropical paradise where about twenty of my closest friends and Kel and I have all rented houses on geothermically heated oceanside lagoons where we’ll all celebrate a slew of 40ths, as well as my 15th wedding anniversary, in a freeform board-shorted bacchanal of lazy days and laughing nights. There will be no finer way to celebrate this watershed event, to usher in this new era of ostensible maturity, or - better yet - to memorialize this phase, this epoch, as an apex, yet another apex among apeces, as once again I find myself more where I want to be, more whom I want to be, than I’ve ever dreamed of being.
SO: big gourmet gorgefest; big bloggy blowout; two weeks on the islands with my darling wife and hand-picked compadres. Nothing’s on the agenda yet, though, for my actual birthday. I’m open to suggestion. What I need is something memorable, inexpensive, local, and reasonably low-impact, that will mark the day as one that will live in the annals of history even longer than I do myself. (Heh. I said “annal.") Currently on the short list of options under consideration are the following:
* Ride the 38L downtown to my office and then back again. Make it festive by doing it naked.
* See what happens when I open that creepy stone puzzlebox I got when that defrocked preacher accosted me in that alley.
* Hang around the library and take notes on what people are wearing.
* Explore the magic of hyperventilation.
* Find out what’s making that awful stink.
* Go to the zoo, break into the habitat of a nocturnal animal and sleep with it. (No, not like that - just regular sleeping.)
* Visit the local Ukranian grocery and eat samples of foods with more letters in their names than I have in mine.
* Sitting on the dock of the bay, but not watching anything roll anywhere.
* Returning to the womb. Lacking that, spending the entire day under a comforter in a papasan chair, humming favorite nursery rhymes to myself.
* Count my freckles. Might as well name them, too.
Your input is obviously badly needed. The clock is ticking, and I ain’t getting any younger.
