Congratulations to the slimy bewildered creature-ape that was evicted from its perfectly adequate uterine accommodation approximately twenty-seven years ago today…is what I hear when people celebrate birthdays. Consent is antecedent to inception; one cannot consent first and then be born. I suddenly found myself flailing in the open air and now here we are twenty seven years later, a fully-formed adult mammal with a bad posture and an ever-growing list of standing grievances, bitching about into social-media ‘birthblogs’ where supposedly sane adults ‘write’ on the traumatising event of clocking another year older.

pop surprise! You’re conscious but you’re also mortal and someone’s going to ask you what you want to do with your life before you’ve even figured out solid foods. No one let’s you decide between non-existence on the one hand, and on the other hand a perpetual cycle of discomforts and struggles, hunger, thirst, ennui, and a litany of bodily needs, banal bureaucracies, traffic, experiencing the perpetual fluctuation of temperature, a cycles of illness, the frustrations of relationships, the pursuit of career aspirations, and the inexorable march of time that leaves us enfeebled.

It is truly psychotic that we celebrate this. Annually! As a society. We’ve collectively decided that the correct response to “another year of entropy has passed and you are measurably closer to nonexistence” is cake and balloons and a gathering of humans performing gladness at you. Members of our species jump all up and down around some choreographed dance in order to alert strangers about children ultimately escaping mother’s warm confines. Guests show up babbling happy words along with a token present or trinkets adorned with fat numbers covering gifts, while everyone has to pretend gratefulness instead of feeling shame. eat the sugar, pretend this means something.

To be clear, I’m not above birthdays. I was extremely above birthdays at age six. Age six me would have dissolved into actual atoms of joy over a balloon animal and some party rings. But that was the terrible knowledge that this is all just one long countdown embellished in novelty wrapping paper where the universe clicks its tongue and says tick.

I hate that question, “What are you doing for your birthday?”, delivered with this tone of bright expectation as if you’ve been quietly planning some magnificent ceremony of self. As if you didn’t wake up this morning, lie completely still for several minutes calculating whether anything has changed, conclude that it indeed hasn’t, and then get up to piss like always. I will exist through this day in the same way I exist through all the days, except with a low-grade awareness that I’m supposed to feel something, which somehow makes everything feel slightly worse.

Nobody remembered, by the way. In case you were wondering. The day passed (is passing) in the exact same unbroken beige of every other day. No ambush of affection nor a birthday dinner, not even a text with a little cake emoji dispatched out of obligatory fondness. My back pain is still here reminding me of my disintegrating bones and I still need to scratch my itches, go to work, sit in traffic, piss every couple hours, schedule my crying, deal with bureaucrats (etc etc), the specific tiredness that lives behind the eyes and has no cure, and just generally feeling way too adult. Not much connects today as opposed to several others going by. Twenty-seven feels remarkably like twenty-six, which felt remarkably like twenty-five, which I don’t entirely remember but am told happened.

Fine. Fine. Everything is fine.

reasons this particular one is annoying:

1. Odd-numbered birthdays have an energy to them. A wrongness. Twenty-six had even-numbered dignity. This one has the vibe of a chair with one slightly shorter leg, if that makes sense?

2. More grey hairs. Apparently demanding recognition in numbers too. Not complaining, exactly. Just noting that my body is apparently sending communiqués that non-existence is ever closer.

3. Somebody asked me what I want for my birthday and I had to stand there in silence for four seconds because I really wanted to say that I want the concept of wanting to feel less exhausting. Instead I said “oh nothing really”. They seemed satisfied.

4. Twenty-seven is the age of the club. The dead musicians one (look it up). I am not particularly worried about this, but I am noting it somewhere in the back of the mind where irrational anxieties go to stretch their legs.

5. I spent a portion of my birthday writing a blog post about not wanting to write a blog post about my birthday (which no one will read). This feels like important data about who I am as a person now.

Anyway. Here we are. Still here. If you read this far you either understand or you’re extremely polite, and either way, genuinely thank you.

Come complain with me in the inbox. I’ve got time. Apparently I’ve got a whole year of it.

#getoffmylawn #i’m fine #no really #the cake was theoretical