January third is possibly one of the worst birthdays a person could have, especially if you spent most of your life growing up in the northeastern United States. As kids we almost always went back to school following Christmas break on January 3rd, everybody was always in a bad mood and it was bone chillingly cold outside. The older you got the worse January 3rd became. It’s not so much that it signified the end of the festive holiday season as much as it was the beginning of the long, slow, cold, and dreary slog towards spring with nothing to look forward to in between.

If your birthday lands on January 3rd all of your friends are broke or partied out by the time your special day rolls around. It’s the day that everyone who said “It’s the holidays, I’ll worry about it later…” as they ran up credit card debt in December on gifts and drink and rounds of shots for old friends, actually start to worry about it. And if you ARE unfortunate enough to have been born on January 3rd you’re kind of stuck as to what can be done about it. Answer: nothing. By adolescence you, as the January 3rd birthday boy/girl/whatever, have already learned not to expect much. You don’t dare attempt to pressure family or friends by doing something stupid like dropping hints, they will all expect you to know instinctively that now is not the time for your birthday bullshit.

If they pity you for having a January 3rd birthday you will never know, for it will not come across as empathy, sympathy, or even be acknowledged in any real sort of way other than perhaps a split-second blank expression that most certainly can be interpreted as “What the fuck do you want ME to do about it?” In the rare event that somebody actually DOES get you a January 3rd birthday present be forewarned: no amount of gushing gratitude or joy expressed by you will be sufficient to ease their regret and resentment. Buying a birthday gift for a January 3rd-er, for the purchaser, is the spiritual equivalent of letting somebody beat you at a game of pool even though you and everybody else knows that you are better than them by a long shot. It’s an act of nobility and sacrifice that will long be remembered by mutual company, and it is the buyer who will be revered and admired for decades by all in the know. They will, in fact, privately seethe at the birthday boy for being enough of a dick to have been born on January 3rd.

Sure, there are birthdays on the calendar in the same neighborhood as January 3rd that could possibly qualify at sucking as hard; January 2nd, 4th, 5th… but here’s why they are not as bad. January 2nd is still echoing with the remnants of New Years celebrations and as such many are sufficiently tipsy enough to want to keep it going a little longer, a birthday party is a perfect excuse for that. By the 4th and the 5th (and onward), these days are the recovery days after that initial blow connects with the jaw that the holiday fun is all over, and that once the pain abates they can collect themselves and press onward. Friends may still be too broke and partied out to celebrate with you, but they will obligingly offer happy birthday wishes sans hostility and violence.

I was born on January 3rd, 1965 at the Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. Pretty much out of the gate I was an inconvenience to everybody given that my original due date was mid December, 1964, but clearly I knew better than everyone else and saw fit to procrastinate my mom’s pregnancy a couple of weeks, plus. And as if that wasn’t harbinger enough for my poor five foot, one inch mother, I saw fit to barrel my ass into this world weighing in at ten pounds, seven ounces.

As chance would have it I was born as a human being, a species native to the planet earth. Humans are the strangest animals on the planet, seeming to exist in opposition to the very natural order that created them while every other creature in the environment seems to get along just fine with the tasks handed to them. The craziest part is humans don’t think this is true, a fact of which suggests quite strongly that they are addicted to delusion. They convince themselves of fantastical beliefs which they call “convictions” (at least that’s what it’s called in my part of the world, known as English-speaking) and will stubbornly adhere to them with the grandest self importance. Humans will con themselves into thinking nothing’s wrong even though it is, or that something’s wrong even though it isn’t. Or that they are more important than other human beings based on things like skin color, possessions, intelligence (or lack thereof), or even for no tangible reason at all, and also that gods exist in the skies above judging the humans down here on earth but also that their relatives who have died are hanging out with one of these gods, upset with them for masturbating. Of course I knew none of this on the day of my birth, in fact I knew nothing at all. Had I known I might’ve stayed in my mom forever, but we all know that’s imposing and rude.

If this assessment of my species comes across as condescending or arrogant make no mistake; I only speak from personal experience as one of these deluded, frail, self-pitying/aggrandizing rubber monkeys myself. I alone am the idiot who decided to take up smoking at the age of 44 having never smoked a day in my life prior. I am the fool who believed reason and logical discourse could bring peace and civility to society. I likewise thought that someday Batgirl would be my girlfriend, and even when I reached an age of “maturity” (one of the silliest words in the English language) where one realizes the divide betwixt fantasy and reality, I continued to labor on within my brain as to how this relationship could be made real, for far too an uncomfortable span of time. Oh no, if I disparage the human race it is only from a place of familiarity.

I have zero recollection of my first day on Earth, although as time would pass and I learned more about my species I imagine there were a lot of unpleasant noises and secretions emanating from my baby person during my first 24 hours, though I never really inquired as to the details. What I now know looking back is that my arrival came at a significant cultural hinge in my country’s history. No more than 24 hours prior to my great squirting out, my nation’s government had announced that their “police action” in the country of Vietnam had been recategorized as a “military action” thereby starting a war. WELCOME TO EARTH!!! It would also be the year that my country signed what they called the Civil Rights Act into law in an effort to make things more fair in life for everybody, and this caused a lot of violence and death. It would also be the year that the people originally living here (before my ancestors showed up) were granted the right to vote in the nation’s elections, which seems a little backwards if you think about it. As chance would have it I was one of the first human beings that would eventually be referred to as “Generation X” (see also previous suspicions of delusion) for what that’s worth. However more important events took place in the general vicinity of my birth. Had I popped out on schedule there’s a strong chance I would’ve been noisily oozing and secreting in a baby bassinet while my parents and older sister watched ‘It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas’ as it premiered in December of 1964 on television. 1965 was likewise the year that Play Doh would get patented so you could say we were BOTH patented in 1965.

It wasn’t just in my country that amazing things came to be in 1965: in Japan, ‘Frankenstein Conquers the World’, an eventual favorite film of mine, would likewise be born, in addition to “Invasion of Astro Monster”, better known in the USA as ‘Godzilla vs. Monster Zero’. Another what-eventually-would-become-a-film-favorite-of-mine hit the silver screens within the year of my hatching: ‘Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!’ although this movie was of a slightly naughtier vein than those previously mentioned. Meanwhile over in the country called England, the television serial ‘Thunderbirds’ aired for the first time, so one could say that the table had been set seemingly tailored specifically to my tastes.

So if you’ve made it this far in this pointless meandering babble you might deservedly be asking yourself “So what? Who cares?” and truthfully I couldn’t agree with you more. Why SHOULD anybody care what a halfway-to-a-hundred (and then some), cis-gendered, white, male has to say about anything? My answer to that is; no reason. There’s no good reason or justification for reading anything I eventually will post here. As it is, the execution of my primary post is 7 years overdue. I first had the idea to write this as I was approaching my 50th birthday and was feeling like I should mark the occasion with some sort of meaningful-to-me gesture of futility to lend my existence some sort of gravity or stamp, yet ultimately procrastinated to the point of obsolescence. So why go on? Well, partially because I’ve finally gotten around to it, but secondly due to having lost a good number of friends who might’ve been around to dispute some of the stories and claims I will present here, it suddenly occurred to me that I was fast running out of corroborators to verify and confirm facts and details. And who can say for certain how much time any of us has left, so if my passing is imminent I might as well go out boring the piss out of everyone with my drivel! With the death of every friend, enemy, and associate, we lose the tangible parts of our lives. Everything else simply turns to static.

Since life is little more than today, plus the addition of memories, and the subtraction of opportunities, seasoned with the absurdity of hopes and dreams, the only good reason to recant ones’ life experiences is akin to firing a signal flare from a life raft while adrift at sea. You just hope that there’s somebody out there to see it and your life hasn’t been for naught. Actually, that’s crap. I know my life is meaningless and I will ultimately be forgotten, and I’m fine with that. I guess the truth of it is I have led a somewhat interesting life and just the fact that I can jot it down here like a nostalgic diary for anyone who gives a shit is kind of cool. I don’t really care if anyone reads this digital “message in a bottle”, but this was my life up to now. It will not be a chronologically linear recantation, it will not be a legal document of public record, it will pretty much just be me remembering my life the way I recall it. Nothing said here will be carved in stone, just how I remember it. Sometimes my posts will be discussions of favorite movies, record albums, bands, breakfast cereals, the coolest birds, the pros and cons of high heels (open toe’d vs. closed toe’d), comic books, monster movies, model airplanes, Scotland, Japan,… to put it plainly it’s going to be all over the map, but it’s me remembering my life the best I can. We only get one go-round, we should try to remember as much of it as we can.

Also: I am very fond of obscene bodily functions, and well planned scare pranks.