please do not call in a wellness check reacting to this blog entry about my birthday

​My birthday is here again, which comes at the end of February.  It’s nice having a birthday at the end of February because you start the depression off in December.  It goes Christmas, New Years Valentine’s Day, and then Birthday for me, like an ever increasing level of loneliness, with the goal of not stepping in front of a UPS truck towards the end.

Speaking of package trucks, my sister has her birthday right after Christmas, so the loneliness equation is slightly less, but my parents always skimped on her birthday, I’m pretty sure in any positive parenting guide that “try to cut corners on your kids’ birthdays so you can have more money for yourself” is not in there..  My parents were less the gold standard and more the jagged rusty nail standard of parenting.

Suffice it to say that birthdays have never been happy affairs for me, regardless of my mood. I still have a hard time getting people together to celebrate it. For one thing, “celebrating” anything relating to myself is something I never quite got growing up, so it feels alien.  If birthdays were something where you got a cake and then everyone left you to eat it alone, that would feel pretty normal. I would be totally on top of that. I could even get a blank card for myself that I seal in an envelope and never open. It would be more of a birthday lamentation than celebration.

As I get older I do feel somewhat amazed that I’ve been around this long.  I’m not sure if that’s because of the experiences I’ve had, or that the technology now allows me to watch videos of people being accidentally killed at the touch of a button.  I mean, have you seen the videos where someone is minding their own business and are suddenly killed when the side of a building falls on them? It reminds you that God doesn’t exist.  No, rather, it reminds you that if God does exist, then he’s very prone to writing anti-climactic endings for our lives. 

“Jim struggled his whole life, but scrimped and saved and finally went to medical school.  One day, a chimney fell on him. THE END.” I mean, seriously, there’s some lazy writing there, supreme being. 

Anyway, there’s no God, just a series of random events and human beings making choices. It’s not entirely depressing.  Well, okay, from what I’m writing it seems entirely depressing. Let me see if I can  spin this to a positive. 

We celebrate birthdays, because we all know how unlikely it is for us to get through he Kafkaesque world we live in for an entire orbit of our speck of a planet in a universe of stroke-inducing size.  Small victories deserve a giant sugary confection with candles we blow out as if to say “Fuck you, universe! I live.”

Hm, okay, that wasn’t quite positive.  Let me try again.

Despite my bleak outlook, I am glad that I don’t have to worry about returning to my dark apartment to have lights suddenly blinding me as people shout “surprise,” causing a PTSD flashback in me that--

Still not positive.

Maybe endings to our lives may not be positive.  That's just how it is.  However, between life and death we should at least try to make the happiest narrative for ourselves, yeah?

There we go.  That’s the ending that will prevent a wellness check! Win!