Happy ****ing Birthday To Me

I don't put much store by birthdays. I don't encourage anyone to give me presents. In some moods, I think a little spanking might be nice.

Obviously when I was a kid birthdays were special. But by the time I was in college, the shine had kind of come off of it, although I still used it as an excuse to drink. Which made it much like any other day. Which is how I still feel about birthdays: they're like any other day. You can think of them as a day in which you're one step closer to dead, but again--that makes it like any other day.

I like people saying Happy Birthday and stuff but I don't plan anything special. This year, for instance, the plan was to wait for the dishwasher installers to show up, which they finally did around four. There were three of them. Their hobnail boots crunched ominously on the wood floors. I worked at my computer in the kitchen while two of them ripped into the box containing the dishwasher and set it out on the floor, where it promptly tipped over with a mighty crash. I looked around and one of them said Oops. Meanwhile the third was busy hauling out the old dishwasher.

This was their second trip. The first trip they announced my water shut-off was corroded and they couldn't do anything until I got a plumber in to fix it. The plumber was a week out and charged more than the new dishwasher cost. But that's water under the, uh, sink.

The installer wanted to know if I'd ever tripped the dishwasher breaker before. Because the wires were all melted. "And if this goes far enough in, we won't be able to install it."

"You mean I'll need to get an electrician in?" This was fast becoming a thousand-dollar dishwasher.

He investigated and the damage was limited to the first inch of the wires and he said he could do it. I relaxed. Went for my email.

Just at the exact moment I finished reading the letter from my literary agent in which she said she was sorry but she was dissolving my agreement with the agency, the installer said "Uh-oh."

"What," I said, in a tone any good TV detective would recognize as homicidal.

"Have a look," he said, and I got up, made a wide arc around the kitchen knives, and had a look. Mouse turds in the cabinet hole. An inch deep.

"Huh," I said. He said nothing. There was a long pause. "Do you want me to clean that up?" I said. In fact, he did. "Do you see this sort of thing often?" I said.

"All the time," he said, although he apparently kept no vacuum in the truck, and turd removal was not in his contract. He stood back helpfully.

I got a broom, dustpan, and vacuum cleaner, and I got on my hands and knees with my ass in the air in front of three strapping young dishwasher installers, and swept up ten thousand mouse turds, on my fucking birthday, and imagined that somewhere behind a two-way mirror folks were pointing and giggling and popping corn, and I creaked back upright thinking a hantavirus was probably as good a way to go as anything, and they put in the dishwasher and left.

It's not at all the color I thought it would be and doesn't match anything. It is, unfortunately, the color I ordered. I intend to find it charming.

Donald Trump arguably was having a worse day. The impeachment inquiry had officially just begun. Then again, any day you wake up and you're Donald Trump has to be the worst day ever. Only, in his case, he doesn't realize it. He thinks he's a perfectly fine appliance, the best, like you've never seen. He doesn't know he's sitting in a tub of rodent poop.

Don't Get Me Anything

I had one of those birthdays with a zero in it yesterday. I don't do a lot of celebrating on birthdays. Every day for me is pretty much like every other day, and that's not a complaint. My days are stellar.

The only birthday I ever had that bothered me was my seventeenth. I thought you couldn't be a prodigy after the age of sixteen, and that's what I thought I should have been, so I felt officially washed up. I must've been quite the snot. I'm not sure what it was I was thinking to have accomplished by age sixteen; probably a novel or something. I always had it in mind that I would excel at writing even though there was nothing, trust me, absolutely nothing in the way of evidence to support that. At the time I was specializing in precious poetry with a lot of internal rhyme that sounded cool but didn't make any sense at all. I don't know what any of it means now, and I didn't know then either. I soldiered away at the craft like I was driving a wheelbarrow through the mud and finally buried the wheel in what I called Writer's Block at about age eighteen. It was writer's block, and only real writers can have that, right? I now credit my writer's block with being something of a truth-teller. I think it's one of my healthier qualities: I can only fake it so long, and then I bog down. And I was totally faking it. I wanted to be a writer, not write. You should always write what you know, and I didn't know anything. I'd have done just as well trying to grow a Walt Whitman beard.

Seventeen

I remember my fiftieth birthday like it was ten years ago. Dave and I thought maybe we'd haul out the old backpacks and pitch a tent up on the Timberline Trail on Mt. Hood like the old days. We'd wake up in the morning and see the sun spark the waving threads of spider silk across a blue sky. But then some dear friends from long ago showed up with love and party hats and we all went up to the mountain, and all saw beautiful things, and all slept in decent beds like sensible people, and it was the best thing ever.

It's hard to know how to celebrate when every day's a blessing. I just got another essay accepted to The Christian Science Monitor and Dave said "we should celebrate!" Yes! What should we do that would be better than what we were going to do anyway, which was have a beer and then a nice dinner that he cooks? "We could have a really good beer!" Yes! We could! Dave hunts in the fridge. "Looks like we just have our regular good beer," he says. "I love that!" I say. We have that. We clink glasses.

I've had this weird thing since I was a real little kid. Whenever I picture a number, I see it floating in

three-dimensional space with all its neighbor numbers in a twisting, meandering pattern that never changes. The spatial arrangement is set in concrete for me, but it's not sophisticated. The numbers always change direction noticeably at the tens. One through ten wiggle around quite a bit, but then they take a right turn at eleven and stagger a little, and then another right turn at twenty and thirty. From forty through a hundred, they don't move around as much. Not so many right angles. It smooths out. And it probably corresponds to life, such that the more of it you have stacked up behind you, the less important each individual number is. Daily dramas yawn, unimportant. Death loses its sting, even without being swallowed up in victory. But at any given age, I visualize myself perched on that number, in the space it's occupied since I was wee, and looking at higher and lower numbers that have not changed position my whole life. I don't see a lot of sharp turns in front of me. It should be a coast from here.