Birthday Surgery

Hi. It's the morning here, so good morning!

It has been said that at least two things would be or have been addressed by this point. For starters, I have been promising to detail the workings of the Birthday Surgeon. Well, dig what follows, please.

Alright. Everybody knows that we age. In fact, we've done it with every sentence that we've read (please note that I am trying to make this worth your aging while). See? But how it happens visibly is a different creature indeed. One might think that it's nature or whatever, but I know different. It's the BIRTHDAY SURGEON.

So, this brings us to something else entirely. The Birthday Surgeon (I say that like there's one, but I imagine that they're an entire subspecies). At some point around your birthday (and this is the "official" reason that it's impossible to change your own birthday convincingly), the Birthday Surgeon will appear during your slumber or coma or what have you, and work his or her (although I think that the self-identify largely as male, which figures) deleterious magic at your expense.

And the difference... well, it shows! Bit by bit, you are transformed into an incontinent, immobile version of your former self!

For instance, do you ever wonder where that effed-up, 3-inch, wiry, almost-pubic hair on your chin appeared overnight? The Birthday Surgeon bestowed it unto you.

Have you inexplicably just gained several pounds without any obvious cause? They were a collective gift to you from the Birthday Surgeon.

Forget something? You know, like everything? Well the Birthday Surgeon knows Neuroscience, that's for cure, and he is only too happy to apply his skills in this way.

For those among you that might be thinking, "This is pablum, Benb. Sheer, unquantifiable mythology," I counter, with way more dignity than any of us deserve, that I have actually obtained photographic evidence. This dates from the eve of my 24th birthday, 3/26/2002:

How the Birthday Surgeon found me at R. Stevie Moore's house in Bloomfield, NJ is beyond me, but I gotta go now. More soon, I swear.

Preposterity

There's an executive decision that's been made, and I'm not talking about yet another disproportionate resource-driven slaughter of civilians that is somehow meant to illustrate how bad it is to kill civilians (I mean, duh. If they really are civilians, then why don't they just stand clear of the damned ordnance?). 


No. I'm talking about an altogether different executive decision. 


I was born on the 27th of March, 1978. I've always been fond of that date for mathematical reasons (too convoluted to explain that in this forum). And, I dunno, it's just always been my birthday, and I've liked that about it, too. As I was born in Georgia (on Tobacco Road, at Fort Gordon), my birthday was on the first Monday of an actual spring (c.f. 2011's first spring Monday, which oh-by-the-way is today, and which finds us fielding a SNOWSTORM. Losing the lottery is considerably worse than merely not winning the lottery.).


As I've grown older, and not just just for climatic reasons, the 27th of March has revealed itself to be kind-of unspecial. Barely anybody remembers my birthday, and I'm tired of pretending not to care about that. I've always felt it kind of a matter of imbalance, given how I strove to remember people's birthdays (before that awful Facebook app that very indiscreetly broadcasts your specifics to all of your friends), and have in the last decade felt the significance of knowing those dates sputter into utter trivia. That's just wrong. I mean, we really have to think about birthdays...when we people are at our bar-none most vulnerable, all covered with vernix (and maybe a dash of meconium), our functional independence completely contingent upon the promptitude of whomever will sever the funiculum; why on earth would we not want to honor that in one another? Birth both trumps and transcends dignity, even for the calculating and stodgy and cruel and administrative among us. This is the underpinning of my executive decision.


My executive decision? I am going to change my birthday. That's right. Don't fucking laugh.


This has been a subject of ample discussion between my wife and me. A January 27th person, she thrills me non-stop with her fascinating Aquarius allure, but her day falls within frozen-spit distance of the winter's purported nadir. She's of a similar mind about the need to make things different, so we decided to change together, and have coinciding birthdays. Since Molly is exactly 10 months younger than me, it seemed an obvious bridge to build.


We thought of keeping it real with our shared 27th thing and all that, but it felt sort of forced. (This reminds me that, on my 21st birthday [1999], my pal Jamie got me the autograph of VANILLA ICE! It read: To BENB  HAPPY BIRTHDAY "21" Keep it Real; this has been an enduring inspiration to me, as I figured that Vanilla Ice knows more about the importance of keeping it real than anybody.) 


I have to go to bed, as there's a lot of work that I have to do, but I will post tomorrow with not only the details of my new birthday, but also my startling exposé about the Birthday Surgeon.