Thirty-one reflections to pass the day

Today's my birthday, and I love it; I've always loved my birthday, and I hope I always will. It's the one day I'm guaranteed to have to be particularly mindful to my needs and interests, and so what if the people around me have to put up with my crazy-ass announcing that it's my birthday and I can do what the fuck I want to do for 24 hours? I firmly believe that your birthday should serve as a big middle finger to death, that you beat it for another year.

I have officially rounded the curve on "30" and I'm now officially in my "30's," with today. Of course, I don't feel any different than I did yesterday when I was technically a year younger, but I've always believed strongly in the premise that age is not in your years, but how old you feel. Believe me, I've talked to folks in their 20s that looked and sounded like people in their 50s. And I don't feel 30 ... or rather, in my 30s.

And I never really bought into attempts by some folks to make profound observations on their birthday. It's almost like eulogies; you can say all you want to, but you're always bound to leave something out, and it doesn't change the fact that some things pass and we can't help it. But, I did start thinking about the things that I've been around and exposed to that really have helped make life pretty fan-damn-tastic. If you, SGM reader, can bear to give me a a moment of reflection, to just focus on these things, it'd be better than any present most folks could give me.

1) Real cherry Coke; not the pre-made kind, I mean the kind where you start out with regular Coke, but the waitress has to add cherry syrup & stir it around to mix the tastes together. Coca-Cola Inc. couldn't bottle that if they tried.

2) Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion effects; you can take your Peter Jackson remake, with its 3 hours of character development and hobbits and computer enhanced graphics. I'll take a Kong made of clay any day of the week, and I'll up the ante with sword-wielding skeletons ("Seventh Voyage of Sinbad"), Ymirs ("20 Million Miles to Earth") and the rhedosaurus ("Beast From 20,000 Fathoms") any day of the week. CGI can suck my dick.

3) Run DMC's "Peter Piper;" the opening lines that display the best tandem rhyming ever commited to wax, combined with that scratch in the middle (the one that follows "Not bad meaning bad/ But bad meaning good" .... "that is"). An almost perfect jam.

4) Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Arguably the best of the tragedies; I have seen the film version, the Kurosawa adaptation, I have four book versions (incl. a children's book [!]), I've seen it on stage twice, and I'm currently looking for a Book-on-CD version that offers an unabridged, solid full-cast reading of the play.

5) Samurai philosophy, discipline & history. If I were reborn into any era, in any place, I would want it to be feudal Japan. The samurai culture, with its emphasis of honor in warfare, is by far very interesting to me. I have even used samurai philosophy to promote wellness through my therapeutic clients.

6) "American Werewolf in London." One of the best horror films ever made. The way the film sets up is on par with the great modern age horror films of all time ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Halloween," etc.). It takes conventions of the genre and spins them into that which you least expect.

7) Banana milk shakes. Thank you for the extra forty lbs.

8) Kurt Angle vs. Chris Benoit, Royal Rumble 2003.

9) Steven Wright; I had the chance to see him perform live, and it was great. Now, my comedy tastes have advanced to the Lewis Blacks and Mitch Hedbergs, and listening to older Steven Wright routines doesn't have the same punch, but it wasn't that long ago that I was thoroughly entertained by his non-sequitur comedy. It was Wright that made me think I wanted to be a comedian for all of 2 days when I was in elementary school.

10) Horror comics of the 70s & 80s. "Tomb of Dracula" and "House of Mystery" made me lose more sleep than I'll ever be able to get back, but I would rather have been cowering under the covers than believing at the time that human beings were capable of atrocities far beyond what Marv Wolfman & Cain the Caretaker could ever weave.

11) Columbo. I grew up watching this show on Fridays, really late, wondering at my young age how in the hell this show could be so interesting if you already knew who the killer was ... and damned if I wasn't just glued to the TV. A perfect prologue to Saturday morning cartoons, if ever there was one.

12) Godzilla movies, Abbott & Costello, and Transformer cartoons; when we got our first VCR in the house, the local video store only had more adult-oriented comedies, horror and dramas on video, so my parents weren't about to let me watch those. But, the Video Place also had every Godzilla film, every A&C film, and every Transformers cartoon on video. And I spent more downtime watching those than I care to admit.

13) Elmore Leonard writes him some damn good books.

14) Warren Ellis writes him some damn good comics.

15) Universal's Wolfman; Lon Chaney's pride & joy.

16) "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. One of the best mysteries ever penned.

17) To quote one of my best friends, Willard: "I'd never hit a woman, but I would smack a bitch." You will not deny the wisdom in that statement. Peace to you, Thriller.

18) The Pistons NBA title win in 2004 was probably one of the most exciting in a long time.

19) Galaga & Street Fighter II; easily, hands-down two of the best stand-up arcade games ever made, from the era when arcades sucked money out of pockets.

20) The Riverwalk Park in downtown Greenville, SC.

21) The well-tempered steel of a sword or knife.

22) Chasey Lain ... love her. Back when I worked at the video store, and wasn't dating, I was the designated "back room" restocker. And trust me, when you stand in front of a wall of porn chicks, it starts to fuck with your head. But I remember some guy bringing in an adult video, chucking it at me and saying that it was damaged & he wanted a free replacement rental. Well, he had also checked it out three days prior, so after quizzing him about it (which he no-sold by repeatedly asking if I was calling him a liar), I made up some rule that we have to preview all tapes that are reported as damaged before we issue any replacement rentals & took this one to the back. It was "Nymph" starring Chasey Lain, and needless to say, there was nothing wrong with that video ... hell nah.

23) The return to a "big three" in professional wrestling; for as long as I've been a wrestling fan, the sport has always cycled around three major players, as far as organizations/federations were concerned. When I was younger, it was AWA, NWA (Jim Crockett Promotions), and the WWF. It wasn't long after that the AWA folded, NWA became WCW, and the WWF ... well, they stayed the same. A few years later, Eastern Championship Wrestling changed their name and booking tactics, Extreme Championship Wrestling was born, and we had a "big three". That lasted until the year 2001, when both ECW & WCW went out of business and were absorbed into the WWF. And then there was one. Thankfully, this is changing, as TNA seems to be building steam with a solid roster and critically acclaimed pay-per-views every month. And I gotta say, the more ROH I watch, the more I'm convinced that if they latched onto the same zeitgeist that ECW did, more people would be impressed with their product to gain them national attention (there was a recent Entertainment Weekly article on them, if I'm not mistaken). All this, while WWF continues to go into the shitter. 2006 looks to be an interesting year to be a fan.

24) The Curt Hennig Memorial Lethal Lottery Tournament; it remains one of the most rewarding board projects that I am still committed to doing on a semi-regular basis.

25) Homicide: Life on the Streets, perhaps the greatest television show on man's planet.

26) Of all the jobs I reflect on in the past, the three that I miss the most, but not enough to want to ever go back to them, are 1) Pizza Hut delivery (fat money on a weekly basis, plus all the hot waitress nook I could get); 2) Buckingham Correctional Center staff psychologist (I miss those crazy, incarcerated fuckers); and 3) Foozles Books in Pigeon Forge (half price on any Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge attractions for county employees, plus all the hot coworker nook I could get).

27) The Cascades hiking trail near Radford, VA.

28) That feeling when I'd pop a crowd by dunking in a basketball game; being the white guy that I am, it always felt good to get that one short burst in a game when I'd take the game above the rim & have everyone from teammates to opponents patting me on the back, saying, "Damn, man, you got some ups." Track was my sport of choice, but my love's always with my balling days.

29) Grapes, the best damn fruit that has ever populated the earth.

30) Public Enemy, the rap group. When everyone my age in my lower-middle class white neighborhood was playing the rebellious, pubescent rage act by growing their hair long and listening to heavy metal, I kicked it up a notch and busted out "Get the green, black and red and/ Gold down, countdown to armageddon" during the family meal. 'Cause if you really want to rebel, you couldn't do it better than by being a white kid listening to angry, politically-charged black urban music. Those Metallica kids up the street didn't have shit on me.

31) Firmly adhering to my "don't drink, don't smoke, don't drug" policy. I don't have any ill feelings toward those that do it ... I just choose not to. And I don't think I'm better than folks that do those things, either. I just have this belief that my body and mind are sacred architectures, built and maintained by physio/biological science, and to put anything in there that is unnatural is to succumb to loss of control. And that loss of control cultivates weakness ... watch a smoker 5 min past his or her nicotine fix, and you'll see what I mean. I maintain control as much as I can, and I believe that this has kept me young, even when time has not.

(Anyone who has read to the point, thanks.)