The week of my birthday is a weird week to think that I was born bigger(and more ready to breathe) than Kate’s miracle baby on “This Is Us” (I was 3 pounds 5 ounces, young Jack 2, 8, but of course with 45 years more technology, more awareness that things go wrong, and the cultural sense that my life is too much of a bummer for a show that prides itself on crypoints per episode.
Fuck you, too, "This Is Us".
This birthday feels a little bit more like an accident anniversary than some of my previous ones. Even though I’m creeping back into some of my things, the slower-than-usual pace of life with corona has given my life a somber cast.(Maybe it is a true triumph of the human spirit, even though I don’t believe I’ve ever said that not being sardonic- that I was ever able to get excited about my birthday at all.) I’m not Jewish, but I wonder, if I had been how it might have affected my personality to have been born in a season so concerned with righting wrongs and setting things right…maybe it did anyway.(Would I have been more grateful if born in November as expected?)
This is the second year in a row that I couldn’t possibly fit in a year’s worth of bucket-list worthy cool stuff in the last two weeks so it feels like I’ve Lived.(Appreciate losing this pressure, not loving the societal slowdown that made it likely.)
This year is the first year I can maybe play the dozens on a third-grade level and sometimes enjoy an unofficial role as #SimonsLittleHelper(Because he can’t be there every time some jerk’s mother needs mocking) but I’m pretty sure some West Baltimore kid could get one look at my big teeth and the wheelchair with the tape on it and take me down a peg or twelve.(learning to do that shows me I talk about Actual!Mom a lot, which is why she’s actual mom nowadays, though I sit before you as one of the few people on this seaboard who could find out one of those Mrs. Robinson scenarios is true and have her life make *more* sense, instead of less.(But, alas, it’s not)
48 seems like an impossibly huge, mommish or professorial
number, though I never really got close to being either of those things. Kind
of hard to talk about what I am, cause at least at my level, “writer” and “activist”
feel at least as generic as the other one I have a tiny shot at, “social media
influencer”(Even I read all those things, about me or anyone else, and halfway
think ‘how nice for you!” so I would like to blame you if you think that, but I
can’t.) I do have an audience, and David Simon reads my stuff sometimes, which
is absolutely like having a kvetchy Mikey
eating my cereal at long last, and would totally be a bullet point on my resume
if HR departments were all run by Wirefiends, especially since he did tell me
something I’d completely misread the first time we “met”(I misread the question…did
it stop me? For once, no.) but I’m not a shitsquib. Yet. Plenty of loyal, if farflung enough friends and family to keep Carole King's "So Far Away" in my head at least once a week, but I get by with their help all the same.
I have had more “In another life…” moments than “How YOU doin’?” moments.(if there’s something to be done about this, I doubt there’s an algorithm to solve it.0
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