As of 6:08 this morning it is my birthday, and as someone who is now another year wiser I would like to say a thing, and that thing is that having babies in December should not be allowed. Like by law, I mean. I know that’s a fascism but I don’t care because a December birthday is truly one of humanity’s cruelest tricks.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get people to give a shit about your birthday when it is in the month of December? It is nigh on impossible! And that is not me fishing for you to make a thing of my birthday because for fuck’s sake, EYE don’t even want to be bothered with it! I have enough problems!
First of all I just started a new job last week (omg thank you so much) and I was born with a rare chromosomal condition called impostor syndrome which means new jobs stress me out so much they scramble my brain to the point I honestly forgot it was my birthday until about fifteen minutes ago.
But even without that, who has the time?! A birthday? I’m over here fighting for my fucking life trying to figure out what the Christ to buy my brother-in-law for Christmas and carve out time to actually bake the traditional British Christmas mince pies for which I spent 100 American dollars having ingredients shipped from England and now have absolutely no interest in, and you want me think about a birthday? In December? In this economy?!
I’ve been living at my (family-of-choice™) sister’s house because that’s how my life has shaken out in this year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Two😎 (her child’s best friend refers to me as “That uncle who lives in your basement or whatever,” which is the greatest drag I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life because this house doesn’t even HAVE a basement and yet the spirit of the drag is irrefutable. I will be laughing about it for the next three to five business days), and when she asked me all cheerful the other day, “What do you want to do for your birthday?!” it was all I could do to not hurl her Christmas tree into the fireplace as I realized, like I do every year, “Fuck! It’s December! Fucking fuck goddammmit FUUUCK! NO! FUCK! FUCKING FUCK!”
This is what it’s like to have a December birthday, every year. Jesus Christ, Birthday, not now! We’ve only just recovered from Thanksgiving! Read the goddamn room!
Now I do want to own my ~*privilege*~ and acknowledge that as bad as it is to have a birthday on December 5 having a birthday in the back half of December? Bitch that’s terrorism. My mom‘s birthday is December 22 and this woman had one (1) birthday party her entire childhood. One! And it was a half-birthday party held in July! And almost nobody came because she invited the Black girl from Brownies! (The Help-ass shit, man fuck the 1950s.)
Truly this December birthday shit is a waking nightmare, because while everyone else at least gets to enjoy the holidays in peace, we get to contend with the yearly “Oh my fucking God what am I doing with my life another year older and I’m still a fucking piece of shit love that for me” smack dab in the midst of what is supposed to be everyone’s favorite time of the year. Cool!
Sure, many of us feel this on New Year’s, but at least you’re shit-faced and everyone’s feeling inadequate so you’re all in the same boat. But having an existential crisis while the literal entire rest of the world is scream-singing along with Mariah Carey in front of a Christmas tree? Seriously? Why stop there, why not just burn me at the stake in the middle of Disneyland?! Hell, go back in time and drag me onstage in the middle of that Tom Holland Lip Sync Battle clip and have Zendaya bludgeon me to death with his prop umbrella? If you’re gonna force me to be miserable in the midst of one of humanity’s purest forms of glee then commit to the bit!
But even if you are one of these brain-damaged monsters who actually gets excited about the day of your birth instead of waking up every year thinking, “Why must I be required to celebrate this when I definitely did not ask to be born” like I do, you still get hosed. Because what people love to do is the ol’ “combination birthday-and-Christmas present” shuck and jive, which sounds rad but in practice is just an excuse for someone to smile proudly and say, “Well ordinarily I’d only spend $40 but for you I spent $50 because it’s your birthday and Christmas gift” like they’ve just bought you a goddamn villa in Gstaad when in reality they just splurged for the upgraded Chia Pet that looks like Barack Obama instead of an armadillo or whatever the fuck those things are supposed to look like. The whole thing is a grift! I see you bitch!
Truly, who allowed all this? Can parents not keep it in their fucking pants during the month of March to prevent the scourge of the December birthday from befalling their children? It’s fucking irresponsible, is what it is. All you had to do was fuck in February, hold off, and then fuck in April! You couldn’t do your kids that solid? April is when all the animals outside your house are fucking, are you too good to fuck in April too? You just HAD to get it in in March, huh? Man fuck you.
HOLD ON SIDEBAR ADDENDUM UPDATE CAVEAT EMPTOR.
I’ve just discussed this with said sister, who is an OB/GYN and also a December baby, and she informs me my math is wrong because one is actually pregnant for 10 months in toto. This means we December children were not conceived in March, but rather February, which can only mean one thing: We were conceived on fucking Valentine’s Day.
I am REELING. On one hand, this does make my entire life make sense—my parents had already hated each other’s guts for many moons by the time of my conception so I have always wondered how exactly I ended up here, and have long presumed I was probably the product of a hate-fuck? I mean these hoes got divorced while I was in utero, things were BAD in the first quarter of fiscal 1978! So it only stands to reason this was some War of the Roses-type shit, right?
To now learn it was more likely during a Valentine’s Day attempt at salvaging a marriage during which my mom wore some Sears & Roebuck negligée or some shit? Repulsive. I’m repulsed!
Heterosexuality is a mental illness. You people are disgusting! Out here fucking willy-nilly on Valentine’s Day and then saddling your kids with December birthdays AND the knowledge they were conceived on a day when straight people show their *checks notes* “love” by giving each other candy hearts with slogans on them like “Call me” and, inexplicably, “For Pete’s Sake”? If you people don’t get the entire fuck out of here with this shit I swear to fucking God.
Jesus, now I’m even angrier at my parents than I already have been! I’ve spent thousands of dollars on therapy only to now find out I will never fully recover because there is no remedy for news as disgusting as having been conceived on fucking Valentine’s Day. Eew!!! How am I supposed to face my father for our annual awkward post-Christmas gathering where we studiously avoid each other’s gaze while helping my nephew put together his Legos now that I know this knowledge?! I can’t fucking do this. Thank God my mother no longer speaks to me because I CANNOT ever look that woman in the eye EVER AGAIN.
Disgusting behavior. Disgusting! STOP FUCKING FUCKING ON VALENTINE’S DAY YOU FUCKING DEVIANTS. FIND GOD.
I’ll say this, though: being deeply annoyed and inconvenienced by my birthday is an improvement on things, because I used to truly, truly hate my birthday. Every year I would get dragged down into an intractable and often debilitating depression, which I later learned in therapy was mostly due to the ~*childhood trauma*~ of having been mercilessly bullied by these kids Jason and Kingsley on my 12th birthday. Sixth grade is also when I gained class consciousness, so I spent the rest of the school day lying about my mom taking me to the expensive Italian place all my rich classmates went to for their birthdays, when in reality we were going to the adjacent suburb the kids in my school called “white trash” to have meatballs at the Ponderosa buffet.
I sat there with meatball gravy sluicing over my chin like a proxy for my tears, despondent over Jason and Kingsley and wracked with guilt because in the grand tradition of codependent single mother/son relationships with insufficient boundaries, I was well aware of how hurt my mom would be if she knew how embarrassed I was about a birthday of Ponderosa meatballs she bought me with money she couldn’t afford to spend. It was like that meme but in real life: “You okay honey? You haven’t even touched your Ponderosa horse meat!”
Can you believe I was still crying about this shit at like 35 years old?! Brains are so dumb. I mean I had to book an EMDR session about this shit! And for what? Those Ponderosa meatballs were delicious, horse or otherwise! And Jason looked like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets while Kingsley was rumored to be in a sexual relationship with his fucking chihuahua. My brain let these people ruin my birthday until my mid-thirties? What a maroon.
Despite all that sturm and drang, I have had some truly lovely birthdays in recent years. For my 40th I drove 70 hours a week in my Uber car instead of the usual 60 so that I could go to Paris and eat my favorite emotional support croissants and depression-sublimating steak béarnaise, then I flew home and my best friend threw me a Madonna-themed party with a Costco birthday cake. If you’re a certain kind of broken-brained homosexual of a certain age you really can’t do much better than that.
I don’t remember my 41st birthday but COVID meant I had to spend my 42nd alone, so I went on a gorgeous hike of Corral Canyon in Malibu, got fish n chips at the seafood place at the trailhead, and then went to my favorite beach and watched one of the most incredible sunsets of my entire life, deciding as it dipped behind the mountains that my 42nd year would be the one when I changed my life. And for once, I actually did. So. Pretty good!
Last year my birthday fell while I was living in London for a few months and I spent it with my girl Hazel who lives on a boat in one of London’s gazillion canals? Can you believe? I went over to this bitch’s boat and she’d baked me a clafoutis in her little boat oven! Then we went to this pub in Islington for Sunday roast with potatoes baked in duck fat. Now that’s what I call a birthday.
This year is a little strange, though. I’m 44 today, which means my life is now split into equal pre-adult and post-adult halves (if we’re considering 22, not 18, as the adulthood milestone—out of college and out on one’s own as the beginning of adulthood). That’s a strange feeling, because until about 15 minutes ago my adult life has been quite a mess, at times horrifyingly so. I know it’s simply a function of being older, and of course when crazy, difficult, often terrifying things just keep happening, bam bam bam one right after the other for two decades, the passage of time stops feeling like it’s making any sense.
Be that as it may, those two decades feel like they ran at dizzying speed, whereas the first two felt like slow-mo—which I guess is what happens when you spend your coming of age plotting your escape from everything and everyone you’ve ever known. It’s disorienting to look back over my life and now see equal halves. For a long time I felt sort of comforted by how disproportionate those two chunks of life were, how much longer my dark upbringing was than the confusing, chaotic mess my adulthood turned out to be despite all my best-laid plans. There was something hopeful in the notion that someday soon, I’d have my shit together, and that balance would finally tilt, the math would be different. It’s difficult—and maybe even unnatural—not to feel a bit disappointed to see that pan out so differently than you thought, and hoped, it would.
I am choosing, however, to look at the upshots here. I can’t bring myself to say it for fear of jinxing everything, but if I were a normal person whose brain wasn’t addled by superstition borne of having been an evangelical Christian for most of his formative years, I’d be tempted to say that all the shit I’ve learned from all the shit that happened is finally turning shit around. And I sure did experience some interesting stuff along the way, because that’s the thing about being a fucking mess for decades—every now and then the profoundly broken decision-making center in your brain puts you in some situations that really blow your hair back, in a good way, I mean.
Due to the very specific, very homosexual ways in which my brain is broken, sometimes when I’m feeling weird about my birthday I will think about what Madonna was doing at whatever age I am. Please know that I know how absurdly hilarious it is to be a person whose entire psyche is basically constructed of dissociative Madonna fandom. It’s like a personality tic Tina Fey would’ve given Jenna Maroney if 30 Rock were about gay men or something. But sometimes this is what we use art for, right? To help us navigate through our own experiences? So just go with me on this.
When I turned 40, for instance—on that trip to Paris—I listened to her 40th year album, Ray of Light, practically on a loop, because it’s about all that turning 40 stuff—all those moments of re-examination, all that trying to make sense of who you used to be, who you think you might be now, what sinews might still connect the two.
So what can Madonna’s 44th year tell me about my own? Well (LOLOLOL), turns out 44 was a bit of a flop year for Madonna! Her big song that year was “Die Another Day,” a James Bond theme about Sigmund Freud, or something, that makes absolutely no sense. “I’m gonna wake up, yes and no”? The fuck does that even mean. Those are words, in English, there’s a subject and predicate, and yet it carries no meaning. “I’m gonna close my body now”? Bitch respectfully what the fuck are you talking about? “I’m gonna destroy my ego”? Ma’am this is a Wendy’s.
In the annals of James Bond theme songs, no one has more profoundly misunderstood the assignment. And if that weren’t bad enough her 44th year is also the year of Swept Away, the profoundly bad collaboration with her ex-husband Guy Ritchie to give the 1974 Italian film of the same name a remake absolutely nobody asked for. And for once this is a movie that is bad despite Madonna, not because of her, cuz she’s actually… funny in it? Occasionally? But still, it is so bad that I went to see this shit in the movie theater on a Saturday night in Los Angeles, where people will just go to the movies and see whatever just for the sake of doing so, and it was still just me and one other fag sitting there looking at each other like:
However 44 is also when the ol’ girl started making what I consider to be one of the best albums of her career, American Life, even though it is routinely maligned as the worst because people don’t understand it, nor do they understand her, nor do they consider it in the context of the immediately-post-9/11, pre-Iraq time in which it was made, but that is an entirely different essay for an entirely different Substack for people who care about the semiotics of Madonna albums, one to which I will subject you some time next year when the album’s 20th anniversary rolls so unsubscribe now, you’ve been warned.
The point is, she responded to that flop era with an interesting, experimental album so off the beaten path almost nobody appreciated it, and almost no one does to this day, but still—she pushed the boat out, and that’s not nothing. And then the following year, at 45, she started making Confessions on a Dance Floor, considered by many to be the best album she’s ever made! They’re wrong, it’s Ray of Light or Like a Prayer or maybe even Erotica, depending on the day you ask me, but still! It’s #3, at least.
Similarly, my 43rd year has been spent making messes, but my 44th year is kicking off with me pushing the boat out, in all kinds of ways, in order to clean them up. So maybe 44 is gonna be the year of my American Life album, and then next December I’ll be in my Confessions on a Dance Floor era, and won’t none of you be able to tell me shit.
I mean I know I could just dispense with this whole metaphor and just be like, “2022 was a bit of a bust, but 2023 is shaping up to be a lot better” and leave it at that, like a normal person. But as a Sagittarius and an Enneagram Four and the adult version of a little gay boy who had to escape into fantasy to survive, I’m choosing to do what Michael Cunningham did in The Hours, except instead of Virginia Woolf everyone’s channeling Madonna. Mrs. Ciccone said she would buy the flowers herself, etc.
So I guess look for my critically reviled and universally misunderstood watershed album next year. Until then? Just leave me alone, because nobody has time for a fucking birthday. That shit’s canceled until at least January 15!
Did you enjoy this post? No? Me neither. You should subscribe anyway though!
Ok bye!
Not Now, Birthday
Happy Birthday, John, however barbaric the sentiment may seem.
Looking forward to the album!