In my region there's not much to love about January. It's cold, dark, and the post holiday season debt depression is setting in. You've spent too much on Christmas. I get it. I've spent too much as well. We have to buy our children's love somehow, right?
Growing up I always got the whole, "We got you your birthday and Christmas present" combination. It's the same pair of socks that my brothers received. I don't want to sound entitled, but it always felt like a spit in the face after watching siblings of mine enjoy elaborate birthday parties, while I got literally nothing extra. People can have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle parties in the winter too, damn it. Sometimes I got the "funds have been a little tight and we've been really busy", thing where everyone said they'd celebrate my birthday some other day that never ended up coming. I always just took this as being bad timing. It wasn't that I thought everyone cared less about me or something, I was just an unfortunate casualty of the calendar.
This year seemed like business as usual.
The fiancée and child came down with COVID. This meant we would be celebrating later when everyone felt better. As if my life isn't already consumed enough by the COVID virus, I started showing symptoms myself on my birthday. (It's the gift that keeps on giving.) I'm force fed COVID in the media, general layman conversational politics, and working fire/EMS services ad nauseam. Now I've had a nagging headache for days in case I forget that the virus exists. This is my second time contracting the virus with the last time being, you guessed it, during my last birthday.
I also was served some papers about getting subpoenaed to court to testify for the state because of one of the recent ambulance runs I was on. You know one of those, "we'll celebrate later", type of presents.
I not into astrology, but what the fuck is a Capricorn? All I know is that it's supposed to be my sign.
It's like a chimera of the two least desirable animals. How else would you come up combining a fish and a goat? I don't suspect it would be very good on land or sea. There's like zero appeal to the sign as well. They basically list a Capricorn as being a personality-less know-it-all. Even the constellation that it was named after is mostly known for being, "very faint".
God looked down on the poor little Capricorn and was like, "hey bub finances have been rough during Christmas. We'll get you your legs later, or maybe a fish head or some shit. Oh yeah, we love you, I guess."
On my 21st birthday I was pumped to be able to go to the bar. I had been doing months of honing my alcoholism prior to that taking on such challenges as drinking coffee mugs full of coconut flavored rum (I almost puked thinking about this again). I was going to see the wonders of the bars and be met by hordes of attractive young women there. It was going to be a blast. Except that, no one wanted to go to the bar. I couldn't reach most of my friends and only really found an acquaintance that wanted to go to the bars with me.
This friend did not drive. I did not want a DUI so we decided to forego the "cool" bars and stick with the little rough and tumble type of bars in town. It was a complete redneck-fest. Everyone there other than myself and my acquaintance was at least twenty years older than us and male. I drowned my sorrow in cheap beer and ended up playing some pool with a few guys there. One of the gentlemen playing pool invited us to his house at closing time with the allure of having more beer. The dude stated everyone was just going to play cards. Having nothing better to do at 2am in the semi-tundra of my neighborhood I agreed.
Everything was alright, at least what I remember of it. The host left the house for around an hour and came back calling me into the kitchen. He said, "I got you a present" and smacked something wrapped in cellophane into my hand. I had no idea what it was. I squeezed the small white rocks that were in the bag but it wasn't clicking that I was holding a bag of crack. Then it hit me. Oh shit, this is crack. I was immediately offended. Why would you hand me this dude? I'm not a fucking crackhead. I made a huge scene and then announced my departure from the building. I looked at my acquaintance and said, "come on dude let's get out of here." He replied, "I think I'm going to stay." It was clearly a cooler idea to smoke crack with strangers than to leave with me.
I stumbled home through the dark streets trying to process everything that was happening through the lens of inebriation.
Fun fact: If you tally up a lot of birthdays you can correlate the conception date with major holidays or birthdays of your parents. I found out from my mom that I was a little late being birthed. That puts my date of conception around April Fool's Day. How fitting.
Another Fun Fact: King George II was one of my fellow casualties of the calendar and had a birthday in late November. He made the decision to start celebrating his birthday in more fair weather months and since then many of the elite royal class have done the same.
Maybe I need to start celebrating in a warmer month too.
Moral of the story: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. If someone offers you crack, you should probably smoke it. Especially if it's one of the most thoughtful birthday gifts you've ever received.