It's August 15th

I used to wear a watch that showed the month and the day, but I don't anymore. I'm fickle that way. I've switched to a Bulova wristwatch from the 1940s, which I bought for myself as a present last year for starting a job that only lasted a month, and ended ingloriously. I still wear the Bulova, though.

It has a simple face, with no month or date, so, oftentimes, I don't know what date we're all on-- I'm often on a different one than you. Without that constant reminder, it's easy to lose track.

When I went to the pharmacy to pick up my asthma medication, I glanced down at the signature pad before signing my name and saw that it was August 15th today. I thought for a moment about what was significant about August 15th and nothing specific came to me, though I knew it was something. An hour or so later, I realized it was my best friend's birthday.

But we haven't spoken since May, so it doesn't really matter.

We had a falling out that is inevitable amongst certain types of male friends-- a fight about the other one's girlfriend. It wasn't what you're thinking-- that I wanted to sleep with her or something like that. I just confessed that I didn't trust her, and that, in my best friend's mind, concluded our friendship-- a friendship that began in 4th grade, petered out in high school, and then reignited in college when we discovered that we were living in the same dorm, and had carried on ever since. Until May.

I don't know if he's going to read this post or not, and it doesn't really matter anyway. I wish I could call my friend and wish him a happy birthday, but we all know I'm not going to do that. I want to wish things could go back to the way they were before, but I don't really know which "before" I'd be wishing for, so I just won't. Wishing doesn't get you much these days anyway, I find.

Life without a best friend is strange once you've had one for many years, but you adapt. There is, of course, no replacement for a best friend, just like there is no cure for a broken heart, but the days and nights keep rolling along and we do our little thing in spite of our loss. There isn't really a day that goes by where I don't think about him, at least once. At least fleetingly. In truth, it scares me, though, how ambivalent I've grown about the loss, and it scares me too to think about how ambivalent he has most likely grown as well, as he has adapted and moved on, too.

Thinking back on it, our friendship was probably more volatile and more succeptible to collapse than I realized. We had huge fights and falling outs in the past, and we are both extraordinarily truculent and hot-headed, making apologies hard to come by.

I don't know who was right and who was wrong in our final argument, and I don't care either. Somebody speculated recently that, when his relationship ends he will come back to me, but I don't necessarily want either of those events to occur. I want him to be happy, with or without her, and with or without me.

They say you need friends to survive in this world, but I don't really know if that's true. Maybe they're just nice to have, like leather seats in your car. Part of me can't believe I'm saying that after burying my oldest friend's brother on Thursday, and part of me can. Maybe it's just the depression talking. But, if I were more upbeat, it would probably just be the Xanax talking, and I only treat my asthma.

When this falling out first happened, I thought it was a great tragedy to lose your best friend, but I've come to realize that, while it's still a tragedy, it's not so great. It's just one of those things. What we're so afraid of losing sometimes, I feel, is the history, and all the history is still there, it's just that looking at memories is a little more abstract now. Remembering my past used to be like looking at a Wyeth painting, now it's kind of like looking at a Picasso-- it's still beautiful, but it's also a little fucked up. You have to struggle to look through the weird colors and shapes. It's not so pleasant or so easy to sit back and remember anymore.

Soon it won't be August 15th anymore, and that will be okay with me.

See You in Heaven

Because I live less than half a mile away from my parents house, I have the good fortune to be over there a lot. I'm not sure that many other people would consider such proximity to be fortuitous, but I do.

My wife and I were at my parents house on Sunday for a combined Mother's Day/Masonic Apron Birthday celebratory dinner. My father, who is a late bloomer in the kitchen, cooked his traditional garlic-swathed vegetables and succulent shrimp. (A side note: Yes, he is Israeli, and yes, shrimp are not kosher. We do what we want.)

My oldest sister was in attendance at the dinner, and, being the gossip maven, she kept me abreast of the latest important developments in our small little world:

1.) My aunt and uncle are selling their house, which burned to the ground in 2005 while my aunt was drunk and napping in the bathtub. She only survived because a neighbor saw the fire and ran into the house and got her out. They used the insurance money, and a lot of other money that wasn't theirs, to rebuild greater and grander than before. The house is going for $1.4 million. Cash or check. Paper or plastic.

2.) There is a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Montgomery County. Why does my sister know this? Why, because she elected to receive text message and e-mail alerts from the Montgomery County Health Department to aide in scaring the bejesus out of her, obviously.

Cryptosporidium, by the way, "a gastrointestinal illness caused by parasitic protozoa of the genus Cryptosporidium and can produce watery diarrhea lasting 1--3 weeks; one or two cases per 100,000 population are reported annually in the United States. Fecal-oral transmission of Cryptosporidium oocysts occurs through ingestion of contaminated drinking or recreational water, consumption of contaminated food, and contact with infected persons or animals (e.g., cattle or sheep)."

This information is taken, obviously, from the email message that she forwarded to me the following day. I have since taken steps to limit my intimate contact with cows and sheep, as well as putting the kabash on fecal-oral activities.

Thanks, sis.

If you weren't discussing gastrointestinal diseases at the dining room table at your Mother's Day celebration, I have no doubt that you were at least chit-chatting about death and cemetery plots. No? You're weird. We were.

I forget exactly how it came up-- I think we were talking about my Great Aunt who is currently living in Florida with her 3rd husband, who is 92 years old, in excellent physical condition, but whose brain is being turned into a cottage-cheese-like mixture, not by Hulu, but by Alzheimers. He is uncontrollable. When the two of them go out to dinner, he routinely approaches young, beautiful women and advises them to have sex with him, regardless of whether or not they are already accompanied by a gentleman caller. When my parents visited them in Florida last month, my father complained that the kitchen chair on which he was sitting was very hard. My Great Uncle cried, "AH! Like my PENIS!"

Always an Olympic-level alcoholic, this tendency has only increased with his Alzheimers. Where he used to begin drinking at two or three in the afternoon, my Great Uncle will now commence libation activities at around 9am, consuming twelve to fourteen glasses of vodka or gin (that are watered down with futility by my Great Aunt.)

"You know, she's going to leave him there (in Florida) when he dies," my father said to us at the Mother's Day dinner.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, not entirely surprised.

"Yeah," my father said, smiling mischieveously, "she said that the second he's in the fucking ground she's moving back to Philadelphia."

"Well, where will she be buried?" my sister asked while conducting a necropsy on her eviscerated piece of shrimp.

"With my parents, with us," my mother said with irritation.

"With us, huh? Where the hell are "us"?" I asked.

"My parents are in Frazier."

"Is that where you're going?" I asked.

"I'm going to Heaven," my mother answered with all the confidence of someone announcing that they were going to Trenton or to the gas station.

"Oh, really?" I asked, amused.

"Yes," she answered, cracking a smile.

"Wow. I didn't realize that's where you were going. I guess I should engage in more air travel after you're dead, maybe I'll see you out the fucking window."

My mother laughed at that.

"Sure, you will. I'll be floating around the clouds."

I stared at her.

"Hey, it's better than thinking I'll be stinking and rotting in the ground."

"Well, yeah, you got me there," I said. My father continued eating, no doubt completely disengaged from the current conversation. My father is like HD-TV. Sometimes he's totally tuned in and impressive, and then *poof!* the signal goes out.

"What exactly is it that makes funerals so expensive," my sister pontificated, "is it that people haven't pre-purchased their plots, or is it the service, or.... I mean, what is it?"

"Well, I think part of it is the fucking casket, for Christ's sake," I blurted out. "I mean those fucking boxes alone are, like, $3,000."

"Really?" my sister asked, stunned. I was surprised she hadn't already exhaustively researched and vetted them on Consumer Reports.

"Really," I said, "and those aren't even the ones with power windows."

I asked my mother if they had their plots purchased.

"Yup. Picked out, purchased and paid for."

I admired her businesslike attitude about the whole thing. She's always been a no-nonsense type person, like Margaret Thatcher without the business suits, handbags and cool accent. I guess it was her stoic practicality that made her comment about ascending upwards in a white robe to hobnob with St. Peter and Gandhi so surprising to me. My mother can smell bullshit a mile-and-a-half away and no greater bullshit story has ever been written to surpass Heaven. If there is a Heaven, my mother will be there. I just hope they'll let me have visitation sessions.

Ten or so minutes later, the conversation had moved onto another topic-- God knows what-- I think my wife was putting my sister onto the Consumer Report hunt for a new gas stove for us. In a week, we will have a dossier on ovens bigger and more detailed than J. Edgar Hoover's file on Marilyn Monroe. Ever the perseverator, I turned to my mother.

"So, let's say you decide to get cremated and have your ashes spread in the ocean. If I go snorkeling, will I see you?"

Beeeeeeee-day

It's almost my birthday.

May 12th. Buy me things.

I'll be 29 years old. I wonder if 20 Something Bloggers will take back my membership card a year from Tuesday. I won't give it up without a fight.

I don't know quite how I feel about my birthday these days. It's funny. See, on the one hand, I'm an attention whore. I am coming to terms with this. I mean, if you examine the things I like to do in my life (principally-- act and blog) my attention whoredom is pretty obvious. I'm only now just coming to terms with it, and I thank you for your assistance-- although that seems kind of ass-backwards, but that's okay. I don't thank you guys nearly enough.

So, being a self-proclaimed attention-whore, you'd think that I would eat my birthday up with a red plastic spoon and wash it down with some sugary cake. But the attention-whore in me is in competition with the influence of 28 years of my father poo-poohing his own birthday.

Dad: "Why do I give a fuck about my birthday?"

Me: "Um, because it's nice?"

Dad: "Nice? Please. Fuck that!"

When my father was growing up in Israel, they didn't used to have birthdays. They imported them from America back in the mid-seventies, after he'd come and gone. He doesn't understand his birthday-- the point, the purpose. He doesn't like being fawned over and, if we ever bought him a tie, he'd strangle us with it. A "World's Best Dad" coffee mug? He'd break it over our heads. He thinks all that shit is gay, and it is. The funny thing is, he understands the concept of the birthday perfectly well when it's my birthday, or my mother's birthday, or my sisters'. He just doesn't get his. And it's not just him, either. His sister doesn't even know her's, so they picked a day in early April-- you know, for the hell of it.

Dad: "I don't want a fuckin' birthday. Do you tell me that you love me every time we talk?"

Me: "Um, yes."

Dad: "Good. Then every day is my fuckin' birthday."

So there are these two parts of me working against each other. Part of me wants loving cards and pressies and, yes, attention-- and part of me kind of is sort of non-committally rather ambivalent. Well, it wants to be.

29 is going to be an interesting year. It's the first year where I'm starting to really notice changes in my body. As I look in the mirror, a cluster of ten or so white hairs is clearly visible near the front of my hairline. Mrs. Apron used to pull them for me, four or five years ago, in those heady days of youth when there were only two or three-- when we thought we could beat them. I've since asked her to stop. No matter how early you wake up, you can't beat the clock.

I was standing in the airplane-sized bathroom on our first floor a couple days ago and, in the tragic lighting situation I noticed horizontal lines going across my forehead. What does Joan Rivers call those things? Wrinkles? Yeah. I guess they're wrinkles.

I'm very fortunate, I realize, to have gone through almost the entirety of my twenties without my physical appearance changing very much. I was 134 pounds and 6'0" when I graduated high school, and I'm 136 pounds and 6'0" now. Thick head of brown hair then, thick head of (98%) brown hair now. Skin basically smooth. Penis goes up and down as specified in manual. Time has not ravaged me yet, but I do feel like it's picking my pocket.

Since it's my birthday soon, that means I get wishes, right? I guess my father gets wishes every day of his life. I hope he uses those abundant opportunities wisely. I know the big wish, the sacred wish, the one that just absolutely has to come true has to be uttered in silence before the blazing birthday cake, or else it won't come true. Don't worry, I know the rules.

Here, though, are my other birthday wishes. Are you listening, Santa Claus & Jesus?

* I want my athlete's foot and toenail fungus both to go away this year. I've tried Lamisil and baby powder and tough-actin' Tinactin and prayer and seances and nothing seems to work, so I think I'm going to try birthday wishing it away. I'll keep you updated.

* I want to go hot, one last time.

* I want to kick this bitch, right in the pussy.

* I want to still be writing this blog a year from now.

* I want to gain some weight. This is a tricky one, see, because Mohandas & Pete, the Birthday Gods, to go overboard with this particular request. So, I'll be specific: seven pounds or fewer please, thanks.

* I want reality television to be uninvented.

* I want Barack Obama to ditch the limo and start riding around in a car that is more befitting the first African-American president.

* I want to learn at least ten chords for the banjo, and I want to learn how to pick.

* I want happiness, health, safety, love and laughter for Mrs. Apron.

* I want more white hairs. Bring 'em on, motherfuckers.

Bring it.