The best birthday that wasn’t
I have had some great birthdays in my life. On my 21st, the group I was with got way more drunk than me, which doesn’t make much sense but did end with someone leaving a puddle of fish-n-chips-n-whisky in the middle of Main Street, Greenville.
Before that, I remember my pops getting me a cream-on-white Fender Stratocaster (a la Clapton) on my 16th birthday. Problem was, he wanted to surprise me and asked me to get his cigarettes out of the car. I did, and somehow managed to miss the large, guitar shaped box next to them. When I came back in with the smokes but without a guitar, dad had to improvise.
There are plenty of other memories, but the point I’m getting to is this – recently, my birthday has been the worst day of the year.Last year I had a root canal.
This year, I went to ER.
Diana and Luis planned an incredible surprise party for me at some meat and swords place out at the beach. Everything started well enough, including me being genuinely surprised at a room full of people dedicated to telling me Happy Birthday. It was awesome – for the first 15 minutes.
Pretty soon, I was in the bathroom throwing up so hard my lungs were having a hard time refilling after each yack. Lucky for me, the bathroom in this busy restaurant was movie-scene deserted, and I had plenty of time to wretch in peace. After an hour of praying for death, Luis got me out of there, and around 2:00am I felt like I was going to die and went to the emergency room (after stopping by the paper to retrieve the insurance card in my desk, natch)
The lovely ER nurse with the personality of a moldy sponge pumped me full of relaxing meds and sent me home with a diagnoses of food poisoning around 4:30am.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that I missed a night full of sword meat, booze and friendship, Luis and Diana had a custom-made robot cake for me at the party. Luis brought it over the next day and I spent the next two days picking apart the remains, eventually cutting the head off and keeping it in the freezer.
The moral to this story? Always cut the head off a robot.