Grumpy Bulldog vs. Old Age

If I repeat anything I said either on this blog or the old one, it's because today I'm officially another year older and thus getting more forgetful.  More so because I was pretty damned forgetful already.

Anyway, there are a lot of things that suck about getting older.  If you're me you get fatter, balder, wrinklier, and hairier anywhere except on the head.  Also you lose hearing and vision and your digestive system can't handle any spice stronger than regular table pepper--if that.  And if you drink one cup of coffee you'll probably be up all night, which will leave you tired and needing coffee to stay awake the next day only for the cycle to repeat ad nausem.  Plus the sex stuff I won't discuss.

There are some good things too.  Primarily I feel justified in hating youth culture and youths in general--except for my niece, though babies don't count anyway because everyone (except maybe Kim Kardashian) likes babies, at least until they start crying or messing their diapers.  So at this point I'd like to say, Fuck you Justin Bieber.  Fuck you Selena Gomez.  Fuck you basically everyone on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.  And stay the hell off my lawn--if I had a lawn.  So, stay off that little spot of concrete they refer to euphemistically as a patio.

Because really as you get older it's kind of a relief that you don't have to follow trends anymore.  Really when you get old enough no one wants you to follow trends because it's creepy and a sign of something jumping the shark, like Bill Shatner wearing an Ed Hardy T-shirt.  Even if I'm not as old as Bill--or even half as old as Bill--I'm sure no fashion designer wants me wearing his/her clothes because that would mark it as not cool.  Which is fine with me.  The days for me to be cool went by long, long ago.  So now uncool is the new cool.  Or something.

I won't say exactly how old I am, but if you can guess it, then you'll win a fabulous prize!  That prize being I'll Tweet that you won.  Which is only a fabulous prize if you follow me on Twitter.  Life's a bitch that way.  (Hint:  It's more than 210 dog years.)

I thought just for the hell of it I'd do a little birthday inspired meme:

1.  What's your favorite birthday memory?

My fondest birthday story was actually not that good of a day, especially at the time.  But it's the kind of day that afterwards becomes a funny story. Like "Adventures in Babysitting" without Elizabeth Shue, a one-handed tow truck driver, car thieves, '80s street gangs, or basically anything interesting.

So it was my 20th birthday and I was still living at home up in Saginaw, MI.  I decided to go down to Detroit area for the hell of it.  I took the older of my younger sisters with me in my '89 Corsica.  All important details.

It was all fine until we went to Best Buy in Madison Heights.  After we got out of the store, we came out to find there was a flat tire.  I've changed flat tires before, but this one was too tough.  In part because the factory-issued wrench was a piece of shit; the wrench actually broke a month later when I had another flat tire.  Try as I might, I couldn't get the nuts to come off the tire.

There was a Firestone tire place down the road.  We got the car there and the sales guy helpfully told us he might be able to get the car in by 6pm.  Or in other words, all day.  Gee, thanks.  We left it there anyway because where else were we going to go?

Down at the corner was a Shell station that at the time had a service station.  (It doesn't anymore.)  The guy there said he could patch the tire in less than an hour.  It felt about as good as that scene in “Pretty Woman” when she goes back into the clothes store where they refused to wait on her when I went into the Firestone to get my keys back from the douchebag clerk. At least I’ll imagine that’s how good it felt that we thwarted his apathy to our plight.

Then the problem was cutting across six lanes of busy traffic with a flat tire.  That was fun.  But no cars were wrecked and my Corsica got the tire patched.


But that's not the funniest part.  We pulled into the old Clark gas station next to a now-defunct Hooters to get gas. What made this so fun was the clerk working at the station. This guy looked as if he’d just fallen out of bed and stumbled into work after a bender. His hair was all messy and he was wearing a crappy T-shirt and some baggy sweatpants—backwards! I don’t know, maybe this was some kind of street thing. If so then he was a forerunner to Eminem and Kevin Federline because he was white too.

The tire got us all the way back to Saginaw, where eventually I got a new tire.  The End.  Yeah, so that's as exciting as my life gets.

2.  If there was one birthday you could erase completely from your memory, which one would it be?

The problem for me is that my birthday sometimes falls on Thanksgiving, which really sucks.  Because for one thing I don't really like turkey.  Turkey lunchmeat is fine, but the actual cooked turkey I don't really like.  I don't think it likes me all that much either.  Really I have the same problem with turkey as with those paczki things they have for Fat Tuesday:  those look like a doughnut but they sure don't taste like a doughnut.  In the same way turkey looks like chicken but it tastes a little different from chicken.  Maybe because we don't fry our turkeys like some people do.

Anyway, that's all the setup for my answer.  Being a forgetful old guy, I don't remember exactly which year it was, but I decided to stage some futile rebellion.  I insisted that since my birthday was on Thanksgiving and I thus got to choose what the family had for dinner, I didn't want turkey.  I wanted chicken.  Except this was still far enough ago that KFC wasn't open on Thanksgiving or anything similar.  So we had to eat the Banquet boxed chicken.  Which sucked.

After that I decided to just suck it up and eat turkey on Thanksgiving no matter if it was my birthday or not.  Lesson learned.

Second place would in 2008 when my mom decided we just had to rip up the entire living room floor on my birthday.  So by the end of the day I was dirty, tired, and sore.  Too tired and sore even to enjoy my birthday champagne.

3.  What's your favorite birthday-themed movie?

My answer would have to be "Free Enterprise" which has a subplot about the co-main character Mark turning 30.  At the end his friends throw him a huge surprise party where a green Orion slave chick from "Star Trek" jumps out of a cake and then Bill Shatner does an impromptu rap of "Julius Caesar."  My 30th birthday was on Thanksgiving and thus far less exciting.

(Also besides "Sixteen Candles" which I haven't seen I'm not sure how many other birthday-themed movies there are.)

4.  If you could go back in time to give yourself one piece of advice (not related to money) it would be:

Brush your fucking teeth!  You know how painful and annoying root canals are?  That's also a financial component too, but still.


5.  Since you're another year older and supposedly wiser, what one piece of advice would you give to all the boys and girls out there?

This is inspired by my distant cousin by marriage Margaret Dilloway author of How to Be An American Housewife, which you should read despite the fact she hasn't read my book or plugged it or anything.  I'm just saying.  (I'm so not bitter about that, as you can tell.)

Anyway, one day she Tweeted that she saw some cats for adoption but even though they were cute she didn't take any because that's the grown up thing to do.  Which is something my stupid cat-hoarding sisters should realize.  (So not bitter about that either...)  Being a mature adult means being able to make sacrifices, like not adopting every fucking cat you see.  It probably also means not insulting potential relatives.

6.  Pick three people to give this stupid chain letter wonderful meme to:
Briane Pagel
Michael Offutt
Rusty Webb

(You could do this on your birthday, but if that's not for a while then do it ASAP!)

7.  What's your birthday wish?
That you'll buy my books!  With the holidays coming up in a couple of days, now is the time to start stocking up on gifts for you and the family.  Buy my books in paperback or Kindle edition for you and everyone you love.  Not buying my books for them means you hate them and you don't hate them, do you?