26 REDS & A BOTTLE OF WINE

I don’t usually post personal stuff on this blog but I have to admit that I am pretty excited about Skittlepuppy’s birthday on Saturday. For reasons largely out of my control I haven’t really been able to see much of her lately. Not since the unpleasantness at the Belle and Sebastian concert.

Anyway, I'm excited not just because it provides an opportunity to bask in all things cute and cuddlely but also because it’s my half-birthday. The half-birthday is a brilliant idea who’s time has come.

For most people your birthday is a wonderful time of the year and an opportunity to be lavished with gifts and free booze. It's a great time for everyone, for everyone except of course those of you who over think even the tiniest details and for whom ordering pizza toppings become a delicate game of chess. For those people every birthday is met with a personal reexamination of their lives, an intense vision quest. Those people suck balls.

For the rest of us it’s the time of year that most reminds us of presents and cake and soda. Unless you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or you parents were crackheads you were treated to birthdays of extraordinary pomp and fanfare. Every stably raise child (and most of the unstably raise ones) has had at least one blow-out birthday. As a result you’ve developed a Pavlovian response to that portion of the calendar. It’s the same thing with summer. We’re trained to take summers off, so we do.

Anyway, my theory is that one birthday is not enough. Sure, it might be fine for the egghead intellectuals, or Christian fucking conservatives but for leisure class citizens like us it’s simply too little birthday. Some of my more Philistinic friends have suggested choosing your own birthday and calling it second birthday or unbirthday. First I explain that unbirthday is a rip-off of Lewis Carroll and second that it totally violates the first rule of your birthday; YOU DON’T PICK IT! Besides if everyone got to pick their own birthday half the population would pick Memorial Day, the other half would pick Labor Day.

So that’s out.

Thinking about it with any seriousness, and not being a retard, leads to only one conclusion; The Half Birthday. The day six months from your birthday. First, this lets you keep the day, mine is the 18th. This is good for those fruity palm-reading beatniks, and let’s be frank, we need them if half birthday is going to catch on. It’s also a windfall for the economy. Think about it. Thousands of people running like loons through the streets buying up half birthday cakes and half birthday presents. Fucking idiots!

So how do we pitch the half birthday? Well, that seems clear. Hallmark. If there’s a greeting card for it then it must be a real event. Look at Secretary’s Day and Father’s Day and Chanukah. So0 let’s start a grassroot campaign to get Hallmark to start making Half Birthday cards…

Any seconds on that?