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sept.  2003





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"the confrontation of aesthetics..."
writeThis.com
a pretendgenius.com production
mandible
vol. ii, issue vii
feb. 1, 2005
Happy #@%& Birthday
kabuki concarne

October 5th - It seems like an okay day to have a birthday. Clearly it’s better than October 31st. Screw Halloween. That would be a rip off for any kid. Not that I’m a kid anymore. But you know what I’m saying. And December 25th, obviously that would suck as a birthday. I mean even July 14th would be a crappy day to have been born. If you live in France, anyway. Let’s face it- having your birthday eclipsed annually is a drag. And I don’t even want to talk about being born on February 29th.

I liked being born on October 5th. Larry from the Three Stooges was born that day. So was the lead singer from AC/DC. What’s his name. No, not Angus Young. That’s the guitar player. I’m talking about the guy they hired after the original lead singer drank himself to death. Some times, for no reason, I have the power chords from Back in Black stuck in my head. Da – Da Da Da – Da Da Da! It’s annoying and distracting, but better than having some lame Cher song lodged in the temporal lobes of my cerebral cortex while I’m trying to concentrate on solving a calculus equation.

So, I was fine with my birthday. Got past the Libra thing. But then I found out my Grandmother who spent thirty years in a mental hospital was born on that day. We had always thought she was born October 12th. Then, after she died, we saw on her old and yellow birth certificate that it was really October 5th. Shit! Thank God I don’t believe in astrology. Not really, anyway. So I wasn’t upset. I was just uncomfortable. In a very creepy sense.
I mean, the probability of me sharing my birthday with her was 1 in 365. Or so I thought. I already share one quarter of my genome with her. I didn’t what to share a birthday, too.

But then I found out that October 5th is the most common birthday in American. Which made me feel vulgar and pedestrian. It was, at the very least, invalidating. Sure Chester A. Arthur – the 21st President of the United States - was born on October 5th, but his administration was weak and ineffective. And now I find out that tens of thousands of other people are born on October 5th. Every year.

Look it up on Google. Search “the most common birthday in America”. And you’ll see it’s true. An explosion of babies. Annually. On October 5th - my birthday. Which makes me feel so… unspecial. Which you might not understand. Unless you were born on October 5th. Which according to the laws of probability you may well have been. And if you were, we should start a club. Think about it. Then get back to me. We’ll have a massive, collective birthday party.

We’ll need one, because the story gets worse. Because I subsequently discovered, based on my obsessive birthday research, that October 5th  is exactly 274 days after New Years Eve. And that, most obstetricians agree, is the average length of human gestation. So connect the dots here – the biggest party night of the year results in an amazing amount of mindless, irresponsible sex. And, consequently, the baby boom of 10/5.

I had always thought I wound up on this planet because of two people’s emotional and spiritual commitment – not because of their blood alcohol level.  Happy #@%& Birthday!