I guess I can no longer be trusted

Well, happy friggin' birthday to me.

Yeah, that's me. Glad that cone-shaped head leveled out.

I think it was Patton Oswalt that once said that only the milestone years should be celebrated. So, every year to ten years, then 16, 18, 21, 25 (because your insurance drops), then you should just celebrate the years ending in zero.

Jackpot!

Nothing says first year birthday than bunny cake. Hell yes, bunny cake.

Throughout the years, I have figured that people are lumped into two camps: people that don’t care about age because it’s just a number or, people like me, that stay up until the minute I was born – oh, no, we are counting every single second of this.

Yes, I just dated myself with a Polaroid picture on a birthday picture.

And why am I such a bastard with time and age? I blame the media. News cycles last about a day unless it is a really, really, really painfully scandalous story. Thank you, Illinois state politics. Accentuate that with the first year of my marriage, and every day is being counted (but not in a bad way!). This is coming from the guy that has been counting weeks of marriage within the first year. Multiply that with a very short attention span, and every day is counted by minutes.

Why tick away all the dirty minutes on a blog? Honestly, I should have been doing these posts years ago. If I wrote down every cataclysmic event to prevent anyone else from committing my same mistake, life could be a bit easier for the audience involved. For instance, until we see some viable representation from a third party candidate in an election, there is really absolutely no need to vote for Ralph Nader. See, I just helped someone in 2012. Consider this the Lessons Learned for all that read and all that will read.

However, the only way I think there would be any gravitas to my meanderings would be if I had some experience under my belt. And since I am not a Dungeons and Dragons character, the only way I can do this is in years. So, I might as well pile on to the a little more trash to the “garbage dumps outside of Bombay.” Thank you, the late Dr. Weizenbaum.

I will give this a shot for the next decade. My contributors and I will do our best to entertain, educate and irritate what used to be a respectable age benchmark. We will be all over the board on the subject matter, so bear with us. One week, we may be talking about children, the following week we may be sounding like children. But this can be our cathartic connection for us getting through another week with the guise as responsible individuals. It may not be cogent or coherent. But at least we have one standard: everyone is over thirty…years old.

My only mental image of thirty was established by my parents – two kids as opposed to two dogs. That is definitely not the current reality I am experiencing as a freshly-minted old dude. Maybe this will change the minds of old and young alike that thirty (might be) just a number. The fundamental difference is that the experience is vastly different and the journey has had varying paths.

The social project begins with hopefully more conversation and conjecture than some moody twenty-something at a cocktail party. Greetings, and thanks for wasting time with us.

To pull a horrible quote from an instant classic, “And here…we…go.”