Have a Birthday

by Kate Nacy

It doesn’t matter when.

Try October.

Try a golden afternoon in October. Listen to music, you probably have some. Listen to the kind of music that makes you want to punch things with your hands. Try the soundtrack to the best action film you’ve ever seen. (It’s Point Break).

Visit a magnificent historical cemetery rich in historical significance. Visit a cemetery in which a famous set of teeth, for example Helmut Newton’s famous teeth, are allegedly buried. Think, Big deal, so what. You’re not here to see famous dead teeth so don’t get sad when you don’t see any. Remember: Teeth are calcified pulp and wind, not more.

Observe bright yellows, greens and reds. Observe a historical statue of an angel with its head knocked off. Observe a terrier take a historical dump on a historical plot. Scream, HA! and make your music louder.

Now skip around a little.

Summon the force of ten thousand titans and kick a chestnut as hard as you can. Watch that motherfucker soar like a comet past magnificent historical tombstones. These are not your tombstones. Remember: Tombstones are gifts for dead people, not more. Punch your fists at the sky and scream, HA!

Now think briefly of other Octobers.

Think of your fourteenth October, when you were desperate to kiss dozens of new wet mouths. Think of the wet mouths you’re desperate to kiss now, in this October. Hatch a plan to trick these mouths into kissing your mouth. Remember: Every person you touch your lips to is going to die.

Has something smacked you on the shoulder?

Is it a pinecone? A crabapple? The excrement of a magpie living every evening perched on the very same branch? Look up, investigate. Admire the heavens. Think of every weather pattern you’ve ever seen. Think of death sailing down from the sky. Consider the faces you still need to scream into.

Do you know how much I love?!

Try this.

Do you how much of this slick shit, this spectacular awfulness, DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE?!

Invent new memories of the future. Don’t be an old photograph you can’t look at anymore. Don’t keep busy with things to escape. Invent a wife a kid and a houseboat. Invent a day in which you rescue dozens of birthday cakes from a raging inferno. Invent a career, a retainer, home equity, a pension and tax authorities.

WAIT.

If you’ve invented equity remove yourself from this exercise. Remove yourself with dispatch. Drag a three-legged rolling chair into the smallest closet you can find and stay in the closet. Think hard thoughts. Find your Visa card and swipe it through the dark chasm splitting the cheeks of your ass. (Everyone’s is dark, don’t kid yourself). Swipe the Visa up, then down. Up, then down. Think hard thoughts about your soft posterior. Up, then down.

Leave the closet and look around. How many kilometers stretch before you? Ten? Twenty? Bad news. Kilometers have been devalued to the new fixed rate of centimeters. No one is sorry about this.

Now, listen.

Listen to the blood crash through your arteries. LISTEN TO THE SOUND OF BLOOD CRASHING THROUGH YOUR ARTERIES. Listen to all that blood, not spilling onto the ground. Listen to your insurance ensuring nothing but the fact that you now have less money than you did before buying insurance. Listen to the Number 6 bus not running you down. Listen to calamity not befalling the incubated diorama containing your current, undead life.

Eighty percent of you is water, not embalming fluid.

Can you still make a bloodstain? Or are you only pretending to be wet? Are you faking it?

Look at your hands, not separated from your wrists. Look at yourself unfinished. Unsurfeited! Have a good look at you, not strewn in clumps on the freeway. You, throttling the very thrill of your life not cut to the quick. You, laughing in a garden rotten with suckers. You, not a sucker.

Now skip around.

Fill your lungs with afternoon.