Birthday Kisses From My Mexican Cousin

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their

parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

-Walt Whitman

I just turned 31, and aside from gaining a little weight from quitting coffee, I feel fantastic. I suppose I do have a nagging shoulder injury that I really should have a doctor look at, but nothing I can’t live with. Also, if you believe the people who set the bar for this type of thing, my BMI is at the “obese” level, and by some really buzz-kill metrics, I am an alcoholic, but I carry most of the weight in my massive upper body, and drink excessively for medicinal reasons.

“I don’t care!” You might think, “Get over yourself. I drink responsibly, and don’t give a damn about your amazing physique, rippling abdominal muscles, and well-toned biceps.”

“Fuck you!” is all I have to say, “You will sit here, and you will read this because I’m spinning letters into gold. I’m serving up a platter of prose that is pwning your prefrontal lobes. So pipe down, and try to keep up while I celebrate and sing myself.”



I woke up on the anniversary of my birth to the hour with a wicked-awesome dream – an email from my unconscious filled with Freudian and religious metaphors.

I was running the Minneapolis marathon. I was tired, but not exhausted, and had just passed the halfway mark where a crowd of runners were congregating briefly before embarking on the second half of the race.

I found myself running next to a man who looked and acted suspiciously like Bill O’ Reilly. He wore a white campaign t-shirt, was eating a hamburger, and looked completely relaxed. He was clearly enjoying himself, and in high spirits.

“How you doing?” He asked. “Getta burger back there?”

“Oh…No – should have – looks good. Maybe I’ll get one the next time we pass by…Or afterwards I’ll have three or four! How are you?”

“I’m wonderful,” he said, popping the rest of the burger into his mouth, and raising his hands in the air without breaking stride. “Although earlier in the race, some guy heckled me for wearing this shirt, I mean, Comon’, we’re having fun out here, so I heckled him back.”

“You know, you remind me of myself at 15.”

He chuckled. I glanced to my left, and noticed a solitary teenage kid watching us pass by. We continued on, and the streets, which should have been lined with spectators, were suddenly empty, and the other runners melted away.

“Crowd thins here,” I said, noting the complete lack of people.

“Yeah, looks like it.”

We ran into a tunnel, an underpass of some sort, and prior to reaching the other side, a barrier prevented us from continuing. We stopped, and tried to figure out if we made a wrong turn when the same kid we saw earlier pointed to the bushes, and indicated without speaking that there was a passageway around the barrier.

I said to myself, “The other runners couldn’t have all made it through here, there would have been a huge backlog of people.”

We squeezed through the passageway, and emerged back into the race. It was the right way to go after all. The crowd and other runners reappeared, Bill O’ Reilly faded into the smoky peripheral of the dream, and my legs felt strong. I knew I had plenty of endurance left to finish the race. I woke up feeling totally at peace with myself, and that night, got shit-faced on tequila with my wife at a local bar.