Happy birthday to me - NOT!

WARNING - Copious and profligate use of bad language.  It's probably best if you just go away.

More warning that you don't want to read this.  Especially if you don't know me.  There's no reason to since it's just a self-indulgent diatribe that I'm posting because I can.  I have a blog, I can damn well post whatever the fuck I want.  I can even use words like fuck and will use them liberally in this post.  Today's post is not educational.  If you don't like it, go away.  Don't read this post and certainly don't complain to me that you read it and didn't like it for some reason.

Today's my birthday.  My fiftieth fucking birthday.  50!  Half a fucking century.  I am not a 50-year-old man.  Yes, I have some gray in my hair.  Yes, I'm stiff in the morning when I first get up.  Yes, I seem to have more health problems than I did a few decades ago.  I'm not an old man though.  I can't be 50.  I refuse to be 50.  Fuck 50.  I stomp on 50 and piss on the twitching corpse.

I don't act 50.  I take field trips and hike better than some of my 18-year-old students.  I write blogs and liberally use the f-word.  I'm immature as all hell.  I like younger people, I don't hang out with people who act like old folks.  I'm not wise.  I don't have good judgement.  As a mature man, I'm a complete failure.  And I want it that way.  I'm not going to sit around with friends and discuss my health problems.  I'm not worring about retirement (I fully plan on dying in my office or on a field trip of a massive coronary).  I'm not sitting in an easy chair watching Wheel of Fortune and Dancing with the Stars in the evening.  Shoot me in the fucking head first.

Yes, AARP sent me birthday mail.  The fucking vultures.  My wife, bless her cold, wicked, 8-year-younger heart waved it at me and laughed.  I showed her, though.  I ripped it in shreds and tossed it in the trash.  I'll die before I'll accept an AARP card and ask for senior discounts.

So, you'll think, you must have had a lovely day with your family celebrating this special occassion?  No.  My two kids and myself have been sick as dogs all week.  I started feeling sick last Monday, six days ago, and had a fever Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights (feeling a little better today, but coughing my lungs out).  And don't think I was so sick because I'm old and frail!  My kids were just as sick.

My son was so sick we ended taking him to the doctor today and the doctor sent him to the emergency room for a chest x-ray and blood work.  Most of my birthday was spent home with my sick daughter worrying and waiting to hear from my wife while she was in the hospital ER with my sick son.  Fortunately, they found nothing bad (other than a nasty virus) and have sent him home.  Lovely fucking day other than worrying about the life of my children.

If I wasn't so sick, I would buy a bottle of something suitably alcoholic, hike deep into the woods, and drink myself into a stupor (this was actually a half-formed plan at one point).  Of course, I would have gotten rained on since we just had a downpour and it's currently 46 F outside.  I would have caught fucking pneumonia and died.  Did you know that they used to call pneumonia the "old man's friend"?  That would have been pretty fucking ironic, don't you think?

Whatever.  Back to work tomorrow to lecture on various and sundry topics in Earth science with a still raspy voice and a hacking, tubercular cough.  Then, no shit, I have a late afternoon appointment with a urologist.  Don't even ask about that. TMI?  Fuck you, I told you not to read this post!

I'm acutely aware of my own (and others) mortality tonight.