|
Public Birth-Day Party Masturbation If a birthday party is, as I tend to believe, a bit of a masturbatory exercise, then having one's birthday party in a public place, such as a bar, must be something akin to public masturbation. The message a birthday party in itself seems to be is, "Look at me; see how cool I am." "You like me! You really like me!" "Look, Ma, no hands!" I can ride this rock around the sun all I want and not fall off. Look how well I stand on my own two feet. See how far I've come from that little boy you never really knew. A bit self-congratulatory for my taste, really. Moving the party into a public forum, though, adds yet another level to the spectacle. "Look how cool everybody else thinks I am." "You've seen what a big dick I have, and now, you know that everybody else has, too, and that they're impressed." Watch them all watching me. And look! They're you! If the party itself is self-congratulatory, the public masturbation is unconscionably self-aggrandizing. But I'm only turning thirty once. In New York City. So I'm allowed to be a child about it. And nobody wants to go all the way up to my apartment in Washington Heights that I haven't had time to clean, or even properly furnish. And my birthday is really on Monday, and nobody parties on Mondays (except, perhaps, for me). So I'm going to dinner in a few minutes and one of my favourite Hell's Kitchen hang-outs (assuming they'll give me a table fast enough), and then, I'm going to my birthday party at Xth Avenue Lounge. And I suppose I'll see some of you there. And we'll all just have a good time, and we won't think too much about for how short of a time we've known each other or how uncomfortable I am with these things. Because you only live once, and then, as my friend Susan once said to me, "You're dead a long time." So enjoy it, and make it count. r
|