Some people hate birthdays.

I'm the jerk who loves my birthday.

I know a lot of people don’t like their birthdays. Kaden tends to feel melancholy on his birthday. When we worked with my dad, he would get PISSED if anyone mentioned it was his birthday. But I’m the kind of jerk who loves my birthday. I talked about my 40^th birthday for months before it happened. In class, I mentioned to my professor, Greg Spatz, that I was turning 40. He said, “I know.” Clearly, I had mentioned it already.

On Sunday, I turn 42 (my birthday is often concurrent with Mother’s Day; my BFF did not attend my birthday parties for at least a decade while she was working in kitchens).

I was born 11 weeks prematurely. I was in an incubator for the first two months of my life, developed emphysema, and had 1/3 of my right lung removed at 6mos. The photos from my first Christmas, I have oxygen tubes up my nose. My parents were paying off the hospital bills until I was 7 or 8. I was underweight until just before puberty.

I know a lot of people withdraw and become unknowable to themselves during puberty, but I feel like I didn’t have a personality or know myself until I started my periods. But, I recognize, this was more or less concurrent with the time I connected with my BFF. She’s still my BFF, we’re going on 32 years now. My whole life changed/began when she told me the first dirty joke I ever heard.

I’m not sure how I want to celebrate my 42^nd birthday. Mainly, I’m trying to decide whether I want to go to a brewery I’ve already been to, or a brewery I haven’t been to. Last year, for my 41^st birthday, I was in Northampton visiting Kaden and we went to The Dirty Truth. They have the best fucking beers there, but last time we went we spent $80 on 3 beers each (not even pint pours), which is just…they were some of the best beers we’ve ever had, and we are beer nerds, but we are also frugal as fuck.

If I was in Olympia, I’d celebrate at The Brotherhood Tavern, where I celebrated my 22^nd birthday. I have a short story scene that takes place in The Brotherhood, what the hell, I’ll excerpt it here:

I drove north and met my old bandmate Pete at an Olympia dive that looked exactly the same as it had before we dropped out of college at Evergreen. The high-ceilinged bar was painted red, strung with multi-colored bulbs, dank from a century of spilled drinks. JFK-themed tapestries lined the walls. The jukebox, free during happy hour, cradled the same CDs I remembered from twenty years back: Dead Moon, the Pixies, the Sonics. I took a photo of my beer next to the space-age lamp on a black laminate table and posted it to my stories. Some things never change.

This is the picture, Boneyard RPM IPA. I recreated this scene with Kaden last summer when I took the bus from Spokane to Olympia and met him there.

… Pete got a drink, jabbed at the lime in his gin and tonic with a tiny red straw, and said, “Remember that?” I followed his eyes to the HVAC unit suspended high over the jukebox. The brand name was Reznor, and someone had gotten all the way up there with a Sharpie to scrawl Trent in blocky letters.

My 32^nd birthday, in 2015, is the birthday I want to reminisce about. We had just moved home from Albuquerque three weeks earlier. Home, for me, was a studio apartment at Holiday Place in Olympia, a three-minute walk from the print shop where I’d secured a job. Home for Kaden was really home, half time in the house he grew up in and half time with me. My birthday was in the middle of the week, Kaden was working at Whole Foods in Seattle and staying with his folks. I spent my birthday alone. It was totally, totally magical. I had a beer by myself at Obsidian, which had just opened, and is now long closed. I have a picture of the beer but no idea what it was.

My 32nd birthday, May 11, 2015.

Then I took myself on a walk all over the Northeast neighborhood, in a drizzle of rain at twilight, smoking newly-legalized weed. I was coming home to Olympia but also coming home to myself, a couple years into reclaiming queer, on the cusp of understanding myself as nonbinary, starting to write fiction for the first time since undergrad, getting stoned after seven-ish years of not-really. Who I am now is rooted in my 32^nd birthday; I can’t quite access who I was before that, nor would I care to.

For my 42^nd birthday, I bought myself a couch for the first time. It arrived in a huge box today. We had a loveseat in 2012, but it was just the cheapest pos on the floor (actually my sister still has it, so I guess it was good enough quality, it just didn’t relate to my visual/tactile preferences in any way). In Spokane, I had a free couch that my old boss gave me, lumpy and 90s abstract pastels, which I loved and did ALL my writing on, but we were moving to Northampton as minimally as possible, so it did not come with us. I’d had my eye on a couch from “Bob’s Discount Furniture” for months, but told myself I could not have a couch until we found out if we were staying here another year (we are still not 100% sure). Then, we went to a brewery we hadn’t been to before, Drawing Board Brewing in Florence, and they had the exact couch I was thinking of, so we got to try it out. The bartender said it had held up great, it was in like new condition after a whole year, with kids and dogs jumping on it. Lord knows nothing’s ever going to be cheaper than a $600 72” sofa.

My 40^th birthday party was the biggest birthday party I ever had, with all my classmates, their associates, and my sister and brother-in-law. I’d love to be having a huge birthday party with everyone I love (and even some people I only like), but I think it will just be Kaden and me and a couple of beers. Last week Heidi visited, it was phenomenal, we packed so much fun and laughs into a day and a half, including throwing rocks into the Mill River and “researching” with the zine archive at Smith College Special Collections (gonna give that its own future post).

This week brought a lot more rejections from lit mag submissions, not to mention tragic news of NEA grants rescinded by the Trump administration from most of the lit mags I’ve been following/reading/submitting to. I don’t have anything astute to say about it. It’s obviously just more cruelty, the amounts of these grants keeping literary communities afloat isn’t even a drop in the bucket of federal spending (“the amount of like one bolt on a military vehicle” K joked). I feel lucky to have a background in zines; I remember once at some writing thing in Vancouver I mentioned my zines, and a lawyer in her mid-20s was absolutely blown away by the idea that you could publish your own shit. It had never crossed her mind.