As I type this entry it is thirteen minutes away from my birthday. I shit you not much. When the hour hand stands up I will be thirty two. I'm nervous. It's my first time being thirty two and I have nothing to wear.

I really don't have anything to wear. I dress in T-shirts and cargo shorts and and a cowboy hat like some kind of twentysomething bar hipster. People see me - the guy with the cowboy hat - and they wonder if maybe I'm in a band. Well... no. I can't play instruments worth shit. I got kicked out of band in elementary school and I never learned more than a few power chords on the crappy Sears guitar that a friend gave me and subsequently destroyed when he realized how bad I was. I never bothered to tune it and after a few months it really showed. Here are the songs I learned to play on that crappy Sears guitar:

Smoke on the Water
Sunshine of Your Love
I Saw Your Mommy (And Your Mommy's Dead)

That was all. But I didn't sit down to tell you about my guitar-playing days, when I would sit in the guy's washroom and smoke Winstons and try power chords until my friend Derek would scream "Man, you suck! You really do!" I sat down to tell you a birthday story. You'll like this one. It's in the next paragraph.

I grew up eating yogurt mixed with molasses. At some point in my childhood my mother made the switch from the crappy food we all ate in the seventies to healthy alternatives, superlatively healthy snacks which I will call snacklatives for administrative purposes. My favourite snacklative was plain yogurt with an inspiral trail of molasses drizzled over it. Maybe I winced at the sight of the gluey looking junk with brown dribbles the first time I saw it. Who knows? Mix it in with a spoon and it becomes the snacklativest thing ever. My brother ate it too, and I have to say that he was better at it than me, but that's a story I'll save for another occasion (Orangemen's Day? Easter? Quebec National Day?).

Eventually I grew up and stopped eating my childhood snacklative - mostly because I was buying my own groceries and I found the idea of buying molasses somehow ridiculous - but my tongue was left with a sensory confusion. I can't eat plain yogurt without tasting molasses, and vice versa. My senses refuse to give up what they knew when I was a child. So the lesson of my story is that I have an atavistic tongue, a cowboy hat and no talent for musical instruments.

On the 12th of the month I told The Lotus that I had not one day of birthday but twelve, and that the 12th was the first day of birthday. She didn't believe me, but she sure as shooting likes to humor me (Okay now, black bile me, y'all). So far I've got: a) a new keyboard for my computer with all keys working (a nice change); b) a book of interviews with Philip K. Dick called What if Our World is Their Heaven?; c) marital duties; d)several gin-and-tonics; e) others.

I'm so happy that there really is a Fake Claritin Heaven after all. I was starting to worry.

parode - exode