All is Darkness and Despair!!!

...Not really, it's just that I'm turning 40 tomorrow and that's the kind of birthday card I'm expecting to get. You know the type of person who sends these things, the black balloons, the electronic greeting cards that play a tinny rendition of Chopin's Funeral March, the skull and crossbones, the parrots, the peg legs and rotgut... sorry, my mind wandered off to pirates there for some reason.

Anyway, I intend to beat them at their game. I plan to live to be 157 years old!!! (No idea why I picked that number, it just seemed sufficiently decrepit...I fully realize that, with the amount of bacon, salt, and salted bacon that I consume, anything beyond 50 is a revival-inducing miracle...but I digress.)

Actually, I intend to beat them at their game by getting into the morbid birthday card business. If you can't beat them, join them, right? (All right, I know that I just said that I was going to beat them, but I'm nearly 40! My mind is going! How much consistency can you expect?)

Let me run a few of my card ideas past you:

1. Cover: (A picture of an hourglass with the last few grains of sand dropping down) So You're Turning 80?
Inside: (Picture of the grim reaper holding the hourglass and chopping off the head of a faceless cartoon person with his scythe ) Time's Up! You're as good as dead mate!

2. Cover: (A picture of a big bowl of Gazpacho soup) You'd like a bit of extra spice in that at age 70?
Inside: (Picture of the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld pointing directly at the reader) No life for you!!!

All right, they're horrible, even pathetic, I know, but I'm bitter. At 40, I expected to have already published a book, or directed my first feature film, or recorded an album of clever, yet unpretentious alternative rock ditties, to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony all in 5 years (no wait, that was Phillp Michael Thomas's E.G.O.T. plan).

Instead I'm administrating a comedy blog that can't even get all its authors to turn up, even once in some cases. As a running gag it's weak, but as reality it depresses me. It really, really, really, really depresses me.

Still, I got They Might Be Giants "Mink Car" as a birthday gift, so it's not a total loss.

(This totally unsolicited impression of a self-indulgent, middle-aged blogger is brought to you by the Dictionary of Unfortunate Ideas. We make you feel better by comparison, you lousy twenty-something, healthy, easy-going, miserable, punks.)