Happy Birthday to someone none of you know!

There aren’t very many people in the world that I really like. But there are a few. One of them had a birthday today. And I forgot.

But I’m not a terrible friend because at least I found him some cards.

They aren’t really the kind of cards that people actually, ya know, like. They’re pretty bad.

But bad cards are fitting for this guy.

They’re fitting because this is actually a milestone birthday for him. That’s another reason I feel bad for forgetting.

But it’s one of those milestone birthdays where you look back on all your life choices and realize that, yeah, you pretty much chose the wrong branch of destiny a few times in a row. And it doesn’t matter what those choices were. It’s that kind of birthday milestone: one of the ones that’s all about regret. And I should know because I’m older than him.

But don’t get hung up on that. Birthdays are just how we mark how many times we’ve been on this planet as it moves around the sun. And the planet certainly doesn’t care. We can count all we want, but it’s still just a rock moving blindly around another much hotter rock that’s circling with a bunch of other hot rocks in a vast bowl of emptiness where cycles and repetitions don’t even have a point of reference to mean anything if you take a real cosmic perspective.

But I don’t want to be depressing. In fact, there’s plenty of meaning right here on earth. I mean, take the next card and how terrible it is. Just think how far we’ve come (maybe) since this kind of thing was okay to send through the mail.

The fact is, during a certain part of our lives, birthdays are pretty awful things, but they’re awful in a way that should make us happy. Let me explain…

We get older. We grow weird. We become irrelevant as new people show up and think their things are the coolest things. That’s good for the world. It’s even good for us because we can remember that excitement-bred-of-stupidity but we don’t have to believe it with the fire of dumbness that we most certainly had, and that led us to all the places we are now.

And a birthday is a reminder that we’ve got to start that whole damn “living” thing over again one more time. Frickin’ cycles. They’re like some circle that won’t stop. Weird, that.

But it’s like these old cards. They suck. They were stupid. They were made with the cheapest intentions and the least amount of thought. But here they are, giving me no end of amusement.

They make this new thing each time they show up again, and each time, they’re a new different card and different sentiment. Difference in repetition. That’s what birthdays should be. Difference and repetition. (That phrase seems familiar.)

Point is: I forgot your damn birthday, and I feel bad. But here’s some bullshit that may make you smile.

And if they don’t make you smile, then your present is knowing that I smiled when I made this because I found some really lame old shit. And that means it was a good day, your birthday or not.