Reviews of major birthdays

Happy birthday to meeeee

Welcome to a special bonus issue of AWKSD. I turn 35 today. I could now run for president if I wanted to, but I’m not gonna cuz nothing is less punk than being president. But here are reviews of other major birthdays I’ve had. 

First birthday 

Score: 1.6

Not even memorable. Congratulations to me for staying alive, I guess.

Tenth birthday

Score: 7.8

For my tenth birthday, my parents took some friends and I to Discovery Zone. This was at the time when they were starting to get into paintball and, like, hurting each other. DZ’s ball pits proved to be jolly good fun for those wild kids, whereas a nervous kid like me could watch from afar through the porthole windows in the germ tubes. That night, we all slept on my living room floor and watched Poltergeist, a movie that scarred me for years. 

Sixteenth birthday

Score: 8.4 (Best New Birthday)

Ah, the year when a boy becomes a boy with a license to operate machines large enough to kill people. When I turned 16, I also got the best present I’ve probably ever received: a Sony digital-8 video camera, and even though it did nothing to fix my crippling teenage dysmorphia—that’s how I looked and sounded? —it was still pretty cool to make movies with my buds where we killed each other. 

Eighteenth birthday

Score: 9.2 (Best New Birthday)

For the birthday where I turned into a grown-ass adult, my dad took my little brother and I on a three-day, 100-mile mountain bike trip in Moab, Utah. I came home from that trip and found a lump near my scrotum, which made me think that I had cancer. It took a few days for me to work up the nerve to tell anybody, and I tried to diagnose using the medical books we had in our home. I finally told my mom and she was like, “Oh, it’s probably just a hernia.” And it was—caused by the unprecedented athletic strain I put on my body. I had surgery, got some sweet pain meds, and my friends bought me the Fellowship of the Ring collector DVDs to watch during my recovery. I got another hernia on the other side of my scrote six months later—due to the overall residual weakening of my stomach lining. This is all to say that the White Rim Trail in Moab was beautiful and worth the injury. I can’t think of a better way to enter adulthood than realizing the world is full of pain punctuated by little spots of beauty. 

Twentieth birthday 

Score: 6.3

Another decade down, but, eh, what’s the point when 21 is so close. I do remember my friend taking me to Panda Express and buying my beef and broccoli, which now seems like a very sweet gesture considering how broke we were. 

Twenty-first birthday

Score 3.5 

An evil night, Dear Readers. My mom had given me a life-size, robotic skeleton that danced to ZZ Top’s “La Grange” when someone pressed its button. I thought it was the coolest, and brought it back to my gross college house for my big party. At the time, I lived on University Street in Salt Lake City, which is basically frat row without frats. The party grew, and strangers filled the house. I watched people grind and twerk against my beloved skeleton, which—in my head—had suddenly become this symbolic bridge between innocence and damnation. The night raged on, took on a hallucinatory quality of a Terry Gilliam-esque bad trip, and ended when two friends got in a fist fight. The next morning, I found the skeleton broken, unable to perform the ZZ swagger. It took me a long time to believe that the world was a decent place after that. 

Twenty-fifth birthday

Score: 7.0

I had just moved to San Diego eight days prior to my 25th birthday. I had no friends here, and knew no one. I went to Bar Pink where it was Tiki Tuesday and there was a band playing creepy songs. It felt noir AF, and probably the first time I was like, Yeah, okay San Diego, I get where you’re trying to do. 

Twenty-seventh birthday

Score 7.5

Only a major birthday because of the whole rockstar death thing. I cheated death by staying in and watching horror movies all day. Ideal method of survival, tbh. 

Thirtieth birthday

Score: 8.8 (Best New Birthday)

To close out my third decayed (see what I did there, boils and ghouls??), I got to live out my dream of playing drums in a punk band in front of friends at my favorite bar, The Whistle Stop. Also, as a gift, one of my friends gave me a book on financial management, which I haven’t read yet. Financial responsibility: NOT PUNK! 

Thirty-fifth birthday

Score: You tell me! <3