Numbers speak to me. Not in a numerologic or paranoid-schizophrenic kind of way: I don't think numbers reveal my character (it's my reckless disregard for explosives-handling safety that does that) or the secrets of the universe (that'd be season 2 of Buffy) or the details of the Illuminati plot (check out the 1905 Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 17, Fatimites to Flatulence, and decide for yourself). No, I just find certain numbers pleasing, congenial. I notice when a digital clock shows 1:11, 11:11 or 5:55. I'm queer for 5s, so 5:55 on May 5th catches my eye; I hope I happened to look at a clock at 5:55 on May 5th, 2005, since if I make 5:55 on May 5th, 2055, I'll probably just yell querulously, "Hey, you 5s! Get off my clock!" (I dumped a girlfriend who liked 12:34s; how could I be expected to deal with that kind of perverted shit, you know?) Once, speaking on the phone in a crowded cubicle-farm with a headhunter and needing to convey the number "125" obscurely, I kept repeating, "5 cubed! 5 to the 3rd!" I suppose if the guy hadn't been innumerate (and illiterate), he'd have had a real job.

            Today I am celebrating--well, having--my 50th birthday. (That's 2x5², not by the way.) I've been preparing myself for this day since I turned 49. Besides numerical distinction and bodily-decay bullshit--mysterious aches, bi-fucking-focals (I'm lobbying the FDA to make that term official), the profusion of nose- and ear-hair that requires me to own an array of machetes--50 resonates with me for another reason: it was the last age Dead Dad attained before he earned his adjective. Two weeks after turning 50, Dead Dad locked himself in his car near Stillwater Park on Miami Beach and blew his brains out. (He was a crack shot; it was a small target.) I don't know who found him, but I sometimes imagine it was some kid on his way to Little League. If so, I expect he was off his game that day.

I was 18 and in the midst of rehearsals for The Merchant Of Venice, which I was co-producing, directing and playing Shylock in, when I got the weeping call from my mother. My co-producer drove me down to Portland International (they had a weekly flight to Montreal) and I flew to Miami, where for three days I watched my mother argue with the rabbi who'd prohibited my father's interment in consecrated ground (she claimed Dead Dad had not committed suicide, despite the, you know, gun in his hand in a locked car) (those crafty CIA bastards), heard a bunch of people I didn't know tell me how sorry they were for my loss (I nodded solemnly, hoping my actors were at least running lines while I was gone) and felt the sweat-warm rain soak my ill-fitting suit as I stood in the boneyard, the location of which I did not, sadly, note for future grave-pissing purposes. Afterward, the morticians drove me to the airport in the limo, which, okay, was kind of cool, though they kept the liquor locked up.

When I got back to Portland, what I needed most was to tell my co-producer the joke that had been running through my head the whole time. It was way-inappropriate.

            So in two weeks, I will have outlived Dead Dad. During this past year I've  contemplated my achievements, or lack thereof. They are damned few, if you go by the numbers. I squandered my early promise as a writer. I am not famous or rich, powerful or irresistible to women; I have not invented, discovered or created anything of lasting or even fleeting value. In my day job, I make rich people slightly richer. I raised two good (well, mostly; q.v. sub, re butter), smart kids, but, shit, they were, like that horrendous flour with baking powder mixed in, pretty much self-raising. My cholesterol is good and I do work out frequently.

I am unlikely to follow Dead Dad's sterling example. Things are okay, and even if they weren't, they get better. (Then they get worse, and better again, endlessly, until you achieve a ground-state equilibrium.) (Hee! See what I did there? Ground-state?) (Oh, shut up.) But I have been keenly aware of this date, and have been doing my damnedest to make it the Bestest Most Specialest Birthday Ever. I intended to finish it thrilled with my romantic life, fulfilled by my writing and having had the perfect celebration with family and friends, then possibly acrobatic sex, possibly with Tori Amos. Instead, I'm single and already bone-weary of dating; I'm bored with blogging and have not started to do all that "real" writing that I'd planned; and I could not even celebrate the way I hoped. (Tori! Call me! There's still time!) This essay will not, as I'd planned and hoped, be the best piece I ever write. Plus, my kids still leave the fucking butter out. It's Plugras, you little shits! That stuff doesn't grow on trees. (It grows, in fact, in cows.) Refrigerator! Three fucking feet away! Auuuggggghhhh!

            But this morning, making the bed, I had an epiphany. (As we Elliots say, I got piphed off.) (And a day early too.) It was a simple one, and a good thing too, given my utter failure to comprehend complexity. (I needed extensive facial reconstruction surgery that time I opened all those boxes of cats, shouting, "Fuck you, Schrödinger!") I've granted this day significance, and I've insisted it proceed as planned, by the numbers. I've made it exceptional in my mind, but in fact it is like all the other days in my life, some better, some worse, but each day just another day. You don't get the life you ask for; you get the life you get. Either you enjoy that life as best you can, with all its limitations and frustrations, or you are miserable. If you choose misery, it's a good bet you would have been miserable even had you gotten the life you asked for. If this were the best essay I ever wrote, I'd probably stop writing essays, which might be a big win for essay-writing and maybe for me too, and may one day happen, but not today. It's just another essay.

            Sure, I feel a sense of incompleteness, of things undone, but so what? That's just my life, and your life, and the human condition, and probably also the gerbil condition and the cockroach condition. (Squish! "Aaaauuuuuggghhhh! I should've eaten that guy's Snickerdoodles and mated in his ear! Oh, wait, I did mate in his ear...") I'll keep trying to better my life, to publish my first novel and write my second novel and the short stories that are buzzing in my head (that or the cockroaches are mating in my ear again), to meet someone crazy enough to want to spend my declining years with me, to get a reservation at my favorite restaurant (the one with the genius chef who can't take reservations to save his fucking life, the name of which I will not divulge because who needs more reservation-competition?), to do things by the numbers.

But in the end, they are just numbers, fun to notice, devoid of meaning, and the number of your days is the number of days in which you grab and hold on to your life as it, runaway train, careens past you.

Happy birthday to me, and to you.