Bear with me as I'm a tad tipsy. I reserve the right to make editorial changes tomorrow after I get up. And when I get up it will be officially my birthday. It's my birthday today at midnight, but I don't consider it tomorrow until I sleep and get up. Last year I posted a note, a blurb if you will, stating indirectly it was my birthday. This year I will be more overt. And not for the desire for gifts or even attention (although some well intentioned good wishes would be most appreciated). Previously, as I've gotten older, I more or less stopped celebrating my birthday. I began to see it as one step closer to death. And in the youth obsessed, gay culture I'm a part of (like it or not)every tick of the chronological clock made me (at least in my mind) less desirable to the mainstream. Getting old and being gay is so not cool.
However being HIV+ has colored my attitude towards celebrating my birthday. I have had no major health issues traced to being POZ (several minor ones, though). I have, however been even more mindful of how random, how fragile, how temporary this existence on this plane can be. And the weird thing is I already knew that before my diagnosis. It's not like I wasn't aware that you can be walking down the street and have an air conditioner fall out of a window and crush your skull. It happens all the time. Life's a crapshoot. At best. I've experienced too many losses of friends and family. Some have made sense. Some have been sudden and horrible and unfair.
The upshot of it all is that The Duchess has issued a decree from her castle high atop Second Avenue. Henceforth, we shall be celebrating the year of our birth. In light of my medical "condition" and because the alternative is not celebrating at all, I hereby decree February 19th a holiday throughout the land. I've taken the day off from work and while I'm missing the Aaron Carter "performance", I will hopefully make up for it with filthy gay sex and drunken debauchery.
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