If you weren’t already aware, Friday is my birthday. I’m tend not to be the kind of guy that’s all, “Hey! Look at me! It’s my birthday!!!!” I don’t like clowns or magic tricks, I don’t want flair-encumbered servers singing to me. Those poor people have enough to do just keeping the well done steak lady that somehow senses a microscopic pink trickle of moisture deep in the core of her arid leathery steak from scene-making her way into a free meal from the manager.

I do, however, like to use the event as an excuse to beg for free babysitting and spend an evening out with people I don’t see nearly often enough. After which, of course, I have a day-long reminder of how I’ve gotten too old to act like a fool on a Saturday night. I apply myself fully to that lesson every March, as a reminder for the rest of the year that restraint avoids the hungover. Reminding myself is every bit as necessary as renewing that driver’s license.

I also like to take a little time as the day approaches to contemplate my life to date. I suppose lots of people do that type of thing around New Year’s. For me, though, I’m busy around the first of each new year maintaining my cool in the face all the holiday-ness without huddling in a fetal curl in the kids’ backyard playhouse with nothing but a liter of Jim Bean and a few Mad Magazines. I consider that an inappropriate time to attempt a thorough assessment of one’s time on Earth.

So for the next few days, you, lucky visitor, will be getting some good old-fashioned navel-gazing from your pal pud’n. For instance, I’m likely to point out things such as how crotchety I’m getting already, even at the relatively middling age of almost 37. I recently found myself looking at some 16 year-old whipper-snapper making sandwiches at the Penn Station and thinking to myself that somebody ought to make that damn boy put on a hair net before he gets his greasy, rock-band wanna-be hair in my Chicken Teriyaki. Seriously, the kid had hair longer than my daughter’s (which honestly doesn’t bother me), but he was tossing it around as if it had to partially cover his face just so, perhaps at a specific angle to the bridge of his nose. Someday the kid’s gonna learn that real people with real lives don’t really look like those mop-headed models in the head-shot magazines at the overpriced hair salon. So quit flipping your follicles in the vicinity my sandwich, junior, I was hoping to eat that without having to digest whathever gel product you smeared in there this morning.

See? Crotchety. The next few days are gonna be fun!

pud’n