Random Thoughts on Turning 41

In the industrialized West, we mark birthdays by eating cake, receiving plastic novelty gifts made in Taiwan and pontificating on one’s life. Pausing on the day on your birth and reflecting about another trip around the sun and just what those 365 days brought is only reserved for the truly introspective. Everyone else does body shots off a coed’s abdomen before vomiting on her tits.

Everyone but me, for I choose the introspective path.

Turning 41 is a supreme letdown in the grand scheme of things. The Big One is turning 40, when a person officially enters the dowdy realm of middle age and must make due with a shabby wardrobe, an ever-expanding paunch and the fact that one day you will die. Nothing like reflecting on your mortality to liven up a party.

But reaching 41 doesn’t pack the spiritual wallop as cracking the Big 4-0. Turning 41 just tells the world that you’re getting older. With age, comes the fact that a majority of the world is younger, thinner and better off than you’ll ever be. No wonder people drink on their birthdays. It’s not to celebrate some milestone of living another year on this planet. It’s to deaden the pain of getting older.

So upon reaching 41 I’ve got a few things I’d like to put out there. Call it wisdom, advice or quirky observations. The older I get, the more daring and impervious to criticism I am.

Here are some things that have been bugging me as of late:


Why is it that movies or TV shows that feature young, attractive female reporters has them fucking her sources? Can’t the bitch just ask questions? Why does she have to sleep around to get information? To be fair, I’ve known female reporters and most of them aren’t wanton sluts who’d blow a politician for a story. Many of them are articulate, intelligent and professional ladies dedicated to newsgathering. Some of them, however, are insecure whores who screw men for an interview and then say it was “empowering.” Yeah, it’s really empowering that a politician can use you like an Atlantic City escort.
I’ll admit I’m at a disadvantage here. I have to use my sophistication, wit and interpersonal skills to persuade people to talk to me. That’s why I win journalism awards and don’t have a raging case of chlamydia.


If there’s something called Yankee pot roast, I wonder if there’s a dish called Confederate pot roast. I’m sure it’s the same thing as Yankee pot roast except African-Americans cook it and serve it to white people at a long table.


I loathe Sarah Palin. I think she’s a phony hypocrite who represents everything dysfunctional about 21st Century politics. She doesn’t annunciate concrete ideas or graspable logic, instead preferring the murky world of jargon, platitudes and feel-good bullshit. Palin is as nasty as a pit viper when she wants to be, and uses this taunting teenage snark to demean her opposition. It isn’t enough that she’s superficial and disingenuous, but her whiny, nails-on-the-blackboard, cunty whine irritates me. At a time when we need specifics, Palin floats on generalizations and playground insults masquerading as folksy chatter. Why do the conservatives give her or her bumpkin family so much attention? Does she embody the Republican principles of less government and prudent spending or is she just a redneck who dragged herself from the wilds of Alaska and gained followers by playing poor victim to the merciless liberal media, blaming them for accurately reporting that she’s an empty pantsuit and a vapid torchbearer for the Tea Party Republicans?
And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t Todd Palin look like Sarah nails him with a strap-on? What’s with his neatly-trimmed 1980s gay beard? Did he sing backup with the Village People as the lumberjack?


Do ghosts watch you masturbate? If they do, I’d hate to have my grandma watch me jerk off. That would really be uncomfortable having her float above my computer as I’m doing it.
“He used to be such a nice boy,” her disembodied voice would say eerily through the void. “But he touches himself more than a zoo monkey. Must he do that all the time? He’ll ruin the rugs.”


One in five Americans think President Obama is a Muslim. Interesting enough, one in five Americans also admits to drinking and driving. I guess that whole Muslim stat makes a lot more sense now.
The only thing Obama is guilty of is being pretentious and uptight, which is what presidents ought to be. The right rants that Obama is turning America into a socialist nation like the former Soviet Union. I disagree: I think Obama is too ineffective and weak to do anything of the sort. See, socialism historically came from a groundswell of popular support in the form of revolutions and armed insurrections. Obama can’t even get five people in his own party to agree on anything. Of course when you’re chain-smoking and drinking Chablis in Martha’s Vineyard, it’s hard to gauge the true pulse of the American people.


I think that women who find my humor crude and off color are ironically the same women who need a cock in their mouth.


Why do some fat people dress like they’re thin? They wear clothes a size too small and strut around with their bellies hanging out. If you’re 25 pounds overweight, then spandex or Lycra is not an option. Find the largest thing in your wardrobe and wear that. Please. For the love of God. Nobody wants to see rolls of fat sticking out of your shirt. It doesn’t look sexy at all. It’s the anti-sexy.


What’s this obsession with deep frying foods in this country? Every county fair these rednecks try to outdo themselves by taking food that obviously should never be deep fried and deep-frying it. There’s deep fried Twinkies, deep fried Oreos, deep fried pickles. Now they have deep fried beer. No wonder everyone in this country is obese and stupid. The zest for invention and experimentation in American migrated away from useful science towards deep frying junk food. Forget about developing a cheap source of renewable energy. That’s too difficult with our puny American brains. Deep-frying high-sodium, high fat foods? That’s where we excel as a nation!


I’m sick of how petulant and shallow Americans have become. We used to be revered for our strength and determination and for our willingness to compromise. We were once the good guys. Now we’ve devolved into a nation of whiny, spoiled, narcissistic children who want the latest shiny toy. We have to have six iPods or iPads or whatever Apple is shilling at the moment. Instead of holding face-to-face conversations, we text each other, our fat little thumbs running over the keyboard as if our very lives depended upon conveying this vital information that’s absolutely trivial and banal.
The worst offenders are twenty somethings. When I was in my 20s, we were computer literate, but we read books. We contemplated life. We used the phone for calling people, not for sending photos of our genitals to each other. That’s all people in their 20s do. Sexting and sending photos of their genitals. Where’s the mystery and romance anymore? Where’s the allure of love and the promise of passion if you get a text with a photo of your date’s junk? Young people are morons.