Happy Fucking Birthday To Me

Thanks, as always, to my lifelong friend and foil and intellectual trampoline and I don't know whatthefuck else.

This is a weird one, to be sure, with Databoy turning 18 today as well, and off to college (the right college, thankyouverymuch) in six weeks, and my own unemployment looming. It has been one seriously fucked up year:

-The famous dead (Bowie, Rickman, Prince).
-The infamous dead; Sasha's wretched death is sometimes just not there, and sometimes, when I reach for the phone to tell her a story made just for her, when I watch a beloved sportsball team faceplant endearingly, when the cluster that just won't stop clusters fuckingly--it was second nature to share the contents of my brain with her, to earn that guffaw, to process the undigestable.
-The loss of a thing I loved beyond measure (my work family), and of a job I sucked myself dry to earn (when we calculated the risk of my professional move back in December, we ignored extremes of probability in our analysis: probability rewarded us with a set of extremes that we could not have imagined) .
-The turmoil of externality, the march of shit changing just because shit changes.

And it's only July. There are touchstone years in our lives, years we look back on and say, "Good riddance to that fucking turd of a year." This is one of mine, and it's not over.

But I'm out on the stroll, and a john will pull up soon. Bam endures, now enduring at 6'2" tall and 190 pounds of giggle and flap. Ilse rocks. Databoy will get the fuck out of my house, and he won't have to live in an appliance box. It's not all hopeless bleak despair, and it's important to say that, to stare down the void and flip it off before walking away, to click my heels and will it gone, not caring that I'm a big doofus in red slippers.

Thanks and love to you all.