Yesterday was my birthday. 27 years old. I’m doing pretty well, no complaints. Got the girl, the friends, the family, the job and the comics – what more can a man want? I had the most laid back birthday of my life. My parents were up this weekend, did the family thing. Sunday, my birthday, I slept in, went to Best Buy and Barnes and Noble, got myself some presents, got some lunch, opened some presents from Robin, had some birthday cake, took a bath while reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II did some homework, worked on DC Conspiracy’s webpage and now here I am. Just chilling; ready to pass out after I write this.

I’m sitting here and trying to figure out which birthday to talk about for my story for today. I have 26 to choose from. I really don’t know which to tell so I think I’m just going to make this week my birthday week, one birthday story for each day. Maybe try and make them short and sweet.

Back in the late 80s roller rinks were back in hard-core in Brooklyn. There was this one roller rink, I believe it was called Skate USA. For some reason, my recollection of most family oriented entertainment facilities in Brooklyn have the word USA in it. Skate USA, Funtime USA was an arcade, Baseball USA was this batting cage complex, USA Mini-Golf, etc. Now, there are two possibilities here. One is the fact that everyplace I ever visited as a kid had “USA” in its name or for some freakish reason I happen to insert the word “USA” into the names of everyplace I ever visited as a kid. I prefer the alternative. USA rocks! Buy Ford.

Anyway, my friends had back-to-back-to-back-to-back…birthday parties at Skate USA and, naturally, I wanted one there as well. Now, this made no sense because, I couldn’t skate. I had these black Return of the Jedi skates as a kid and I think I wore them once, to a skate party, where I played skee-ball the entire time and won a fake nose, three creepy crawlers and a harmonica – making it the best day of my life up until that moment.

When it’s your party, you want to be the center of attention. It just makes sense. And if your party is a skating party, you need to be on the rink skating with the prettiest girl in order to be the center of attention. For our neighborhood, hands down, the prettiest girl was Mita. She got invited to every party and she knew how to skate.

I sort of remember entering the rink. I timed it to when she passed, hoping I can simply projectile skate directly at her, turn 90 degrees and somehow have enough momentum left over to keep up with her. If that involved grabbing her hand, so be it, this was a skate party. My skate party, no less.

So, like I said, I sort of remember entering the rink. And then I sort of remember sitting at a table, ice on my bleeding nose, and yeah…I could have been crying. I think I got one wheel of one skate onto the rink before hitting the ground hard, face first, no hand out to brake my fall.

I put the skates away, content with playing skee-ball and Outrun while anxiously waiting to open my presents and see what Transformers awaited me. I might not have skated with the prettiest girl but I had a Carvel cake, G.I.Joe written in glorious red, white and blue frosting across the left side; Snake-Eyes sneaking through the bush, nun-chucks in hand on the right side. Women, they come and go…but that cake will forever go down as the best cake design I have ever had.

So hey, the seriously talented Jared Bivens zombied up my profile picture, check it:

Don’t you want me?

read a book, fanboy: Trainspotting

turn off the metallica, fanboy: Madvillainy