Yesterday was my birthday.  Most people don’t think about the break down of birthday but it was the day you were birthed.  So for some crazy reason, society decided it was important to keep track of how old you are and to celebrate the day you exit your mothers vagina.  Wonderful.

It’s been 31 times that I’ve had a birthday and I couldn’t care less.  I feel no need to celebrate and it feels like any other day.  I even prefer not to be the center of attention.  It’s nice for people to come out of the woodwork and wish happy birthday through Facebook but it doesn’t mean much.  I’ll give an example, my friend Adam didn’t even know it was my birthday but he’s a better friend than 99% of the people who did wish me a happy birthday.  I missed his birthday by 2 days last year.  I missed Sam’s 2 years before that.  I’m not advocating missing birthdays but it’s not that big of a deal compared to when you were 12 and kids were dropping quarters at Challenges.

I put a picture of Katy Perry and her huge boobs because this is my blog.

The word next to your score was what being a kid was all about.  When you’re little, you don’t understand how big the world is.  Test grades were huge.

Have you heard of a #2 Ticonderoga? Look at how sharp that point is? Joy was associated with sharpening a pencil. Remember the little sharpeners that you’d store in a your backpack? Those would never get the point as sharp as one hanging from the wall. Back to the grades.

Teachers would grade your tests with numbers and the number would be associated with a word:

100% Perfect.
98% Excellent.
95% Super.
90% Bravo.
85% Decent.
80% Ok.
75% Average.
70% Almost.
65% Poor.
60% Bad.
<55% See Me

I had a “see me” in 10th Grade Ms O’Donnell AP history. I handed in an Encarta version of Lewis and Clark and she must have seen it before. It was probably May and I avoided her until the end of the school year. I was frightened every single day of the year in that class. It was an AP class and I was by far the dumbest kid.

The only teacher who scared me more was Mr. Sukits in Corporate Finance my junior year. Every morning he would start the class with some classic rock like David Bowie and Jackson Browne. He’s the reason I know the song The Pretender. Anyway, corporate finance was made up of 33% Participation in class, 33% Tests, and 33% Quizzes. My participation score was 0. I could not have gotten better than a 67% in that class with 100% test results and I promise you that didn’t happen. I wrote a crying email to him pleading to not fail me in this subject because it would have stopped me from Graduating. I got a C. Perhaps the email was an A.

A lightning bolt must have struck me right in the forehead and it electrified a light bulb right above my head because it just lit up. I’m not deleting that last line because that’s what I came up with when trying to explain how a light bulb went off in my brain. If that’s not telling I can’t explain it better. Or worse.

You can also tell I quit pretty easily and don’t give a fuck about quality. I took that picture from images and loaded it in PhotoShop, grabbed a terrible picture of my head, contorted in every direction so it was completely mismatched, then I said I don’t give a fuck about how it looks my audience doesn’t either. This should demonstrate my commitment to quality.

It’s fairly obvious that after 5+ years of doing this, I’m not that talented as a writer. Sure I scrape by but if this was my full time job, I’d be alongside the one legged man on 8th and 76 intersection begging for pennies. I make little effort of improving which is the worst part about it because I actually do make effort to improve aside from taking an English class and being that old dude learning to write for his blog which has an annual revenue of 0. It’s like, “dude, blog’s about your shitty life have no relevance or educational value to society so be happy no one tells you to shut it down.” That’s what Mr. Wonderful would say.

What’s worse is that I find myself right-click saving any gif or pic of interest just to make it look like I’m still here. I’ll go to Reddit with the pure intention of finding the first clip that I think other people might enjoy. It’s fine but there is no emotion behind it. This blog was always fun for me but I’m starting to suck at it.

This could only be a phase but I wanted to check in and say I’m still here and will find some inspiration somewhere but it could take some time before these ideas have resonated (I hate this word by the way) within me.

First and foremost, I must apologize to the 12 people who check this blog daily. One half hearted update in 5 days is not a blog that is worth checking in to. I have reason for this though as I told myself I wasn’t going to waste my audience’s time with pointless posts about life that I barely care about so I wouldn’t expect you to. The posts, not my life.

I suppose you could say that over the past few days I’ve been doing much “research” (I have no idea why I used quotes or why this in parentheses other than because research is definitely not the right word I just don’t know what else to call it) for blog entries. I’ve been reading a book recommended to me about a scam artist, a book about a revolution, and a fair amount of Shark Tank shows that I’ll comment on when I finish the series. It’s also fair to say I’ve been very busy with work as the job has gotten more serious since our 1 week vacation for some inexplicable reason.

Hang in there though. I’ll have more posts shortly.

I got a haircut yesterday.  Nick cut it.  He spent 12 minutes on my head.  It’s a little pricey at $18 plus tip (I give $22).

That’s all I’ve got.  Watch Terio get punched in the face.

Laura and I went to The Barrel House on Bainbridge and they had one of the best beers I’ve ever had.  We talked family and business matters which was pleasant.  It’s now 9:26 and I’m sitting at the office taking care of matters that I think about but don’t usually get to.  I know people are into specifics so I’ll give some insight into what I’m doing.

• I wrote a business associate who invited me to Europe an email asking what he has been up to because he left the company a few months ago for personal reasons. To describe this type of fellow: he invited me to Europe, his company paid for my accommodations in full, and then he left the company after spending 20+ years there.  This is incredible hospitality and I learned that it makes you want to do business with someone who extends that much reach.
• I wrote a business partner an email to set up a trip to visit an area of the nation which was prominent in slate decades ago but due to cost of production, has shut down.  Since Jeff has been working with the company, I’ve been able to get out more and this is a trip I normally wouldn’t get the chance to make.
• I wrote a “mentor” an email asking if he would sit down and talk about various business that I’ve been getting myself involved in.  This helps get an outsiders opinion of deals that I may be blindsided because I see it everyday.

Those few examples are only the tip of the iceberg and emails that I’m writing on my free time because we’ve been so busy with orders and taking care of normal business.  I’m actually backed up blogging to the point that I can’t concentrate on writing good entries.  The only thing on my mind is business and I’m fine with that.

I’ve been watching Shark Tank (a separate entry will occur on this show) and I understand that success isn’t granted by luck.  Life is a relatively simple formula that the more you put in the more you take out.   This is my time to make something happen and I’ve purposely set my life up like this.  The reason I can focus so much of my energy on business is because I have nothing else in my life to focus on.  I have exactly 0 “life” distractions.  This is both good and bad but for the time being, this is my life path.

Yesterday evening after eating a 10″ classic meatball hoagie, drinking two for $3 dollar Blue Glacier Gatorades, a 20 oz coffee, and a bag of Honey BBQ Fritos from Wawa, I was back to normal.  This was a solid 3 days after my last drink at around 4:30pm on Sunday.  As unbelievable as that sounds, I swear it’s true.

I would guess that I consumed 20 high ABV beers and a half a fifth of bourbon over the entire weekend.  For 3 straight days I experienced symptoms of dehydration.  Every time I drank a bottle of water, I took a piss.  My mouth was completely dry.  I tried licking envelopes and everyone would pop back up after trying to seal them.  I felt like a student in a remedial class when I tried to use my brain.  Instead of being a Ferrari going 150mph, I was my mom’s 1985 brown station wagon which maxed out at 55mph and it wasn’t easy to get there.  My hand eye coordination was awful and my backspace count was through the roof.  3 days later, I’m back.

When I sat down to write yesterday, I fired off 3 blog posts in a matter of 2 hours.  None of them were planned and I shot from the hip.  I’m not saying they were my best entries but they came easy.  When I’m in the period I described above, I can barely watch television let alone produce anything of quality.  The best part about the mentioned period of time is that I know it will end.  When I was younger I may have been able to sleep it off but my older body doesn’t respond the same way.

I’m sure if you reviewed by blog over the years you would find numerous entries similar to this one but I feel it’s important to comment on my state of mind because this blog acts as a mental output for me.  The obvious question to ask is why do you put yourself through this and the answer is fairly simple, it’s not my intention.  Once a certain amount of alcohol hits the bloodstream, the situation snowballs.

Hopefully in 50 years when this blog becomes a national phenomena, people will look at this post and get some better insight into the effects of alcohol on a 30 year old binge drinking alcoholic.  Just doing my part.