I do finally feel like a thirtysomething now. Thirty and Thirty-One was like I just was Twenty-Nine a few seconds ago. Thirty-Two feels ankle deep in the first treadings towards the dirty old man pond. Couple of fortysomethings at the jobby job called me a baby, which made me giggle like one.

So, in mock celebration I am gonna go through each age and mention a lackluster highlight stricty to tickle my own pickle.

YEAR ZERO: I will not profess to have genius cognizance of the warm autumnal glow emanating through my mother's womb while I was floating in amniotic fluid. The time when my age could be weighed in months are a blank slate. I can only go by third party perspective and their reports that I was cuter than a basket of muffins.

YEAR ONE: Yes, I remember events from when I was one. You can either believe me and call me a freak, or don't and call me a freak, I don't give a fresh steamy snow melting turd. We lived in Crete Greece, where my Pop was stationed by the Air Force to monitor radar activity of those sneaky USSR bastards. We could have lived in a sealed geodesic dome environment on Pluto for all I knew geographically then. All I knew is the tiles of Greece were my nemesis. Grappling onto shaky end tables, arms of chairs, and Ma's shins to get myself erect. Blammo! Me no likey smacking my wittle head on hard floor. I crawled my way though life until the following year. Also I spoke my first sentence shortly after turning one. Pop told me not to bite his toes and I said "Mm biten'em".

YEAR TWO: The Greeks adored me. Thought I was Zues spawn. Ridiculously wrinkled old lady who lived upstairs from us would steal me away when Ma wasn't looking. I couldn't be happier about the scenario. She would take me up to the open air terra cotta roof and feed me perfectly cooked soft boiled eggs. The yolks were this deep melted crayon looking orange, and super nummy. Also on the roof she would break out the jack bunny rabbit and plop him down with all the lady bunnies. He'd thump into them like a steam engine piston, and then pass out on his side gasping for oxygen.

The Greeks also loved me in the restaurants. I would stumble from table to table like a drunken sailor and they would feed me sips of Ouzo.

Ma really freaked at an outdoor market when a clamoring crowd plucked me from her backpack, and passed me around held high in the air chanting "Christo! Christo!". Not many platinum curly blonde haired babies with sky blue eyes about in Crete. They assumed I was the second coming of christ. I thought my first crowd surf was great. Didn't really know I was being proclaimed the boy king of heaven at the time.

YEAR THREE: We moved back to Oshgosh Wisconsin halfway through my third year when Pop's military duty ended. Actually, this was my first time ever on American soil. I was born overseas. I've written many accounts of that winter to winter year before we moved to St. Louis.

Developed a huge crush on Samantha, who lived across the street. She was six. She would dress me up like a living Ken doll. Smeared gaudy cosmetics on my face. We had tea parties. We had our own inside jokes. We giggled incessantly. I would hold her hand and she would drag me around the block. Her complexion was like an Incan goddess. Long black hair. It severed my insides when I saw her waving goodbye image become increasingly smaller when we headed on the road to our new southbound home.

Also, while watching cartoons right up against the old wooden encased black and white televion set I busted the damn thing. Apparently sensitive cathode tubes don't like it when a little kid is jumping up and down directly in front of it. But the critters on the tube wanted to dance. The fading out blip was an ominous sight.

YEAR FOUR: I was given a Big Wheel for my birthday from my Pop's folks. The folks were growing crops of corn and tomatos in the backyard to supplement our calorie intake, they couldn't exactly afford a new plastic mini pretend bike.

We lived in the ghetto part of Oshgosh, well as ghetto as Oshgosh Wisconsin gets. Basically, picture dirt encrusted white trash warm Schlitz drinking tractor drivers. I was riding my new Big Wheel down the sidewalk. This Black kid jumps out of the bushes, plants his sneaker on the middle of the handlebars, and demands I get off and give him the bike. I tell him to go jump in traffic. He spits in my eye.

I still remember the gooey faint olive hued slime running down my face. A flavor seeped from my eye into my throat, and it was stingingly sour. My eye was infected for days later afterwards.

We ended up rolling around on dried ochre grass for possession rights to the Big Wheel. I bit into him and chewed a chunk off. He yelped and sprinted away screaming. I think I had a morsel of his cheek in between my teeth.

A week or two later the mud coated runts that lived in the house behind my backyard took me to see a dead body of an unfortunate who got sucked into a drain pipe and deposited in our local trench. He was puffy and smelly. We poked his corpse with sticks.

YEAR FIVE: Odd. See, having a birthday in the summer, meant I was always the last one to get older in any class I've been involved with. So I started kindergarten about a month after turning five. I have written about that impressionable first day in here before too. Anyway, I mention that cause I think I also have reported I started kindergarten when I was four, which is false.

Anyway.

1976 was the year of the Bicentennial of Declaration of Independence. Many kitschy 70's items with red, white and blue adornments were everywhere. There was a particular calendar that hung in our kitchen. The corners with printed wavy flags, rings of stars with "'76" in the middle of them. Funny trio of guys, one playing a flute, one playing a drum, all bandaged. Amused me greatly.

YEAR SIX: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Star Wars.

My friend Brian's birthday party had it's finale at the movie theater for a mass group viewing of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. His folks were well off. I was in a strange U. City school district where half the kids were fairly affluent and the other were dirt poor. I wallowed in the second category.

McKnight Elementary School was an interesting mix where I was in the minority. Sixty percent of the students were Black, and out of the forty percent of the students who were White, about ninety percent of them were Jewish.

Back to the sticky floors and crowded seats. During the previews I filled my mouth with soda and chewed popcorn until I looked like a defensive blowfish. Turned to look at Brian to crack him up. The kid on the other side of me squeezed my face and I launched sweet spanky slurry on the backs of the seat in front of me.

Luckily we were not ejected from the building. Once the movie started I forgot that anyone else was there. Ma and Pop were not big movie goers. This was my very first experience at a movie theater. Been a junky ever since.

Well, the folks had to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon luckily. Plus, the Star Wars preview showed before Close Encounters, and I became a squeaky monkey in the house until we made it to Star Wars. I still picture myself hearing "laugh it up furball" for the first time whenever I want to try and force a cheer up. The Hobbit also previewed during Star Wars, and since pop was a Tolkien nut, he took us to see that as well that year. That trifecta solidified my movie crackhead status.

YEAR SEVEN: ....... well this is turning into a gargantuan effort. Plus I am at the jobby job right now and these puke stains don't make it conducive to productive creative thought with their yammerings and lowest common denominator retard radio noises. So I will be continuing this later. Hold your water until then.