Anyway, that's what happened the day I was born. It was summer, 1966, the Year of The Monkey. Actually I don't know if it was the Year of The Monkey, but I like to say that it was because it sounds cool. Folks say "Tell me about yourself" and I say "I was born in the Year of The Monkey." It sounds like the first line of a novel.

 

 

In 1898, the Spanish-American War began on my Birthday. In 1942, the Gestapo killed all male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, , in retaliation for the assassination of a German official. In 1943, the ball point pen was first patented. Three years before I was born, Elisabeth Shue was born; a year after, Elizabeth Hurley was born (it's like being in the middle of a kind of cosmic babe sandwich; the downside of course is that, as far as I can tell, there is no benefit to me personally). And also on my very first birthday, Spencer Tracy died.

 

Anyway, I keep having these birthdays and getting older and older and somehow it doesn't seem fair that we always get to be older than we are but we never ever get to be younger. I mean I'm five and then I'm six and then I'm seven, but once I'm seven I never get to be six again. Not that I'm wishing I could be sixteen and, say, have it be 1982 again; even though that would be cool all by itself, it's just not what I'm talking about. And it's not that I'm getting all morbid and depressed and thinking that every year or month or day that I live is just one more year or month or day closer to death that I get. Or at least I wasn't thinking about it until I actually said it.

 

But no: Birthdays are happy days, or at least they should be, unless we project these hugely unrealistic exectations onto them, in which case we get all depressed and end up jumping off buildings. Kind of like your own personal little Christmas, except that on Christmas everyone does it all at once, and so we notice it more.

 

I think my happiest birthday was when I was like four and my sister and one of her friends took me to the mall and bought me lots of toys and we had lunch. It seems now like she got me a billion toys that year, but really she probably only got me a few. And when we had lunch, I think I remember having mashed potatoes, or maybe I just stuck my finger in someone else's mashed potatoes. It was a great birthday, though; probably the best one ever, even though it totally sucks that the entire rest of my life has been downhill from there, and plus if I had the same exact birthday today as a grown man I would kind of think it sucked. Or at least be really bizarre that my sister is buying me a toy airplane that I can spin around my head.

 

Anyway, like I was saying, birthdays are great because they are like your own personal little holidays, not like how everyone gets Christmas all at the same time. Sometimes I wish that I could compress time so that every day was my birthday, kind of like if time was a string and my birthdays were all like beads along the string, if you could just take away the string so that the beads all kind of just squnched together, then every day would be my birthday, and it would totally be worth it even if this time compression caused the entire universe to descend into chaos and all matter and energy ceased to exist, just so that I could get presents every day and waitresses would sing to me in restaurants and I would be special. At least I could cut out all the crap between my birthdays where I'm not special and I just stand around looking like a doofwad.

 

Or maybe the problem isn't me at all. Like how I keep having all these birthdays and how they're always my birthdays I'm having, and not someone else's. Like I keep growing and changing but I'm always me.

 

It's not like that for James Bond. Like how he's this super-cool secret agent guy just kind of doing secret agent stuff, and then in the next movie he's still a secret agent but he's an entirely different guy. And no one ever seems to notice that he's three inches taller or ten years younger, even though everyone else like Q or M or Miss Moneypenny is exactly the same as they ever were.

 

Like when Q died everyone made a big deal out of it and how like John Cleese was going to be the new guy and they called him R or something, I don't know, but the point is that they didn't just go "John Cleese is now Q, and he's always been Q, and you're stupid and crazy if you even remember the other guy."

 

On the other hand, they have a new M and it's a woman, and in Goldeneye she acted like she didn't know James Bond all that well, and it didn't seem like we were supposed to just play along and pretend that she's always been M. So maybe M and Q aren't really their names, but something more like designations within the intelligence service. I've never been to England but I am fairly certain that English parents don't just give their kids random letters instead of names, and anway there would only be 26 letters for however many millions of English there are over there.

 

It does bring up the possibility, though, that "James Bond" isn't really his name, but a fake identity that gets re-assigned every few years. It doesn't explain how things keep happening to him like they do; like if he goes to the doctor, you just know that the doctor is going to be a super-model and he's going to make love to her, or that she'll make some witty remark to put him in his place and then sleep with him in the next movie, or at the very least you know that he won't be getting a full rectal exam from a burly East European nurse.

 

OK this was all way off-topic. I forgot what I was talking about anyway.