What Should I Get Myself For My Birthday?
Oh, how I hate my birthday. I'm just not a holiday person. I'm employed all sorts of stratagems to ease the annoyance of the day. Some years I pretend it isn't happening. Other years I sleep all day. They're not all terrible, though. One year my baby-mama put together an absolutely superb surprise party to interrupt what I had hoped would be a particularly somber and self-pitying meal at Red Robin. Two years ago I threw the atom heart mother of all birthday parties. What should I do this year? I thought about ordering a Tesla Model S for myself. So I went on the Tesla Model S site. The base car is $62,000. The one you really want is $104,850. But there's good news: if you order the fully-loaded Tesla Model S 85P, you will get priority delivery. If I drove it every day, I'd save $400 a month in gas. But I wouldn't. I'd still have to have the Town Car and the SL and the Porsches. But it might be worth it, because I'd get the jump seats and make other people drive me around while I sat in the back, facing the traffic behind me and making faces as I did as a child in the Caprice and Delta 88 station wagons of my childhood.
Or I could get a chrome BMW. The primary joy in this would be driving it to my father's house and watching him try to think of something nice to say. It would also be easy to find my car in a parking lot. And nobody would steal it. But it's a 2009 BMW Siebener, which means trouble. And when---not if, when---you're stranded by the side of a road in a chrome BMW, you get no sympathy.
Better to do nothing. I have enough cars already. I have enough guitars already, as well, but the other night I went guitar shopping anyway, with a small friend of mine:
We ended up buying a floor model RainSong JM-1000. It's an unbelievably brilliant guitar and, as the promotional material promises, it's loud. That's enough of a present, I think.
For my birthday, my RainSong and I are going to Sonoma Raceway where we're going to drive some super-fun cars about which I cannot yet tell you... and then I'm meeting my brother in La Jolla to celebrate the actual day in properly idiotic fashion. With that done, both of us will be appearing on The Smoking Tire's podcast a week from tomorrow. So check it out. I promise to say something absolutely outrageous, probably about this cross-country "record" that just got set. And my brother will talk about his old Infiniti G20. You don't want to miss it. Happy Birthday to me!