Happy Birthday To Me

I’m not gonna’ tell you my birthday.  You’ll just have to guess.  But rest assured I do have one. And I chose to celebrate it at an undisclosed time in an undisclosed manner in my hidden hypothetical secret bunker.  You may have a beer of your own to join in.  I’m inclusive and trusting in that way.

Birthdays remind me that I was actually born.  Which remind me of Neal Stephenson’s thoughts on the matter.  Which give me license to think of myself as a stupendous badass.

This all derives from Stephenson’s introduction to fictional character Godfrey Waterhouse IV:

“Let’s set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stevenson

P.S.  As one stupendous badass to another I recommend that you read Cryptonomicon if you haven’t already done so.