Suckle-Free City

As of this afternoon, I have finished the last of our state-mandated birthday parties for my three boys. As dictated by the Catholic church, their birthdays fall inconveniently close together because we managed to conceive each of them at around the same time of the year, each two years apart, at the waning of a Blue Corn Moon as the late summer would die, regular as the Randy Train arriving at Doin' It Station. The Pope, I believe, calls this the Rhythm Method. I'm not sure what it means exactly, so just to be safe, we always had some Gloria Estefan on in the background. Now every time I hear a bongo drum, my cheeks flush.

I am happy to announce that my wife and I were able to throw three separate birthday parties in the space of about five weeks and handed out exactly ZERO gift bags to departing guests.

That's right, we invited scores and scores of spoiled little lower-middle class children to our homes and sent them away with NOTHING but full bellies, sweat-matted hair and the same number of limbs they arrived with. The tyranny and oppression of the Child Party Gift Bag Door Prize stops at the threshold portico of Domicile Poplicola. We ward it off with a horseshoe. We keep it in a sock so I can whip it around my head. It's also quite effective on solicitors and proselytizers. OK, the latter depends on the denomination. The Mormons run, but the Jehovah's Witnesses tend not to mind it so much. I think they're just so grateful someone answered the door.

I'm not sure where the social pressure to provide bags of toys kids don't want nor will every play with as thanks for attending YOUR party, but I'm fairly certain it's Martha Stewart's fault. She's the one standing at the top of the steep, shale peak called Commodification Of Manners, throwing down pebbles that start the landslide that falls out of birthday invitations I open from other people in the shape of little metallic balloon-shaped confetti.

Because of her and her felon's magazines and scofflaw's TV shows, one can no longer just throw a party, one must entertain. A bag of ruffles next to Lipton French Onion dry soup mixed into 16 ounces of sour cream is now the social equivalent of serving unroasted grasshoppers with dog shit guacamole.*

Now if I don't make my own bagels from scratch so that I might make onion-saffron bagel chips with a nice garlic prawn three-cheese dipping sauce served in a hollowed-out casaba melon, then I might as well invite people over to take turns gazing into the bottomless wonder that is my colon.

I say, No more. The line must be drawn HERE, THIS far, NO further.


And I will make them pay for what they've done.

Mostly by serving peanut M&M's and 2-liter bottles of soda. I'm sorry, little Timmy, were you expecting a little parachute man in a cellophane bag decorated with colorful balloons on your way out? No offense, but FUCK YOU, you little parasite. Until I get my Stimulus Check, you're just going to have to find a way to make due with the hot dog, cake, chips and soda I served and the unlimited play time it the inflatable basketball-themed jumper castle I paid for.

Tell your mom I said Hi.



* To be fair, no one has ever demonstrated for me the difference between dog shit and guacamole.