Today was fucking surreal.

I woke up and realized it was my birthday. But I couldn't, for the life of me, remember how old I am. I had to consult my fucking myspace page to figure it out. The answer was 29, in case you were wondering. I'm tempted to put in that old joke about how memory is the second thing to go, and I can't remember what the first is, but that seems kind of lame.

So then I leave for work only to get stuck in a massive traffic jam. Apparently, someone thought that Monday rush hour was a good time to repave one of the city's main thoroughfares. A thoroughfare which has the exit ramps of one of the busiest metro area highways right next to their little construction project. It took me twenty freaking minutes just to get out of my parking lot. It took another twenty to go the three quarters of a block to where I could cut through the neighborhoods to go around it. Or so I thought. I drove two miles out of my way, took an alternate route, and still got caught up in the construction. There was even an entire fully-loaded coal train caught in the traffic jam. I didn't know that was even possible. I guess it's a good thing I took a dump before I left.

Then when I finally got to work (over an hour late) there were cupcakes. Sooooo many cupcakes. And signs proclaiming the glory of my twenty-ninth birthday. And also a spandex water-bottle cozy, for some reason. Now, my bosses buy a cake for everyone on their birthday. It's just something they do, and I think it's kind of cool that they do, but it's usually just a cake and a card and standing around like an idiot while people sing Happy Birthday at you. The sheer volume of cupcakes aside, the decorated signs and water-bottle cozies were kind of a mind-fuck.

Then when I left work, I went to the health food store to get a steak because, well, I spent most of my birthday staring through a jeweler's loupe at little pieces of cold-rolled stress-proof steel and cutting a 0.060in radius that had to be completely freaking flawless for some reason, and I wanted a goddamned steak for dinner goddamnit. So I'm at the health food store buying an organic porterhouse roughly the size of my head, and the crazy little hipster girl at the register starts in on this whole meat is murder trip, and how any self-respecting human being should be vegan, and not only vegan, but they should only ever eat organic vegetables. So I had to sit there and explain to her, as calmly as I could, some of that Lion King circle of life shit, namely that to have organic vegetables you have to have organic cows, because if you don't have organic cows you don't get organic manure and organic bone meal to fertilize organic crops. So organic vegans like her desperately need people like me who buy organic beef, so shut the fuck up and give me my motherfucking steak already.

What is it about veganism? I mean, you don't want to eat meat, that's fine. You don't want to buy or use products which contain animal parts, I totally get that. I respect that. But what is it about going vegan that turns so many otherwise completely reasonable people into such self-righteous cocksuckers? Obviously I'm not talking about all vegans, or even most vegans, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. In fact, I'll bet every single person reading this knows at least three of these people. It's like a vegan diet just does something chemical in some people that causes them to become complete assholes. They should start putting warning labels on the broccoli: "Warning - May Cause Sanctimonious Cocksuckery."

Right, so then I went to the Kmart across the street to get some soap, and toothpaste and stuff because I didn't want to pay ten bucks for toothpaste at the health food store. As I'm walking to the door, I see this car, a cream colored mid-'80s Volvo, covered, completely covered, in troll dolls. There was a crowd gathered around it. People were taking pictures. People were posing with the car. People were pulling in off the road to see the car. It was... actually really kind of creepy. It's hard to explain it to anyone who wasn't there, but I had the overwhelming feeling that I was about to be sucked into the plot of a horror novel in which an agent of Satan drives around the suburbs stealing people's souls and trapping them inside hundreds of troll dolls and Mardi Gras beads. It kinda makes my skin crawl even just thinking about it.

Today was like, you know how sometimes when you drop acid it seems like the universe just throws a whole year's worth of weird shit at you in the space of seven or eight hours? Today was like that. But without the acid. At several points during the day I found myself feeling really glad that I don't smoke pot anymore. But now that I think about it, maybe a little weed might have made it easier to cope. Days like these kinda make me wish I still drank.

On the plus side though, I finally beat Earthworm Jim today!