You Say It’s Your Birthday

This is my friend, Putzy.

I made him wear my scarf for the emo effect.

Today is his birthday. (Welcome to 36, my friend.)

Those who have been around for a while here might remember him from when I first moved to Seattle. Putzy holds the title as my First Seattle Friend. And if you can believe it, we met on My Space of all places. Over the past three years, our friendship has waxed and waned but in the last few months we’ve been hanging out a lot- both newly single and up for some fun.

We're total hams. Later this night, totally drunk, I tripped and fell because I am classy like that. I must have made Putz look at my busted lip five times. "Is it bleeding?!"

Putzy makes me laugh. Like deep in my belly. He’s very silly and a total prankster. In my old apartment I had on-going issues with my Comcast internet service. It was so terrible that I got to know the service guy by name. He had a friend that worked at Comcast at the time so he snagged a bunch of those “comcastic” stickers and came over to my place. While I was making dinner, he slyly hid the stickers all around my house. I found those fuckers for months. He was very full of himself for what he’d pulled off.

I think one of his best pranks was on a best friend of his who hates bunnies. Yes, you read that right, the dude hates rabbits. Putz works with kids so he had them make hundreds of cut outs of bunnies and then put them on sticks. He and his friends went over to this bunny-hating friend’s house while he was gone and covered the front lawn with them. P went to meet with his friend and grabbed a ride back to the bunny-laden-lawn-house so that he could see the reaction first hand. As the car turned up the driveway and the headlights lit the lawn, his friend saw what they had done and told him to get out of the car. You just know that with shit like that, Putzy was at the helm. The guy is very creative.

P found this heart-shaped rock for me & I made a necklace out of it.

He’s incredibly talented. He’s played guitar since he was 15 and owns upwards of thirteen guitars, a mandolin and a ukulele. He’s the one that’s teaching me to play my acoustic. He’s artistic- he’s constantly holed up in his apartment making jewelery or painting or doing some new mosaic piece. He’s a horrible typist, hates mushrooms and has a really dirty mind (but I like that about him). He drives me up the g-damn wall when he goes into hermit mode. He can be sporadic about which messages he chooses to respond to which I think is total bullshit since he has an iPhone and I’m pretty sure it’s written in the fine print of the contract: You can not miss any calls, texts or emails when owning an iPhone because when you hold an iPhone, you hold the Universe in your hands. (Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.) His litany of excuses amuse (and irritate) me. My favorite is “I was putting out my bosses PMS fires all week.” By my calculations, his boss is constantly suffering from PMS. Poor lady!

I cut his forehead off on purpose. Really!

Putz is my go-to guy. He’s usually up for anything and he’s pretty unflappable. It’s well known that I am a control freak and when I mentioned this to him he seemed to have no awareness of it. Either he’s playing dumb to play safe or he really doesn’t notice it. But that certainly didn’t stop him from giving me shit about it for the rest of the evening. “Oh, are you trying to control me now?” he’ll say trying to suppress a smile. Just shut it, Putz. Except I’m laughing while exasperated. He gives good tease. I’ll admit it- it’s good for me to be around him. He’s like the yin to my yang. I suppose that’s what happens when you put an Aries and a Libra together. He’s not an emotional basket case which sometimes is unnerving for me. He does claim to have cried before so my previous claim that he is a robot masquerading as a man is unfounded. Kind of a bummer because having a robot friend could be kind of cool.

You can take the boy out of California but you can't take California out of the boy.

This is all just to say Happy Birthday to my very good friend in celebration of his 36th year and thanks for being in my life. Have fun in California! Say hello to the ocean for me.