December 15th at 12:58 AM

Yes, happy birthday to me.  Another year, another broken heart.  Live and let live.  Leggo my Eggo.  I'm joking, of course.  But aren't we all in some way, joking?  The family took me to Paisano's in Kingston for a lovely dinner of salad and the sort of Italian fare one might expect from a place named Paisano's.  Quite yummy.  I got a gameboy game and some money and a Andy Kaufman video and some big old CaseLogic CD holders and some candy and that's it, I think.  

I'm listening to The Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips.  A warm, tight album.  Like me.

And let me tell you, boy, now that I'm 22, there's going to be some big changes around here.  I'm going to settle down once and for all and stop eating so much Taco Bell.  It's time to write that novel.  I want to learn to play baseball.  I've decided to give up juice.  I'm going pro, and it will take a deluge of monkey-voodoo and bad fortune to convince me otherwise.  There's something weird in my pant-leg.  I'm going to travel to China and learn about these so called "Chinese people".  I will never fish again.  I want knees, oh what I would do for a real pair of glorious, flexible human knees.  To stand, then sit.  Oh! to lift a piano with my legs rather than my back.  I promise to build my own crawlspace.  They will say, "That Frank, he's a go-getter.  There's a womanizer who knows what he wants."  And I will toss Frank a similar quip of positive reinforcement, and at 5 o'clock, Frank will go home happy, but inside he will be lonesome.  And while I'm watching reruns of Just the Ten of Us, I will think about Frank.  Even Seattle will try to drop me a line.  Everywhere I will see buildings, short, squat buildings,  growing of their own accord. I whistle:  dogs and cats, swimming together.  The temperature bothers only the weak.  Millennial jump-rope.  The sophisticated lilt in my voice pitches your head upward.  I need no saddle.  Silver drips everywhere.  We are watching me.  Count my gunpowder.