It's Bad Luck To Be Superstitious

I am eighteen hours away from completing a 60 year journey through the universe.  I have spun on this orb 21,913 (soon to be 21,914) times and I still maintain my balance.  I have traveled 35,100,000,000 miles around our Sun.  It is no wonder I am short winded.  Also, keeping pace with the Sun, I fly through the galaxy at 140 miles per second, which means tomorrow at 5:55 am I will have flown 9,304,018,214,400,000,000,000 miles. (...and boy are my arms tired... {rim shot})

I came onto this planet on Thursday the twelfth, making Friday the thirteenth my first full day of existence.  Good thing I am not superstitious (knock on wood).   I recall being born and how badly I wanted a cigarette.  I was quite the smoker in my youth.  I averaged a pack and half per day.  My brand was Old Gold and I saved the coupons.  When I had accumulated enough for a chest x-ray, I decided to keep collecting until I could get an iron lung.  Unfortunately, they quit making iron lungs before I had enough coupons, so I had no choice but to extinguish my smoking habit.

In my beginning, I had very little control of my limbs, which made it impossible to turn on a radio or TV.  I couldn't even hold a book for reading.  So those first few months were boring as hell.  I tried to sleep as much I could.   Also, I was toothless.  You think my folks would have sprung for a set of dentures, but no.  They preferred to use their money for housing and utilities... and food.  Which was very mean of them, taunting me with their meat and potatoes knowing full well it would be quite some time before I could enjoy a burger and fries.

One thing I had, that today's babies do not, is a diaper pail.  Today, a soiled diaper gets thrown away.  Diapers were not always a paper product.  They used to be made of cotton cloth and reusable.  Before I was potty trained, my soiled diapers were deposited into a diaper pail kept next to my crib.  It is said only other people's feces reek of odor, but that is untrue.  Try living in a room with a few days worth of your own excrement.  It can be very unpleasant.  Moms was not always in a rush to wash the diapies.

While in the process of learning English, my first messages were not always understood.  I would be yelling for Dad to turn off the bowling program and put on "The Pinky Lee Show."  This usually resulted with me getting a pacifier crammed into my mouth.  The folks had to dip into their savings to procure a pacifier because they got tired of me pulling paint chips off the wall to suck on.  Not that they were worried about the damage lead paint could cause, but because I was ruining the decor of the room.

This is it for now.  At a later time I may continue writing about my starting out as this particular life-force, the thrills and spills of it all, or I may not.  But I will leave you by revealing that I had no brothers or sisters and the family motto was "Go to your room, Johnny."