May 30.  That's the day that they used to have as the official "Memorial Day".  It happens to be my birthday.  And I've had a shitload of 'em.  Yep.  I'm a baby-boomer.  Born after the 'big one'.  Born into a family of 'The Greatest Generation'.  That's primarily why so many of us are so fucked up, having to listen to the greatest generation lay down the rules, lay down the law, lay down the guilt.  Lay down the religion.  Got religion?  I do.  Yep, got it.  And I'll say it's taken a lifetime to get rid of it and return to a spiritual being.  I'm new at this of course, but it's pretty cool.  More on that later.

Grew up in a small shit town in Kansas.  Mind you, this is meant in a loving sort of way.  Sort of.  Yeah, I grew up with Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rodgers, The Long Ranger  (we didn't know he was a loner - with so much family around that was a foreign concept).  Uncles, aunts, cousins, the whole shebang.  Our family always got together on my birthday which I thought was pretty cool.  Got together and came over to our house.  It was a day off.  I was a kid and had no idea what that meant except that you had to do grown up stuff on the day off.  

Well, sir, on MY birthday they all came over, we piled in the car - and headed over to the cemetery, piled out, and the moms busied themselves with arranging flowers on graves.  I'm thinking "this is a BIRTH day celebration?  I was born today, so we go look at dead people?  WTF?"  Of course, I added 'whatthefuck' later after I got out of the army.  This annual event served to twist me pretty good.  Not only that, but they killed the flowers.  Cut the l'il suckers right off and took 'em over to the cemetery.  After the dead flowers were arranged we went over and watched some guys in uniforms hoist up a flag.  One of them played a trumpet by himself and the others shot at birds, missing them completely.  I figured the trumpet guy's job was to scare up the birds, but his buddies were the worst shots ever.  I kept thinking 'how DID we win that war anyway'?

After you stand around in opressing silence with sniffling moms looking at cold grave stones it's difficult to get back into birthday merriment.  I didn't know any of the folks under the stones except for maybe uncle Jack who died.  I did know him a little.  He always acted goofy.  I heard my folks say that drinking was going to kill him.  Anyhow, I'm sure that cemetary visit every year on my birthday is the root of my imbalance.  We all went back and had cake and ice cream and I sat there often thinking about how uncle Jack might look now if you could turn on a little night light in his coffin and check in on his decomposition progress.  I imagined he might be like Boris Karloff with a sneering toothy smile (without the lips now) and sunken missing eyeballs, etc.  This I suppose is a rather macabre thought for a small boy to be having during his birthday party, but it certainly wasn't my idea to go out there.  

After the ice cream we went down town and watched the parade.  I particularly liked it when the horses crapped on the street, then the band had to look around their trumpets to avoid stepping in it.  Well after all, this was a step up from my visions of uncle Jack.  Nonetheless, it was pretty cool of our town to put on a parade for me on my birthday.

I got a little tin drum one year and just loved that stupid thing.  My dad kept trying to slip it into the room for the trash but I would get it back out.  I liked making loud and obnoxious noises.  Later in life I learned, of course, about the idea of memorial day but the visions of uncle Jack still persist.  I would guess he's pretty much a full-on Skeletor dude these days.

As for me, six decades have past.   I'm pretty much still a kid, trapped in this decaying edifice.  The photo above is our new band "Blue Lizard Band".  Just formed, with one gig under our belt.  I'm still making noise.  I'm the drummer.  (You'll have to figure out which guy is the drummer - duh)  And uncle Jack?  I'm sure he has spun around several times with the sound.