Today is Tuesday, 25 January 2022 and it’s my birthday.
It’s not an ordinary birthday and by the strictest definition of the word, it’s not a birthday at all. However, it’s very significant to me even though I wasn’t born on January 25th. For today, I have lived on this planet (and for those wise guys out there, no other) for 25,000 days. I’ll leave it to the disciples of Andrew Yang to discover my birth date.
In these times of the third decade of the 21st Century, 25,000 days seems like a significant milestone. For someone like me with a chronic disease, living in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic seems significant enough. After all, I’ve lived to see buzzards flying over the towers of New York City. I would think that’s significant. I feel very fortunate to have lived 25,000 days in this time when life seems so perilous.
I was a young boy when two jumbo jets collided over the skies of Brooklyn and Staten Island. I was significantly older when I saw another two jumbo jets fly into two towers in Lower Manhattan. I was a young man when I lived in Washington Heights, and I lived with another young man who I desired but whom I didn’t have the courage to tell how I felt about him because society and my family didn’t accept people like me. Some of them still don’t.
I’ve also seen some marvelous things. I’ve seen men walk on Luna, which most of you call The Moon and I saw it before I graduated high school. I’ve seen any number of people who celebrate life by celebrating who and what they are. I’ve took part in two Marches on Washington, not the famous one where Martin Luther King spoke, but in 1993 and again in 2000 when I and others marched for human rights for those of us celebrating their gender and sexual diversity. I watched other young people march for their lives in 2018 and understood what a powerful feeling they must have felt as they marched among those alabaster buildings in our nation’s Capital.
I’ve seen wonderful movies like Casablanca, 12 Angry Men, Mildred Pierce, Twelve O’Clock High, Psycho, JAWS, Fail-Safe, my current love tick, tick…BOOM! and the most successful movie franchise in history, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve seen some crappy movies in that time too, because I’m a lover of disaster porn and monster pictures. So, count The Day After Tomorrow, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Gorgo, The Giant Behemoth and so many others among my favorite films. I’ve laughed at the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Lemmon and Matthau, Murphy and Hall, Tucker and Chan, Smith and Lawrence and so many other unexpected combinations down through the years.
I’ve seen a lot in 25,000 days and I’ve lived a lot too, but not necessarily as much as I’ve liked and especially not as I should. Some of that will change and a lot of it will not, but I’m looking forward to doing as much as I can in the future.
For the time being, you can follow this podcast. It should be available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m trying to develop a YouTube channel, which you’ll find at Mikeylito.live. You’ll find opinions like this on my opinion blog at Mikeylito.com and other more comfortable opinions about fandom on my leisure blog at Mikeylito.blog. Finally, I can be found on most social media platforms @MikeylitoLIVE, and you can email me at mikeylitoLIVE@gmail.com.
Until next time, #Civility.
Ciao for now!
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