I’m just a few weeks out from my 30th birthday. What a mind-fuck. I don’t think I’m old, but I remember back to when my parent’s friends were turning thirty, and child me was lurking underfoot during their boring, Zima drinking, no cake or pinata having, adult birthday parties, in all my thumb-sucking, rat-tailed, preschool glory. Back then I knew without a shadow of a doubt that thirty was some Jurassic period Methuselah type bullshit and that they were literally older than time itself. Now that I myself have reached that venerable age, I’m surprised to admit that..thirty ain’t that old.

Granted, my body isn’t what it was ten, or even five years ago, but it’s not a complete wreck either. I can still do practically everything I used to be able to do, I just pay for it in pulled muscles and regret later. I’m certainly not a child anymore, that’s for sure.

What is interesting to note however, is that I’m still me. It’s hard to articulate, but as a kid, I always assumed that the person I would grow into would be a complete stranger, since adulthood was so unfathomable to me at that time, but I’m really not. The Max that lives in my head is the same Max that lived in my head thirty years ago. Sure, I might have learned a thing or two in the intervening years, but I still like building pillow forts, and having nerf-gun battles with my friends, and staying up too late reading, and not eating my vegetables, and being generally naughty. I’m pleased to report that, at thirty, the world is still a magical place, and since I’ve kept that attitude for this long, I’m cautiously optimistic that it will stay with me for at least the next thirty as well.

With that being said, there are certainly distinct differences between child Max and adult Max. With adulthood comes a breadth of new and novel experiences. In my teens I learned how to drive and how to bone everything that moves. In my early twenties I learned all of the essential life lessons that college has to offer, like how to make Dubra drinkable using coffee filters, and how to steal industrial quantities of toilet paper from public restrooms. In my later twenties I learned that no amount of coffee filters makes Dubra drinkable, and that maybe it is not wise to bone everything that moves. My late twenties also brought with them the unavoidable onslaught of friends experiencing various adulting milestones. Careers were started. Homes were bought. And weddings were had. Oh so many weddings. I’ve worn so many tuxedos in the past few years that I don’t even have to show up for fittings at Men’s Warehouse anymore, I just drive slowly past the store on the day of the wedding and they throw my rental tux in through my passenger window. It’s a convenient system, if expensive. Luckily for my wallet, I believe that the glut of weddings has passed its peak. Most everybody I know with even the slightest prospects of marriageability have already done so, and those that remain, well…I think we can safely assume that they’re unlovable cretinous freaks who will die forgotten and alone, their desiccated corpses left to feed their million cats. Or in my case, yard-wolves.

Now that the marriages have passed however, the final threshold to adulthood is upon us. As the prophetic nursery-rhyme “sitting in a tree” accurately predicts – first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.

Oh how right you are mean-spirited playground rhyme. The babies. They come.

Because of their disgusting babies, I now know for a fact that several of my friends have had the sex at least once. It’s proven. They. So. Nasty.

I’ll admit, I’m having a hard time adjusting. Not just because friends that I used to watch snort PCP out of strippers’ butt-holes are now investing in child safety locks for their kitchen cabinets, and buying baby powder in bulk for irritated poop poop fannies. Also because, for the first twenty-something years of my life, the appropriate response to “Max guess what, we’re pregnant!” was “Oh god no. Oh gross. Oh I’m so sorry. Do you guys need me to drive you to planned parenthood? Or the top of a steep flight of stairs? I’ve got like a million coat-hangers in my closet if you need them… or are you just going to accept that your lives are over and you’ll never achieve your dreams or be happy again?”

Now all of a sudden I’m supposed to be all like “Oh neato, congratulations. So excitement. Much happy. Very wow.”

I think not.

Here’s the thing. As a man, my respect for someone is based almost exclusively on the quality of their jokes, the speed they can run a forty yard dash, and the amount of pull-ups they can do in a row. A baby has zero jokes, can’t even run a little, and is incapable of even a single pull-up. Babies are literally the worst people. Babies are even worse than pets, which are useless. Simply put, they’re pieces of shit.

I refuse to debase my tightly held values because your pull-out game weak, and an alien monster grew inside your woman’s belly-hole, and burst out of her in a slimy horror show mess, ruining her front-butt for all time.

Here is a typical human woman experiencing the miracle of childbirth for the first time.

No I do not want to look at pictures of your gross baby. It’s gross. All babies are gross. If your baby was a full-sized human being, but retained its freakish baby proportions, medieval Frenchmen would be chasing it into Notre Dame with pitchforks and flaming torches as it yelled Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

Nor do I want to hold your baby. I want your baby to stop shitting itself, get a job and stop being a mooch.

Don’t get me wrong. I myself would like to have babies someday. Hopefully quite a few. My work offers two weeks of paid paternity leave so…yeah, I’d call that worth it. I think that it’s two weeks per pregnancy, so you better believe that’s a loophole I plan on exploiting. I figure if I start getting busy on two week intervals for the next few years with a new partner every time, I can be out on endless paternity leave until it’s time to collect my 401k and retire. It’s the American dream.

I don’t have any special desire to raise, or pay for, or otherwise interact with said babies of course. We’ve been over this, babies are gross. The very idea of me having a daughter is laughable, and I won’t even dignify it with another second of thought. As is my family’s long-standing tradition however, any sons I sire will be released into the wild as infants, and if they survive to adulthood they will have one chance on their 18th birthday to best me in hand to hand combat. If they win, they take my place as head of the household, and get to enter into society. If they lose however, they must remain in the forest until they die, while periodically allowing grainy pictures to be taken of themselves by excitable tourists, to keep the legend of Sasquatch alive. It’s a heavy burden, I know, but it’s a legacy my family has been proud to uphold for centuries.

To recap this absolute train-wreck of a post, which I just re-wrote quickly after accidentally deleting the very insightful and meaningful post I was originally writing tonight…um, yeah, I’m turning thirty soon, it’s not so bad, and babies are gross.

Max Out.