When You Think You Understand Birthdays

After the last of the refugees left the crumbling canoes, stumbling onto the San Diego shore & frightening the children, the prospectors, the tree machine salespeople, they one by one turned & looked out at the smoking hulk at the horizon's edge. They wished for something like a sunset to silhouette the sinking ship, but it was midday & all they got was a half-assed fizzling fireball which hopped up like a fat man from an ant-covered garden chair, then plopped down again, rocking the distant liner nearly imperceptibly, but not making a sound nor otherwise causing any memorable pyrotechnics.

The EMT technicians who happened to be passing & said "What the hell" & went to help the wet, shocked former passengers were surprised to hear these otherwise Caucasian-appearing people speaking a medley of what a couple of skinny-dipping linguists said were South Indian languages like Tamil & Malayalam, although the cuter of the two swore she heard Comanche. Most improbably, the only word the refugees spoke in English - & the only word they used when talking to the doctors, policepeople, newspaper & television reporters, representatives of the religious community, car wash technicians & out-of-work clowns who came to help them was this: "Birthday."

How did you get out there? Birthday. What happened out there? Birthday. Where did the ship come from? Birthday. Why were all of you on the ship? Birthday. What is the name of the day when I came out of my mother's womb? Birthday.

This enigma attracted surprising little media attention at the time (it happened on either Super Bowl Sunday or Never Ending Pasta Bowl Tuesday - accounts differ) until now, when Lucas Peabody Assortment has decided to follow up on this mysterious tragedy in his new book How To Be A Man, Make Love With Men & Not Be Gay. Despite its "self help" title, this is a provocatively scholarly work which examines what Assortment calls "the wet boat surviving folks" & traces their inexplicable journey on a huge cruise ship with no international markings, no communication with any other sea- or aircraft, & no apparent survivors among the crew.

Assortment, who is an Austrian slumlord with deep ties to the Bavarian holistic capital punishment movement, provides blurry photographs & crayon-colored maps of what could possibly be images of the ocean - or maybe of a monkey getting a haircut - to discuss his incredible discovery that, despite the fact that he's never left the small village of Prigglitz, where he was born & later conceived, he has not been able to locate the ship's remains under the sea. Add to that the interesting - some might even call them mildly amusing - interviews he conducted with the survivors over internet chat from the late 1990s until shortly after the early 2000s, & you are sucked into Assortment's delicious description of an international cabal foiled by freedom fighters & earnest young men with typewriters wearing codpieces & deeply desperate for a space to practice both their music & their avant-garde cinema.

This valuable tome has begun to shed light on the hegemonic aesthetes for whom the War On Sailing is but a ploy for mind control, bigger golf courses, historical revisionism, & the renaming of an entire generation with anagrams of names everyone likes better. Assortment, though despondent about the future & really, really wanting to have sex with a man but afraid of being "outed," still manages to present a plan for scholarship & cruising which demands our attention. A gripping read.