OFFICIAL THREAD- MB's 40th Birthday Blowout

Some of you, whom I won't name, have already asked where the line begins to offer me birthday greetings and shower me with gifts. This is it folks. The queue starts at my tastefully gold plated Herman Miller throne and snakes back toward the MB10K Club Lounge. Come shower with me adulation because these are the last days of my 30s. I am turning 40 Sunday, and if all of the jokes are to be believed, I will soon be dead. The funny thing is that I feel better and healthier now than I did when I was 20, even after kids and two decades worth of adult world ups and downs.

Tomorrow my family has "something" planned which I believe will be "something" out of town. I do all of our laundry and clothes are missing.

All I ask in this celebration is that Black Barney keeps his britches on for at least half of the party. Either half.

Barnes AMA: Compare 40 to 30 and 20.

I'll come shower with you all right...

Happy birthday man. You should crowd-fund a new walker. Tennis balls on the bottom for stretch goals.

charlest wrote: Happy birthday man. You should crowd-fund a new walker. Tennis balls on the bottom for stretch goals.

And then run off with the money, having not bought the walker.

Right before I turned 40 I happened to read an article about how our brains start deteriorating at age 40.

So good luck with that. Happy birthday, Michael!

Lawdy Lawdy Mike is 40!!

Happy birthday, you old bastard. May your dentures fit well and may the doctor understand that you don't need Viagra for sex, but rather just to get it out there far enough so you stop peeing on your slippers.

All the best for Sunday Mike, I'll be up to my glazed eyeballs watching Rugby World Cup matches (and posting match comments) that day - 4 matches on the schedule - so won't be greeting you on the day. I'm all up for giving you the good points of the post-40 years but I'm a (normally) bullshit free Kiwi so I got nothing for ya ... apart from your pre-40 memories become very valued.

I like the way you rock n' roll
You jam harder than a magickist
MICHAEL BARNES x4
I love the way you cuss the crowd
This means you are telling them something
I love how you tell the stupid son of a bitches to fuck off. Right on brother!
MICHAEL BARNES x4
You do not suck a camels poody hole
You do not suck a hyena's spermy dick
Rock over London
Rock on Chicago
MJB Coffee - tastes good when it should

I think this calls for a....

So Friday morning I get woken up at 6:30am and dragged onto a plane bound for NYC (well, Newark and then a train to NYC). Kind of in shock the whole time. My wife had been planning this big trip for a while, and it was worth it because NYC is my favorite place in the world and there's nowhere I'd rather be on my 40th birthday.

Stayed in this hilariously pretentious "boutique" hotel, ROW NYC...rooms were TINY and everything was ultra-hip...but FILTHY! The place was a dump, but they tried to make it look all modern and cool. We switched rooms three times...a $400 a night hotel room should not have coffee cup stains on the desk, broken mirrors in the bathroom and trash outside the door in the hall.

Friday we did the usual wandering around Times Square, spent a bunch of time letting the kids run around the TRU there. Which was fun, but it is ultimately just a TRU. Took a taxi to Little Italy and ate at La Mela, which is kind of a tradition for us. It was the first time there with the kids though. The mixed pasta dish is so freakin' good- gnocchi in vodka sauce, tortellini, rigatoni. Then we went over to Caffe Roma, which is in my opinion the ONLY place to get cannoli siciliana. Dried fruit and just a few chocolate chips, as it should be. I ate two. It poured down rain for a while but then we walked back up Broadway. Kids were not happy about that.

Saturday more wandering, but we took one of the bus tours, which I've never done out of four previous visits. It was actually pretty fun, and it was a good way for the kids to get around without having to walk (or be pushed in strollers). We got off at Chelsea Market, which is awesome but it was way too crowded. Some of the better pizza to be had in town is there at this Italian market. Two dollars. Who said NYC is too expensive? After that, more wandering and then we went back to the hotel because we had tickets to see The Lion King. It was the kids' first show, and my first on Broadway. Don't really care what the theater elite think, it's an awesome show- very artfully produced (Julie Taymor), beautifully staged. And I'm a shameless Disney nerd, so I loved it. Afterwards, vegetarian shawarma, which I was delighted to find at this joint called Maoz.

Sunday we went to the Nintendo World Store, which was awesome but I didn't feel like waiting in line to buy a Metroid shirt. Which I now regret. We got back on the bus but went uptown this time. At random, we got off at the American Museum of Natural History, which we had not ever been to. I forgot it was the museum in Night at the Museum, and the kids love that picture so we had to check it out. It turns out that it is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and one of the best things I've seen in NYC- every bit as good as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, if not better. The place just blows my mind, the way it is laid out with the dioramas is just astonishingly beautiful. The elephant display has one that TEDDY ROOSEVELT shot and had stuffed, unbelievable. The marine life hall was just stunning, with the giant blue whale and of course the famous squid and the whale, which I looked at for like 30 minutes. There's something really special about that piece, it captures something very subtle not only about the subject but also about spectatorship in museums. Of course, the highlight were the dinosaur halls. Mostly REAL dinosaur bones instead of the usual casts. The displays were just mindblowing, and I actually was sort of in tears the whole time. I was a dinosaur kid, I've loved dinosaurs literally since I was a baby and it was the first time I had ever been around actual dinosaur fossils.

Then we stupidly took a cab downtown because my wife wanted dumplings and bubble tea. Stupidly stopped in Soho because we wanted to go to Uniqlo, I bought a Basquiat shirt there at least, but we were literally cramming before we had to get back to the hotel and then back to Penn Station and back to Newark via train. We walked the rest of the way to Chinatown and wound up at House of Vegetarian, which we had about 10 years ago but it wasn't as good as we remembered. Bubble tea was had and promptly spilled not only by wife but also Scarlett. Then we wound up in the longest taxi ride ever back up town, which put us 30 minutes late to get on the train to Newark. Fortunately the plane was delayed or else we would have missed the flight. Then we got to security and there was an incident- some dude going to Tel Aviv jumped the security gate and ran. So they locked the airport down for 30 minutes.

NY Comic Con was in town, but it was sold out. Nerds everywhere. I would have liked to have gone, but with kids it would have been a disaster. It was pretty tough to do anything with a 4 year old and a 5 year old, who don't get the things that are awesome about NYC.

Barnes AMA: Compare 40 to 30 and 20.

20- broke
30- a little less broke
40- had kids, broke again.

Really, I don't feel/act any different than I did 20 years ago...more mature, more refined...but I didn't really grow out of anything except maybe wearing makeup and sporting a Mohawk. Both of which I would have no compunction about doing today, but my personal taste is different now. I feel healthier and have more energy now than I did at 20, actually. Some of that is because I eat entirely differently than I did at 20 or even 30. 30 was actually Atlanta Game Factory times.

I spent the weekend masterbating

Michael Barnes wrote: Who said NYC is too expensive? .

Anyone that has stayed or lived in NYC. The food isn't expensive because NYC is in the United States of America and food there is insanely cheap. But lodging in NYC is insane.

Glad you had a great birthday weekend! Best pizza I ever had was off a random place I walked past when I was there.

I was kidding about that...the thing is, some things are LESS than they are in Atlanta, at least. By a lot. Food in particular, as long as you aren't in Times Square where you can go to a diner and buy a $15 stack of pancakes. Clothes- good clothes- are actually much less, but that's primarily because there are so many more choices. But yeah, lodging, taxis, and all that kind of stuff are ASTRONOMICAL, let alone real estate.

I paid $6.29 for a slice of extremely average pizza at Cedar Point Saturday.