May has always been the most important month for me because it is my birth month. I know this sounds very selfish, but it isn’t what you think. If I wasn’t born, maybe you wouldn’t have been born either and the world would be nothing like it is today. Wait a minute, need to think about the world possibly being worse off than today and that’s a tough one. Let me tell you, for someone who is forever trying his hand at writing, it is a bitch to steer clear of the shit storm that we call the present. The good news for me is that the month of my birth overshadows everything else in the world and I like to quietly and continually celebrate my birth throughout the whole month, culminating on the 29th, with the excitement tapering off during the final two days.

At the very least, May has always been a time of more introspection than my normal quota, which is already pretty high. If you have always been a turd, then your birthday would likely only make you feel even worse about your life. I have fucked up my share, but I can’t say that I have ever felt regret. I have not yet mastered the art of undoing what has already been done. This is my seventy-second May and I am still feeling pretty good about things.

The biggest move of my life was orchestrated around my birthday. In 1987, I was in my early forties, working as the head of sales for a distributor of television programs. I was feeling increasingly like I just didn’t belong in the world of advertising, being slowly crushed in the New York City atomic vice grip. I had been divorced nearly ten years and my boys were in their teens. There would never be a good time to leave them, but it was no longer possible for me to breath that air any longer. I knew it was killing me and eventually I would be absorbed into the concrete.

In one of those rare moments when I had some decent cash, I bought a little adobe home in the Cerrillos Flats, a few miles south of Santa Fe, NM. I was still living the life in the City and bought the place, thinking I would visit it periodically, an incredibly dumb idea. The story of why I bought a place in the middle of nowhere with no plan is a terrific one, but not for now. It is funny, sometimes the Universe is ahead of us and we just simply catch up to it.

Typical of my May thought rhythms, I went back to that time and tried to return myself to it and had no idea where I got the balls to make my move. It was only a couple of nights ago I thought about it. With the total advantage of having lived it all, I am amazed it worked out as well as it did. Looking back, I couldn’t believe I gave up absolutely everything that was familiar and comfortable. The only way I pulled it off was to anchor it to May 29th, with none of the symbolism lost on me, even then. It was perfect, my birthday was on a Friday, using the weekend like a bookend, closing out all I had ever known, hitting the road on Monday, June 1st.

Volume III of my life also happens to involve, you guessed it, the merry month of May. I had an incredible fifteen years in New Mexico, making it my true home and creating a motherlode of experiences, all catalogued in my worst selling book, Halloween in Portland-Diary of a Mind.

Before I left NYC, I had begun to feel life was a journey and I don’t know where it came from. I know I started drifting from the middle of the road a long time before that. Even as a kid, I didn’t fit comfortably into my familiar world.

I honestly don’t remember when moving to Hawaii surfed into my high-desert, parched brain. We fast forward to May 2003, the month of my departure for Kauai, a move that felt like a natural progression for me. It tragically coincided with my mother having a massive stroke, the night before my flight from LA to Kauai. As a young boy, I was often afraid Ida would die, leaving me an orphan, with my father too soon gone. Here I am, headed to a small orphan island in the middle of the huge Pacific and I rush back to NYC to witness a wonderful woman gracefully pass from here to somewhere. She died on May 22nd and all I could think to do was to make sure I had my birthday on the island I would grow to love with all my heart and I did.