on ape-shit tours

My birthday is less than a week away. It's time to wind up my ape-shit tour. Except I haven't started it yet.

My friend John, who was born just two days before I was, introduced me to the idea of doing something fun and nutty during the 9th year of each age decade--as you approach the big three-oh, the big four-oh, or the big whatever-oh. We must have been 29 at the time, approaching our 30th birthdays, when he told me he had to hurry up and get started on his ape-shit tour. Though KR disagrees with me, I think that the ape-shit tour is appropriate prior to any birthday.

The problem is that I never think about going ape-shit until it's too late. My birthday is on Monday, but my schedule is pretty full until then. Okay, that's not the real problem. The real problem is that I don't know how to plan and execute a successful ape-shit tour. It seems that they should involve Vegas, cigars, booze, cops, and lost pants. But I don't know how to create an environment where those elements can come together.

So maybe my ape-shit tours need to be different from that. Maybe they could involve doing creative stuff that I'm normally afraid to do. Like writing and submitting stories to contests and magazines for publication. Or carrying my camera with me and shooting candids of strangers throughout the day. Or--I actually did this--signing up for a couple workshops at the biggest, baddest mofo of a writers festival in the country: the one hosted by the University of Iowa.

I could do those things. So the trick is, I suppose, adjusting my attitude to categorize these low-impact activities as ape-shit. Because, you know, I'm not going to change the name of the tour. We'd have to design new t-shirts.