My birthday is October 17th. In 1989 I lived just a few miles from the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake in California. Some friends and family were getting ready to meet me for a birthday dinner in downtown Santa Cruz, which was completely demolished, killing several people. The first person I had sex with got stuck in a mall in San Jose while she was buying me a hat and never forgave me for it and actually broke things off with me, blaming the earthquake. It was a nice hat, though.

The year before, around my birthday, was a stock market crash, and a couple years after was a large fire in Oakland. I found myself meeting several people who shared my birthday, including the pastor of my parents' church, a recovering alcoholic who was also a surfer, a New Age Goddess, an English teacher, and a mod. Whenever we would see each other around our birthday we would wish each other an uneventful one.