It’s become something of tradition, I think, to blog around this week every year. Not because I lost someone on 9/11. I was only five years and three hundred and sixty-four days old when it happened, after all… Most people my age probably can’t even remember it. I know a girl at my school who thinks Osama Bin Laden is a member of the Beatles.

Not because it’s Mikey Way’s thirtieth birthday today either.

  Or that it’s nearly nine years since a depressed twenty-something artist on his way to work saw the aforementioned disaster and formed a brilliant rock band with his aforementioned brother.

  But because, despite all the odds, I have survived another year. Amazing, innit? I haven’t been run over by a bus, set myself on fire during a Chemistry IAA, contracted cancer, crashed a car, slit one vein too many, been assassinated or fallen over attempting a roundhouse kick, cracking my head open on the dojo floor.

  I’m prepared to bet a few of you have considered killing me, setting me on fire or chucking me on the dojo floor. Thank you for refraining. You know that theory Charles Darwin came up with, the survival of the fittest? That if you’re unable to hunt or climb trees or run really fast from whatever’s trying to eat you, you’ll get cast out of the pack and eaten.

  I kind of cheated with the ‘survival’ part of the saying. It’s not my fault, okay? I didn’t ask to get born eleven weeks early. It just happened. I didn’t ask for Rochford and Southend hospitals to stick pipes in my side and kick-start my respiratory system either, but I’m grateful to whoever signed the pipe-insertion contract.

  Every year I reflect on the shithole that is September 11th and the excellence of My Chem, and wonder how something so good could be born out of something so bad. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, would MCR be doing what they do? I like to think that terrorist attacks notwithstanding, yeah.

  Let’s face it, Gerard wouldn’t have done art for the Cartoon Network forever, Ray was going to pick up the guitar again at some point, Mikey had to get over his stage fright one way or another and Frank… Well, Frank is one of those insane blokes who sort of manages to kill demon sharks wherever the van takes him.

       

  Same with Darwin’s theory of evolution. If I’d been born circa 1950, I’d be in a shoebox sized grave right now next to my mum, and Maxim would be an unexistent annoying little brother. But I was born in the nineties, dude, and there’s no point having a pretty comfortable privileged life and not doing anything but surfing Twitter. So regardless of my serious hatred of birthday celebrations and all the grief that accompanies it, I’m rather looking forward to Sunday.

  It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, according to the proverb. Well, it ain’t over till I say it’s over, so anyone still going on about medical science not being a good idea can go the same way as the homophobes and Qur’an burners. Down the fucking drain.

  When the USSR rigged the Polish vote in 1947 to ensure it became communist, Stalin wasn’t worried about cheating. He was worried that Germany might kill more Russians if there was another war, and he wanted Poland to protect them. I don’t like Labour, but Moustache Dictator Guy Two had the right idea.