One frame of a Detroit Tigers outfielder completely upside-down, vaulting over a bullpen wall, as a cop rejoices instead of helping
The problem with knowing a lot of people and being known for good parties is that, when you throw a big one, it is sometimes an overwhelming & terrible experience. My 30th birthday party was legendarily one of these. It’s a round number! I told everyone to bring friends! I brought this upon myself. Over 250 people showed up, and we had to bribe the police to go away twice. At one point, I waited a half-hour to use my own bathroom, at which point I gave up and went in the snow in my backyard.
This sounds like a non-problem – boo hoo, nickd, you’re so popular – so I cannot stress enough how much I universally, unconditionally hated the experience of throwing my 30th birthday party. In fact, I hated it so much that I vowed to never do anything like it again. But I was still going to have birthdays, and I was going to keep liking my birthdays, and I wanted to party on my birthday.
The way you square this circle is to make your birthday parties polarizing. Not bad, but polarizing. Polarizing means that they are either aggressively for you, or maybe you get to sit out that year. In practice, this means I have done unhinged concept things like:
Throw the party at 6am for my fellow morning people. Serve bacon & coffee. End it at 10am, lock my front door, leave the house, go to brunch.
Throw a funeral-themed party for your 40th after someone tells you that you may as well be dead. Make your friends give eulogies while you pretend to be dead in front of them. Eat a coffin-shaped cake with black frosting.
Eat extremely polarizing foods (durian, natto, hakárl) and write up tasting notes on our phones on a group document in real time.
Play the entirety of Autechre’s eight-hour NTS Sessions on vinyl, on a rented $40,000 speaker system, in pitch darkness, as they have played their shows for over two decades.
Get fried chicken! In Hong Kong. Announce the party in April, give people nine months to prepare. Not a bad turnout, all told!
Throw a self-declared “normal party” to the relief of absolutely everyone, then fly to Australia in the middle of it. Slip out the back, don’t tell anyone. I was told that people found out what happened at 3:30am after wondering whether I had gone missing.
Barbeque outside in Chicago in February.
You get the idea. None of this is normal, but it’s all stuff that’s very unapologetically me to some degree, and if you’re going to throw a birthday party, why not lean into what makes you you?
Which brings me to this year, where I finally did the thing that is perhaps the most off-brand about me and threw a baseball party, baseball being the official sport of February and all. I made nachos for the first time in my life, which were probably some person’s idea of nachos that was xeroxed ten times over and made as messy as humanly possible. I sold beer out of a mini-keg for $14, and donated all of the proceeds to fight our current apocalypse. And I played a brief five-hour selection of my all-time favorite highlights, which mostly involved sausage races, dogs getting onto the field, and Javy Báez fucking with people. After that, I played all of baseball’s only game, game 7 of the 2016 World Series, with original commercial breaks & rain delay.
They say baseball takes a long time, so throwing a 10-hour birthday party feels in deep alignment with this principle. “What part do we come for,” people asked. I don’t know, I’ll be there for all of it? Do you want a roundtable discussion on “my ass is in the jackpot,” or do you want the most important athletic achievement of the past century? Why not both.
Multiple people showed up in full uniform. We sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” before I blew out the candles on a baseball-shaped cake, like normal people do. We all laughed as I frame-by-framed some extremely baffling replays. And we all had a great time, like you’re usually supposed to do at a baseball game. It was a good party; it was mine.