Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the thing I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!