Book of Daze: Keith Richards Birthday

Keith Richards is eighty-two years old today. At this point, Keef is not just an old, haggard human being; he is a biological glitch, a middle finger to the  concept of cellular decay. While most people his age are thrilled if they can find their reading glasses, Keith Richards birthday celebration will include whatever laws of physics he feels like breaking before lunch.

The Morning Ritual of the Undead

Keith Richards does not wake up to an alarm. He simply decides that the afterlife is not ready for him yet and opens his eyes. He starts this birthday, as he starts most others, by snorting a line of crushed moon rock, not because he wants to get high, but because he heard the moon was acting “a bit posh” and needed to be put in its place. He will wash it down with a glass of Nuclear Waste (Vintage ’43) and a cigarette that he will light with a bolt of lightning he caught in a mason jar  last Tuesday.

The Shepherd’s Pie Massacre

Keef’s birthday lunch promises to be an interesting affair. He usually demands a shepherd’s pie, but the crust has to be reinforced with titanium. Apparently, he wants to see if his false teeth are still capable of chewing through aerospace-grade metal.

The Keith Richards Birthday Afternoon

Keef will next spend  three hours in a sensory deprivation tank filled with old guitar strings and the tears of tax collectors. Some people say he is slowing down because of arthritis, but he is just vibrating at a frequency  the human eye cannot fully process. He will spend the afternoon teaching a parrot how to play “Gimme Shelter” in open-G tuning.

The Evening Gala of Chaos

For the grand finale, Keef plans to climb a Giant Sequoia that he had imported from California and planted in his backyard last week. He intends to sit at the top, drink a bottle of bourbon that was sealed before the invention of the wheel, and wait for a meteorite to strike. If it hits the bottle, he will  use it as a pick.

The Rolling Stones might have canceled their 2026 tour, but that is only because Keith needs a few months to finish his current project: rewriting the Bible so that it includes more bass. He is not aging; he is just becoming a permanent fixture of the universe, like gravity or the smell of leather.

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