Hey happy birthday. One that comes to mind is a few years ago at a friend’s place, really neat place at the top of a centuries-old stone building in southern France. We smoke a fat spliff and somehow we get to talking about my friend’s job, which is botanist. He mentions he owns a binocular lens (like a microscope, but less magnifying, meant for observing plant matter), and we decide to take a look at the weed ! so we gather around his little desk which is on a suspended platform above/overseeing the living room, and we look at the weed : it’s fantastic. All shiny, glistening…, trichomes become giant claws of ice covering the leaves… it’s like peeking into a small, strange world.
I have an idea : what if I tried to film this ? I try adjusting my phone’s camera through the eyepiece and sure enough it works -but there’s some weird parallax going on when I shift the camera slightly to one side or the other… it moves the round frame around the piece of weed we’re focusing on and it looks uncannily like a helicopter light moving over a wood at night, looking for an escapee or something. So in my best megaphone voice I go “get out of this weed, we have you surrounded!” and we laugh like dorks

Good memory…