In my mind, the ideal blog post should exist to serve, at minimum, two purposes. There's the stated purpose, and there's the unstated purpose. That second part is key to the continued existence of Puke on Your Birthday, here in 2023. If you want to learn something or be told basic facts about something, then there are literally billions of other places on the internet that you can go to do that, many of them staffed by hungry and/or terrible writers, or maybe even AI at this point. Not saying you can't learn anything here at PoYB, but there needs to be more than that. There needs to not only be a thought of what a blog post is saying on the surface, but it also should be a question as to what it means, to me, to us, to the community of internet dwellers who find themselves here. It can't just be something, it also has to be something else too if you really think about why that first something even exists.
I'm not saying that I'm always successful with this, but I try. And looking back, I know that the best blog posts in this blog's fifteen-year history are rereadable because they not only present something, but that something also gives greater meaning to something else. Like, it's one thing to rank Buckethead's discography, but it's another to rank Buckethead's discography totally arbitrarily and use the blurbs to present a picture of an extremely and sincerely damaged psyche. Does that make sense? This is something that I press in album reviews for everyone. It can't just be "is this good?" because you can find answers to that question fucking anywhere on this stupid internet. It has to be "is this good?" and also "why is this good or not good to me, specifically?"
When I think about all the times I did not achieve that goal of dual-purposes, the example that usually comes to mind is an August 2012 blog post titled "The Boy in the Box." There is exactly one function of this blog post: to inform you about a cold case that began in the vicinity of my Northeast Philly neighborhood. The problem is that you can learn this shit anywhere, especially on the Wikipedia page from which I liberally stole the information from when writing that post. There's nothing else to it. A true PoYB blog post would not only inform you about the Boy in the Box, but it would also tie to some larger theme that's important to me. It supposed to fucking say something. I failed at that.
(I also remember Pam asking me "What is the purpose of this?" which was a deserved sting at the time, but which I think maybe misinterpreted at the time as "What is the purpose of blogging about this subject?" After a decade-plus, I finally realize that she probably meant "What is the purpose of blogging right now?" I.e. the fact that I supposed to be looking for a job that summer and instead I was tap-tap-tapping away on some go-nowhere, pay-nothing hobby blog. She was right then, but she has certainly paid the price for being right, now that I have a full-time career and still blog every day and she is forced to hear me blabber on about that same blogging hobby way more than any who wasn't my best friend could ever tolerate.)
It's funny—in a rather dark way, I guess—but I've had "fix Boy in the Box blog post" on my blogging phone memo for so long now that they actually solved the fucking case in the meantime. Well, they identified the body, anyway. His name was Joseph Augustus Zarelli, and he lived around 61st and Market St. before he was murdered and his body ended up in the Northeast. Per PPD, this is still an active murder investigation, though I do not believe that we'll get answers at to the culprit or the motivation during my lifetime. In the meantime, a new shrine has been erected on Susquehanna Road, right around the corner from my house, commemorating the memory of the boy who was found there.
The only funny part (again, "funny" in a coincidental way and not in any way connected to the death of a child) is that I wanted to write a new blog post about the Boy in the Box, and the universe hands me some new information about it... and yet, that new information doesn't solve our problem here. The lack of information was never the problem. The problem was that it was only information, and new information isn't going to help that. No, we need something more, something on a deeper level to justify the existence of the Boy in the Box on the Blog.
The first idea is that "community trauma" is real, and should be acknowledged. This idea would have landed a lot harder back in 2012, when Puke on Your Birthday still had the subtitle of "Our Neighborhood: Tales and Opinions," back when this was a Northeast Philadelphia-centric blog. If we're talking neighborhood tales, then there's no bigger NE Philly tale then the Boy in the Box. It's the tale known to people far outside of our little corner of our little big city. We can kid ourselves that stories about exploits around the firepit at Burholme are "important," but those stories will die with us. The story of Joseph Zarelli will live on.
And it's a dark fucking story! So that's where the community trauma comes in, the fact that Northeast Philadelphia, to a certain extent, will always be known as the part of Philly where an unsolvable child murder took place. Look, I'm not comparing this particular child murder to the countless child murders that happen all the time in neighborhoods all over Philly. I'm just saying that this one happened here, and due to its mysterious nature, it had an emotional effect over the neighborhood in which I call home. My aunt was just telling me a couple months ago that she was going with some other church parishioners to have a prayer service at the site where they found the body.
Which brings me to the second idea for a worthy blog post: the fact that we, as human beings, tend to take things that don't actually have anything to do with us, and internalize it, and let it curdle into such emotions as hate and fear. Say a dozen churchgoers decide to go to 719 Susquehanna Road, where the roadside marker for "America's Unknown Child" now stands, and they gather around that marker and they join hands and they pray. What, exactly, are they praying for? They are praying for the child, whom the more hardcore zealots fear is currently burning in hell for having the audacity to be murdered without being baptized. They are praying that the case is solved, to bring the community peace. But peace from what? Because none of those strawmen praying there have anything to do with the child or the case.
They are praying instead because they fear the unknown, and they fear that if this could happen here, then it could happen to them, and they are praying that it doesn't. They pray for peace, because there is very little peace to be found in this world, even here in a quiet suburban-esque neighborhood, just noise and violence and struggle, and they've internalized all that, and now they've come to fear the world in which they live, and so instead of accepting this fact and working to overcome it and working to improve this world in various tangible ways, they stand around and they say the words of prayer. The Boy in the Box has come to symbolize something within themselves that they can never acknowledge, and might not even know exists.
And so this second idea for a blog post might look something like me questioning whether I am like those people for ever feeling the need to write about the Boy in the Box in the first place. If the literal question is "What is the purpose of writing about this?" then the meta question becomes "What if the purpose of writing about this was to make myself feel better?" That maybe if I wrote about it, I would try to address that same fear that lies within me. Is that fear there? Would I even know it if it was? Can I be brave enough to acknowledge it, and live with it, and find peace despite it?
The third idea for a good blog post speaks to those questions, and it's something that I cannot fucking believe I didn't even mention in that 2012 blog post about the Boy in the Box. Here is a fact: in 2008, a few friends sat around, drinking Hurricane forties, and discussed the idea of creating a blog. The name was settled upon, and then at the end of the night, we parted ways. I sat down and created Puke on Your Birthday that very night (or the next morning, I forget... I also forget if it was me who literally clicked the buttons to bring this into existence, or if it was Mike originally).
Here is another fact: the location of that discussion and the imbibing of those Hurricanes was, in all likelihood, the exact location of where they originally found the Boy in the Box, approximately 51 years, 3 months, 27 days after the body was discovered. The woods in which he was discovered no longer exist; in the summer of 2008, they were in the finishing stages of building a 65+ resident community on top of that area. We, being teenagers who believed we were invincible and that the rules did not apply to us, thought it would be a great idea to bring a box of Hurricanes to the construction site, to sit on piles of lumber and getting inebriated on a beautiful summer night.
Either an alarm was tripped or a neighbor made a call, because soon after we got deep into our respective first forties, the construction site manager showed in a beat-up truck to confront the trespassers. He was expecting copper wire thieves, and so when met with a bunch of dumb kids causing no harm, he let us continue, after we crossed our hearts and swore to god that we were up to no more trouble than underage drinking.
If I were a mystic, I might be inclined to say something along the lines of Joseph Zarelli was watching over us that night. Maybe I'd say that he—in this hypothetical scenario being a ghostly specter of some sort—was watching over us kids, we teens who were privileged to live an additional fifteen years longer than he, Joseph, ever did, and so maybe he was watching us and ensuring that we were able to have some of those innocent teenage exploits that he never could. Maybe I'd say that he inspired that well-meaning adult to leave us be, let us alone in our innocent merriment. Maybe I'd wonder if that adult knew about the Boy in the Box, and knew that there were far worse crimes in this crazy fucked-up world than some idiots drinking malt liquor.
I'm not actually saying any of these things, but I do think that it's poignant that a pivotal moment in my own life coincidentally happened on almost the exact same patch of land as a pivotal community moment that had occurred five decades earlier. The multiverse-style hypotheticals pour forth from there: If Zarelli hadn't been found in that area, would those houses have been built any earlier than 2008? If those houses were built in the '90s and had people living in them in 2008 and thus would have been out of the question in terms of a location for underage drinking, where would we have chosen to get drunk that night? If we were drinking in the woods down the street or back at the firepit or in someone's basement, would we have had the conversation about Blogspot and our collective desire to write? Would I have continued to blog well into my 30s? Where would I be typing these words write now, exactly?
I think ultimately, we tell these stories about our childhood and about our neighborhood and about how we cut our teeth during our youth in our particular neighborhood because we are trying to understand where we are now, and how we got here. If life is a mystery—and it is—then we pass down myths and legends in an attempt to make sense of it anyway.
Through the legend of Joseph Zarelli, a.k.a. the Boy in the Box, I can find out so much about myself. I can know that the idea of "neighborhood as a home" both entices me and repels me, and the fact that I still moved back to Fox Chase says a lot about which side ultimately wins in that internal tug-o'-war. I can know that collective mourning makes me uncomfortable, but only because I'm still figuring out what "mourning" even looks like to me on an intimate level. I can know that I feel a personal responsibility to pass down certain myths and legends from my own life, and look outward for the motivation to keep going and keep preserving. And I can know that the world is a sad place, but, as proved by the continuing investigation of a murdered child in my own backyard, we still get out of bed every single day, and we keep trying, in the face of that undeniable sadness.
I understand that my failure as a writer in 2012 was a function of just, well, not really being a good writer yet. Eleven years later, and I'm still trying. I'm trying to write a good blog post. I'm trying to do justice to the neighborhood legend that I'm writing about. I'm trying, I'm trying to tell my story, which is our story, and I'm trying to ensure that those efforts will not be in vain. These stories fucking mean something. They hopefully mean that the world is just a little less dark and scary. They hopefully mean that we can make sense of the great unsolvable mystery that we get out of bed and try to solve every single day.
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