PoYB: Closed for Vacation

Though I'm literally going on vacation to Wildwood like I do every August, I'm also figuratively going on vacation from this blog, starting, I dunno, last week? You see, I tried to write something every day during the month of July, and almost fucking met the goal. Almost!! Three days short!! Here's what I had planned for those three days:

• Sunday: some stupid fucking poem written by a fascinating classmate that caused quite the stir in my college theater group
• Monday: some stupid fucking story about the last day of the summer in my youth when we refused to get out of the pool when the lifeguards told us to
• Tuesday: some stupid fucking questions answered, like I have done on the last day of the month a couple other times

Fun stuff. I'm sure a ton of people would have read those pieces. Oh well. I gave up because I got extremely intoxicated at a bachelor party on Saturday, and that drinking continued into early Sunday morning, and that shit wiped me out until like Tuesday afternoon, believe it or not. I'm getting old, folks. Actually, no, wait, I did try to write something about strip clubs on Monday morning, in my hungover stupor. I'm not really sure what I was going for, but here's the first part, which I quite like still, in sobriety:

I want to explore the idea of strip clubs from a sociological and psychological perspective. To do so, I will have to admit, first, that I have been to my fair share of strip clubs, and must warn you that if you find the very idea of a strip club establishment to be icky or immoral, or find the fact that I have been to more than the socially acceptable amount of strip clubs in my young life to be ethically reprehensible, then you won't find much to appreciate in this discussion.

I will also speak frankly about strip clubs and my personal experiences in them. This is important, because strip clubs tend to have a mystical and almost secretive feeling about them. The hush-hush pacts we make when we attend strip clubs together are, if not stated aloud and marked with blood, then certainly implied at the very least. So if this essay aims to discuss frankly the inner ecosystems of nudie bars, these promises (implied or otherwise) must be broken. To all whom this offends, I apologize.

And finally, speaking of apologizes, this is not designed to be a "Tell All" of my experiences, or, like, some kind of confession of any kind. My behavior in strip clubs, while not necessarily something I'd talk about with my priest, is definitely nothing I'm ashamed of or have ever felt the need to hide from Pam or anyone else curious to know. The character I play at these strip clubs typically could be described at different points of the night as the following: the cheapskate; the observer; the shaman; the drunk guy sleeping in the corner. You see, I can speak frankly of my experiences because I'm not embarrassed by them. I have nothing to say sorry for. I have no personal motive here; I simply want to explore what exactly it means to be present in a strip club, on an interpersonal level. (If you simply MUST know various anecdotes, check out this bullshit I wrote last summer.)

The only problem with this idea for a blog post is that I didn't really know where to go from there, and so I gave up. I'm so much better at writing introductions than I am at writing the body of the blog posts (or school essays, etc.). Which is idiotic, if you ask me. Being good at introductions only basically means that I'm good at throwing big words around with no purpose or actual meaning behind them. My English teacher in ninth grade told us to write the intros last, because they are the least important part of the essay. Mr. Janda has hopefully never read Puke on Your Birthday.

I guess what I was trying to say was that my experience at the strip club was both fun as FUCK, and also broke me, emotionally (yes, somehow at the same time). Like, it was the first time in my life when I was at a strip club and felt the full force of the transactional nature of those establishments. I'm not stupid, I don't actual think women are nice to me there because they think I'm cute. I KNOW they just act like that because they want my money (all I had to do was say "I have a daughter" to see their true nature). But I've always been able to just enjoy the ride in the past (not literally, I haven't gotten a lapdance (without Pam actually present) in the past nine years or so). Something about the naked (ha) desperation of these women of A.C. to dig into my wallet just... well, it didn't turn me off, per se, because at the end of the day they were still naked women, but it just... it opened my eyes a little bit to the hollow nature of the game we all play when we're at these clubs.

Anyways, the bachelor had his pants pulled down and was whipped with leather belts on a public stage, so, like, I'm not saying it wasn't fun or anything. I probably laughed harder than I have in years, in fact.

Maybe that's why I didn't complete that blog post the other day. That shit was being made to seem too serious, or I was coming off as too grumpy or something, like I was ignoring the good parts of the night (of which there were many). It wasn't giving any service to the FUN FUCKING NIGHT I just had. Maybe the whole eye-opening "negative" aspects of the night were just some weird 5-Hour-Energy-and-Miller-Lite-fueled hallucinations. Or maybe I pictured Pam reading it and rolling her eyes, like: "you're fucking obsessed with strip clubs." Which I'm most assuredly not, but writing about it at length probably wouldn't help my case.

(On a somewhat related note, it's possible that I wasn't hungover or feeling emotional drained in the first place. My chain of command at work is telling me as I'm writing this that there's been a gas leak in our building for the past couple days, and it was only fixed yesterday evening. Hmm. No wonder I felt like the fourth season of Community.)

So yeah, I'm closed for vacation. No blog posts. In addition to the fact that I'm worn out, I'm also not planning on bringing my laptop down the shore. I need a break from the screen, ya feel me? My mom is on board, and is going to be enforcing a "No Power Happy Hour" daily at the shore house. I can handle this. Not sure if the rest of my family can. Not sure if my grandma knows how to even turn her iPad off, let alone put it down.

Am I going to let PoYB go dormant for months or years like I have in the past? Nah, I hope not. I still have some self-indulgent and dumb ideas I can hit y'all with. Also, I want to amp up the music writing a bit, because I like writing about music even though I'm bad at it, and my pal Steven Hyden just gave me some cliché but worthy advice.

Also also, I want to fill this chart out:

click to enlarge

As you can see at the top of this blog, there are certain tags you can click on to filter out blog posts that you don't care to read. Do you hate when I write about indie rock and only care to read posts I write about my childhood? Click on "Nostalgia." Only want to read about Christmas shit? Click "Holidays." Etc. You can also combine tags. Click on a tag, then in the URL, type: +[another tag] at the end of the address. So if you click on "Fatherhood" and you want to see what posts I've written about that are about Fatherhood AND drinking, then just make sure the URL ends in "Fatherhood+Drinking."

In the chart above, I've listed the main content tags (some, like Miscellaneous and Meta, are left out for reasons I hope you can discern for yourself), and show what combos of tags I've used together in the past 600 or so blog posts. I want to fill in that chart, and write specifically geared toward blog posts that combine previous uncombined subject matters. I dunno, like:

• Music x Print Media—probably finally get around to that retrospective about how I originally got into music because of Rolling Stone's Top 500 albums list.
• Music x The Internet—how about getting drunk and writing about how stupid Pitchfork is
• Drinking x Politics—this one is incredibly surprising, that I haven't gotten drunk and written about politics. Maybe it just seems like every time I talk about trump I come off like I'm drunk. How about, instead of the obvious, I write something about what each politician's favorite beer probably is (spoiler alert: Pat Toomey loves Coors Extra Gold!!!)
• TV & Movies x Politics—live blog a political debate on TV... or discover and publish the alleged Trump N-Word Outtake Tapes from Celebrity Apprentice!
• Sports x The Internet—a guide on how to watch the Phillies without giving Comcast any of your hard-earned money
• Hometown x Philly—I don't know how I would write something about two diametrically opposed tag categories except to maybe ask a drunk Kev about his favorite bars in Philadelphia, not McNally's please not McNally's. Actually, okay, there ya go, I'll write a retrospective about the worst bar in Philadelphia, McNally's. That should work.
• Hometown x Fatherhood—Either "fictional piece about Willow discovering the Firepit" or "why you need to go see your friends' babies right after they are born no matter how lame that shit is"
• Food x The Internet—drunkenly review a YouTube video about how to use a food blender
• Food x Fatherhood—A picture of me, dead-eyed, buying yet another goddamn formula powder mix canister from Target
• College x Fatherhood—Fuck, I haven't really written much about Fatherhood at all, have I? I could write about how Willow was conceived on the fourth-floor mezzanine at Connelly Library (or was it the basement catalogues, gosh I was so drunk who can remember)?!
• Print Media x The Internet—Another set of diametrically opposed tags. I'll have to either respond to a book review I found on the internet, or respond to a... computer review I find in a book? Okay.
• Print Media x Fatherhood—Easy! A mini-review of every book on Willow's bookshelf (from Goodnight Moon to Infinite Jest)
• Politics x Fatherhood—"daddy, why do you hate trump so much?" "..." "Daddy?" "One moment, hun, I'll write my 10,000 response on my blog."

So, yeah, there's maybe a kernel of a couple good ideas in that trash heap. I'll be back in mid-August to write about them.

I have a really boring job. It's a bummer, because I used to have a really exciting job. It's just that that job was also a pain in the ass and I was working all the time. I do jack-fucking-shit here at my desk job. That's why I can blog so much. Nothing will have changed when I get back from vacation, so whether you like it or not, expect some more nonsense here at Puke on Your Birthday.

If you are going to be in Wildwood, NJ in the next eight days, hit me up!