Puke on Your Birthday: November 2018

If life is a series of moments, than my last ten years have been full of life.

When I was nineteen, I thought for sure that I was going to be dead before I was thirty, and at that point, I guess I was okay with that fate. Looking at everything that's happened in the past ten years, however, all the good times and bad, makes me instead look forward to the next ten, and the ten after that, and the ten after that. I don't want it to end. These are the moments worth living for.

I know it's stupid for me to claim that I'm "looking forward" now, since every other damn blog post I write is about the past. If there's one thing I want to get better at in my 30s, it's this; I need to stop looking back, and I need to start looking ahead. So consider this celebration of my 20s to be my final deep dive into the pools of nostalgia here on PoYB. This blog was created to chronicle our "tales and opinions," sure. And I definitely have at least 200 tales left untold (no repeats from previous blog posts), so let's get them all out and then wipe our hands clean.

Unstick yourself from time and join me, if you feel like it, in looking back at a decade well lived. This is my 20s.

I started my 20s drunk as shit after doing a Power Hour that had started at 11 PM on 11/30/08. I spent the first hour of my 20s fighting with my ex-girlfriend about some shit that seems way less serious from this vantage point at the end of my 20s.
On my last night as a waiter at the Lafayette Redeemer, I drank in the parking lot with coworkers, then snuck back into the kitchen to say goodbye for good. I haven't had a better job since.
Pam and I visited Grandpop at Immaculate Mary retirement home one day. He couldn't really hold conversations by that point, but we knew he would at least perk up with recognition at the mention of the neighborhood he grew up. He was also in the middle of eating his tapioca pudding, and couldn't really swallow all that well. I can still hear him clearly in my mind gurgling the word "FISHTOWN!" over and over. It was as endearing and it was sad and it was hilarious, to see so much joy on Grandpop's face, even when he's practically choking. I miss that man.
Me and Pam, sitting in a Vegas restaurant made to look like an Irish restaurant, completely jet-lagged, falling asleep in shepherd's pie, not on vacation but here to stay for a few months, to live, in VEGAS.
For a few years we celebrated New Year's Eve at Bonner's, and the first year was probably the best (cash bar, free food, good music). For some reason, I was obsessed with the idea that everyone should have a New Year's Kiss at midnight, and so spent the last hour of that year drunkenly pairing people up. Dwyer spent the first hour of the new year making out with his kiss. Then he hooked up with another girl the following day at a Mummers Parade party. By the end of January 1st, he was on pace to hook up with 730 women in 2014. Suffice it to say that he did not keep pace the remainder of the year.
I remember quite clearly Ed getting kicked out of Paddywack's for ripping a plaque off the wall, making his T-shirt into an oblong rectangle by putting it under his shirt, and... just sitting at the bar. He's still banned from Paddywack's.
Bernie tried to fight someone at the Republican because he had allegedly stolen Bernie's jacket (the man had not stolen the jacket).
The Phillies started their run of dominance while I was a teenager, but it continued the first few years of my 20s. I'd argue the best moment came in October 2009, when this happened. I was watching the game with my dad and sister in the living room in Rockledge, and we went wild.
I could probably go on about the Phillies, but I'll contain myself after this one (at least for a few dozen memories). But in that same living room, earlier that season, I jokingly and sardonically said during a Brad Lidge meltdown that "all we need is Eric Bruntlett to pull an unassisted triple play and we'll win this game." Then this happened. My dad was there, he'll attest to the fact that the prediction actually happened. I've been obsessed with making unlikely sports predictions ever since.
I did not participate in the 2017 Love Run, but I met up with about eight or nine friends at Jones afterward, and we all took their "All You Can Drink Champagne Brunch" literally. The waiter was on board, surprisingly. After ten bottles of champagne, the final request was "we'll take the check now... and another bottle of champagne."
I remember most of my bachelor party, but what I definitely remember is how crazy it got when the bus driver was paid an extra $50 to take us on a detour to Day Dreams. A bunch of drunk sweaty dudes yelling out the window on I-95N—this is my crew.
In September 2017, me and Pam ate the best cheese curds I've ever tasted, at Bud and Marilyn's, and made peace, and stayed sober.
There are plenty of memories from the past six months, but something I'll remember the most is the smile that Willow has when I walk in the door from work. I don't know if she is just some biological reaction, or her dad can actually make her smile by just walking in the door, but I'll assume it's the latter, and it makes me feel loved.
At Pike Hike 2014, the cover band at Hop Angel played such a blistering version of "Turn on Your Lovelight" that I can't hear that song anymore without thinking about how we used to all get drunk together every Black Friday in Fox Chase.
I'm fortunate that I have great family whom I enjoy spending time with at family parties, both biological and married-into families alike. There aren't many moments when I'm embarrassed to be at family parties. Rarely ever. But not never, if I'm being honest. Every year since 2015, my aunt-in-law Aunt N. has a very nice Christmas party, and we all participate in the most painful White Elephant in history. There are so many groan-inducing moments that it's gotten to the point where I perversely look forward to the thing every year in the same way that we all crane our necks when we drive past a particularly gruesome car crash. But that 2015 Christmas party was the only time in my life I was embarrassed to be at a family party.
I don't know the exact date, but it was in my early 20s, I thought it'd be a good idea to tailgate a Phillies game, but not actually go to the game, just tailgate. I enjoy tailgating, and so too do the dozen or so friends who joined me that day. The problem was, there was also a Penn State game going on at the Linc that day, so when we got to the parking lot, we were walking into a completely trashed lot full of cars but empty of people, who were currently watching the game in the stadium. After the game finally did let out, all the very, very drunk Penn State fans decided to continue their tailgate, and they were absolutely belligerent (so, uh, pretty typical of Penn State). We eventually had to move our car and party to the opposite corner of the parking lot, after a young PTSD-addled veteran tried to fist fight my cousin Andrew, and the vet's dad succeeded in fist fighting the vet's even younger sister.
Nothing crazy happened, per se, but the night before graduating college, La Salle had a big open-bar tent party on the tennis courts, and everyone's families were invited. I say a lot of negative things about my alma mater, but at that tent party, with all the friends I made in the previous four years, I felt like I was truly at home.
Pam and I had already had two dates when I met up with her at the class of 2010's college graduation ceremony (we were both there to watch our friend Hannah give the commencement speech). To kill time beforehand, we walked around campus with a couple other friends, and I was so goddamn hungover that I had to stop the tour and throw up in the green room toilets (not the first time I had to do that in my lifetime). I tried to be discrete about it, but I think Pam could tell how shitty I was feeling, and knew something was amiss. Still, after I got out of work that night, I again made the trip downtown to hangout with her and Hannah and Melissa. She knew it was serious because I went out drinking with her despite feeling like garbage. I knew it was serious because she invited me to hangout even after she smelled vomit on my breath.
One time I drank Four Loko and blacked out at a very fancy Italian restaurant while I ate dinner with La Salle teachers and peers. I later threw up that same Italian dinner into my shoes. My friends, thinking that the red sauce and chunks of meatballs were blood and chunks of my lungs, respectively, tried to take me to the hospital. I ran barefoot down Olney Ave. to avoid this. The next day was a marathon of apologizing.
Me and Mike and Ed left a 21st birthday house party at Temple and walked back toward the subway for the trip to La Salle. We walked past a bar that did NOT look like a student bar, but we said fuck it and went in (after being patted down to make sure we weren't carrying). We were the youngest and the whitest dudes in there by a mile. I said "Can we please have three flaming Dr. Peppers please?" and the bartender responded, "We're going to have to ask you to leave."
Speaking of Temple bars, Pam and I visited Temple Bar, the trendy, college-y part of Dublin, Ireland. We drank Guinness pints and ate Apache Pizza because we are shitty American tourists.
My 22nd birthday party was given the moniker "Joe K***'s Friends Party" because I was tired of people whom I didn't know coming to our house and drinking our beer, so this party would feature my friends exclusively. However, the name of the event eventually morphed into "Dress Up Like Joe K***'s Friends." It was like Halloween but your costume made fun of somebody. It was fucking hilarious, and took busting each other's balls to a whole new level.
When I was 21, I got my final write-up at La Salle, because I was in the presence of underage drinkers, which is still an offense at my stupid old school. I thought I was going to be kicked out of school, so I camped out in front of the Head of Housing's office until he got there to plead my case.
At Pam's baby shower, for the first time, my niece ran up to me without provocation and requested that I give her a hug. It was then that I realized that I could probably get my own kid to like me, eventually, if I kept at it. It WAS possible!
I remember when my niece was born too. I wasn't there during the actual birth, obviously, but I hung at the hospital a little bit before and after the fact. I still chuckle a bit at the sitcom-like memory of my sister-in-law, sitting in the hospital bed, in so much pain, screaming at my mother-in-law to get out because she couldn't take it anymore.
And while we're in this headspace, we can cut to the movie theater where we all saw Coco with my niece. Coco, you may recall, had the infamous 30-minute Frozen "short" before the movie proper. After the Frozen thing was over, my mother-in-law said: "That's it?!" thinking she had just watched Coco. I am fortunate that I have a great MIL and that she cracks me up so often.
Just recently, when Willow was safely asleep in the crib, Pam and I forwent the usual TV routine. The screens stayed off, and we spent the night drinking, passing the iPod back and forth, and just shooting the shit. Next thing we knew, it was 1:30 in the morning, by far the latest we've been up together as parents.
I spent a lot of time in late October 2016 defending Hillary Clinton. I would've defended a fucking three-toed sloth if she was the only mammal standing in the way of a great orange buffoon becoming president. But I remember too how scorned I felt when Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders, the people's champion, to become the Democratic nominee. I remember claiming to Pam that I could not vote for Hillary Clinton, that I just couldn't fucking do it, and I didn't know how I was going to vote come November. Of course, things change; when it became clear that her opponent was racist sexist cheating loser, my vote for Hillary was easy. But it goes to show how frustrating politics can be, and absolutely still are.
I started a Twitter account about a week after I turned 20. I apologize to everyone who has followed me and had to read my hackneyed attempts at humor in the past decade.
When I visited Nashville for a bachelor party, I went down there a day early to hang with my friend Veronica and her girlfriend Chelsea. We ended up a bar in the middle of the woods called "Santa's Pub," a bar that amount to two trailers hitched together. There was cheap beer, a festive Yuletide atmosphere (even in May), and the best part, there was karaoke every night of the week. A couple weeks later, my friend Ciara sent me a screenshot of her FB timeline, where a friend of a friend had posted a picture of me, singing "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," asking his FB friends if anyone knew this fellow. Small world.
My Aunt Dee Dee is obsessed with the band KISS. I think she more enjoys the carnival-like atmosphere that KISS brings, as opposed to actively being a fan of their music (I wonder, if pressed, whether she could name five of their songs). But so, when she visited us in Las Vegas, playing a round at KISS MINI GOLF was at the top of her to-do list. We almost didn't make it; a block away, she tripped and sprawled right across the Paradise Blvd. I wonder if a broken ankle could've kept her from that mini golf place. Probably not, but I'm glad we didn't have to test it.
The drunkest I've ever seen Pam was probably after a night out with her nursing coworkers, years ago, where the doctor with them was buying everyone round after round of martinis. When Pam ubered home, she went right up to the toilet, and refunded all the martinis. For once in my sad sorry life, I was the one taking care of her.
My friend Maeve and I share a fondness for playing drinking games, and creating drinking games, so at one point we decided to take the portmanteau "Alcoholocaust" and make a drinking game attached to it. What I did not anticipate, however, was the fact that a bunch of friends actually took offense to the name of the game, and a large discussion ensued on Facebook as to whether, if we play this game, we've crossed any lines. The fact that it wouldn't have even crossed my mind that we were being insensitive means that I am probably in general an insensitive person, and I sometimes go too far. We changed the name to "Ginocide," which is probably just as bad, but perhaps because it alluded to a more general idea of a massacre, versus a very specific atrocity, people were ultimately okay with it, and showed up, and blacked out. (As a postscript, I'd like to share with you all that, years later, I finally came up with an acceptable name for the game—"The Stanford Prison ExBEERiments"—but it might be a little too late. We're all too old to play this game. Ask me about the rules, though, if you are interested!!!!)
I helped a girl move a bunch of her shit to a storage facility, because her new apartment couldn't fit it all. I offered to have her just put everything in my parents' garage so she didn't have to pay a monthly fee. I should've known when she declined that this was a sign that she didn't want a commitment. She couldn't break it off with a Rockledge boy when all her things were in Rockledge, could she?
I have no idea when this dumb inside joke started, but it had to have been in the past ten years. One time, my mom requested that me and my two sisters gather for a picture together. This was probably Easter or something. But when we stood in a row, Mom claimed that this was our "first picture together," which is a fucking absurd claim, seeing as how we had spent the last 15 years all together, and had had countless pictures taken together. So now every time the K*** siblings are in a picture, we claim that this is our first photo together.
I had just accepted an offer at Avis, and so it was my final week full-time at Zipcar. That, in addition to the fact that it was two coworkers' birthdays, meant that we were going to use some of the budget to get loaded on margaritas at El Vez together. And because that office was full of young people, we kept the party going and did various shot/beer combos at Fergie's down the street. And then, because that office was full of young dumb drunk people (myself being the youngest and dumbest and drunkest), we kept the party going back at the closed Zipcar office, kind of trashing it a little I guess? Like, how stupid can you be. But man, what a send-off from probably my second favorite job of my lifetime.
For a year or so, I was employed as a police radio dispatcher and 911 calltaker. It was, to say the least, a stressful job, and I was not particularly good at it. I'm just not good under pressure, and a police officer announcing over the radio that someone was shooting at him, needing my assistance, that's the very fucking definition of pressure. Luckily no one died when I was covering the radio while someone decided to fire a gun at the Dell Music Center in 2014, because my slow reaction to everything that happened would probably have been to blame if someone did.
On the morning of the Eagles' Super Bowl, I had to investigate in South Philly whether a Mom punched an eight-year-old kid in the face over the fact that the kid wanted to wear a New England Patriots jersey. I thought about that kid twelve hours later when I saw a garbage truck spray-painted on the side with "FUCKTOMB," and I wondered through my vodka-seltzer haze whether that kid was okay, or whether he was currently in hiding.
One time, I tried to bake my favorite breakfast, quiche lorraine, but accidentally used dessert baking crust. Pam made a valiant effort to eat the cinnamon-flavored breakfast, and I thankful that she tried. At least I got some good nostalgia out of it.
I found myself, at the tail end of my 22nd birthday party, popping caffeine pills with my brother-in-law at Frankford Hall. Neither of our wives were happy with this development, and to be honest, the extra caffeine had no effect on my inability to stay awake at the bar.
I was really hungover one morning, and "Bobby" by (Sandy) Alex G made me cry in a Wawa parking lot over soggy sausage/biscuit sandwiches.
I don't remember anything that happened on this particular night other than where we ended up, at Ellis Island Casino in Vegas, four in the morning, participating in all-night karaoke, Pam singing along to a bizarre proto-metal song that was apparently popular sometime in the '90s.
I almost ruined a surprise party when I got there early but not early enough, and almost ran over the woman of the hour as she crossed the street to get to the party.
When Dwyer turned 21, we plied him plenty of shots of various textures (I remember a cement mixer being one of them, unfortunately for him), so he was pretty fucking drunk when we finally left McGillin's. I remember this quite clearly. I remember walking out the door, seeing Dwyer stand at the doorway, and seeing him fall directly out of the door, face-first, onto the 18th-century cobblestoned street below.
My youngest sister graduated college, and the celebration turned out to be during the biggest snowstorm of the past five years at least. Many family members couldn't make it, but the kegs were already there in Rockledge, and her friends had a big truck that could fit like 15 other friends in the bed, so despite the snow, two dozen of us killed a bunch of kegs, and kept warm by cramming into the florida room and drinking all night while the snow dumped on the roof.
I only voted for one Republican in my 20s, and that was my Mom when she was running for town council. I probably would not have voted for her if she had accepted any NRA money, however.
When Kev was chosen to play a game at PCL Park for charity, a bunch of his friends gathered 'round to support him (as painful as it was to go to a soccer game). Our friend Bri printed out a few dozen Kev heads and pasted them to sticks, and brought a bunch of art supplies so we could decorate them. We had Kevs with moutasches, Kevs with top hats, Kevs with open brain cavities, Kevs with open mouths in which to stuff hot dogs, Kevs with wolfman beards, etc. etc. It straddled the line perfectly between making fun of Kev and showing our love for Kev.
While at the "Kevedle" house (Kev, Ed, Kyle lived there) one time for a party (don't ask me which one, or when), our very large friend Andrew insisted that our buddy John smack him with a raw egg. John obliged of course—who wouldn't? Much to Kev's chagrin, egg went everywhere. Ceiling. Walls. Other people. I don't want to say it was the wildest thing that ever happened at that house, but it probably my favorite.
I was interviewed during a very drunk Bikeracemas by NPR radio. I think I recall saying something about how "the Manayunk Bike Race was the spoke to our drunken revelry wheel." The interview was not used in the final broadcast.
Before Mike left for London, me and him and Kev and Dave decided to catch one last Phillies game together. We started at La Salle, and I must've pregamed waaaay too hard, because when we got to the subway station, I asked, "Wait, where are we going?" (And yeah, hardee-har-har, I also fell asleep at the stadium and missed a Jayson Werth grand slam, but you already know that story.)
After an oblique Uber ride finally made it to our destination and dropped us off, I'm horrified to say that Dwyer's buddy (who looked a heck of a lot like Jeff Garlin) actually took the plunge and used the ATM machine at the Penthouse Club, swallowing a TWENTY DOLLAR SURCHARGE in the process.
I won't ever say that Game of Thrones is the best show on television, not even close, but boy howdy, it has some moments, doesn't it? ***SPOILERS*** Probably the craziest thing I saw on television in my twenties was the ending of the Mountain vs. Viper battle scene. It was probably some combination of the fact that defeat was snatched out of the jaws of victory, and the fact that it was just so goddamn gruesome, but that skull-crushing scene stayed with me for a lot longer than any TV scene in the past decade. ***END SPOILERS***
I only went to one full Sixers game in my 20s (in my life, I guess you could say). This game ended with their opponent, the Nets, having scored the most points of any team in Wells Fargo Center history. Trust the process, indeed.
One time we had a sandwich-making competition. I don't have much to add to this fact other than that the sandwiches were fucking great and we should do this again sometime soon.
For my friends Drew and Sara's birthday, we sang karaoke at Les & Doreen's, some shit bar in Fishtown. Little did we know that Samantha was there as well, though she didn't stay long enough to document for the Inquirer my scorching rendition of "Teenage Dirtbag."
One Friday night, we were sitting around Maeve's apartment, trying to figure out what to do. I suggested a bar called "Trestle Inn" and was summarily booed and shit on for even suggesting it. I wasn't even the biggest fan of the place, it was just a suggestion! But sure enough, once we found out that's where the IMPROV AFTERPARTY was, multiple Ubers were summoned, because if the IMPROV kids think that it's a good idea to go to Trestle Inn, it must be a great idea, right?! And you know what? That bar fucking sucks. It was crowded and sweaty and smelly and expensive as fuck. Never again.
I created an alter ego on Facebook called "Port Richmond Pete" (later switched to just "Pete Smith"), and have fucked around on the various Port Richmond neighborhood FB groups a few times just out of sheer boredom. Sure, everyone knows about Pete's intel that a short drunk Italian man was making out with teenagers at a playground on Halloween night. But my personal favorite was when Pete wrote that he was in a wheelchair and needed help up the steps to Bare Elegance strip club. The soccer moms clutched their pearls and kicked me out of the group.
Pam and I visited one of her nursing friends in Colorado a few years back, and man, I felt at peace out there. Something about the clear air and the friendly people really made me enjoy Denver. Even when the Phillies were whipping the Rockies at Coors Field while we watched in Phillies gear, everyone was super nice and genial to us, because it was also April 20th, and it was Colorado, and it's all good man.
One time I was so hungover I ate two burritos from Chipotle.
Pam found out she was pregnant with Willow while I was out picking up Boston Market, so we celebrated by eating our turkey/stuffing platters and watching The Sopranos.
Around the time we took a friends trip to Vegas in 2016, I took like three weeks off from work. I had a stressful job, and needed a break. After we got back from Vegas, my vacation was coming to a close, and the very last day I had off, I decided to join friends Jamie and Nate the Car Seat Headrest concert. Afterward, we closed up El Bar, and I got home like four hours before I was supposed to return to work. I made it on time, saw that I had 150 emails, threw up, and then went home.
One morning, very early in my 20s, I found myself naked standing in front of the window, on the top floor of a University City high-rise dorm building, staring down at my beautiful city below, the dry spell finally over.
After starting to drink at Eggs with Peg, and drinking Twisted Tea in the backseat the whole ride home, I decided it would be a good time to ride my new bike. At 4th and Spring Garden, I flipped over the handlebars. When you are 30 beers deep and wear your helmet, you feel no pain.
I found on Reddit my friend Sam at the tail end of this viral Sleep Prank video.
In anticipation of the Pope's arrival, I was interviewed by a local news station while I sat at Mace's Crossing on the Parkway. I just told some silly, and possibly untrue(?), story about my grandmom meeting the Pope last time he was here. Against all odds, they spelled my last name correctly... but they broadcasted that my first name was "John."
Can't believe I haven't talked about Pope Weekend yet. Eight friends walked five miles and drank fifteen liters of red wine out of soda cans while walking. There was a lot to remember that day, and I'll remember it always as one of my favorite weekends ever. If I had to pick one specific moment, it'd probably be Stephan handing out slices from a loaf of bread he stole from the bar we were just at.
I was on the floor in the arena when the famous Southwest Philly Floater occurred. It capped off one hell of a vacation in Kansas City, when I played hooky from work and hung out with all the college kids as our alma mater actually did us proud for once.
The neighborhood gang left Northeast Philly for one single night and traveled to AC, where we ended up at a very unMcNally's-ish poolside club. I had one of these weird drunken ideas that I couldn't get out of my head, that I should jump in the pool and claim I got pushed in. I did not have a change of clothes. In a lifetime of terrible drunken ideas, this was my dumbest.
Somehow, I refrained, and was able to travel down the AC Expressway all dry and toasty.
My in-laws have a goofy tradition where they hide a little wooden "Butch deer" in each other's houses. The Butch deer passed through Port Richmond after our housewarming party, and spent some time on our mantelpiece before heading up to Hatboro. I wonder where that thing is now.
At my sister Jenny's graduation party, I found myself in the backyard, playing the drinking game Baseball with my family. By that time, the idea of playing drinking games with my mom and dad had lost some of its teenage luster, but still, shooting ping pong balls into cups at two in the morning with a bunch of drunken family members? Pretty cool all the same.
I don't think my Mom was that great at Baseball, but she is definitely a savant when it comes to a more classic bar game—shuffleboard. There are these two dudes who are in McNally's every night on their shuffleboard table (and who look like Dave Chappelle and John C. Reilly), and my mom is the only person I've ever seen take them to task.
The angriest I've ever seen my father-in-law was when we suggested that we have all our friends camp out in tents in his backyard. He loved that lawn, and surely did not want to witness a bunch of 20-something ruffians rough it up.
I was so proud of Pam than her graduation day when she received her Master's degree. She had mentioned that she wanted to go to grad school on our third or fourth date, and I had the privilege of seeing her work so goddamn hard at achieving that goal. She was the very first person called during the ceremony, which I have to assume means she was top of her class!!!
During the spring of 2012, we camped out in the Grand Canyon, without the top on the tent. The stars were so fucking clear in that beautiful part of the country.
When I worked in truancy prevention, I spent about a year in the same cubicle as this guy Fred, an older black gentleman, who was hilarious. I felt like he took me under his wing as far as social work goes (but only because I took him under my wing as far as the fact that he did not know how to use a computer, like, at all).
I was away at college when the family dog Mollie passed away in the living room, and buried in the backyard. I remember exactly where I was when I received the call (on the patio outside the Student Union, running lines with the cast of God's Favorite). I was sad then, and as I am currently digitizing my family's home videos, and watching Mollie grow from a pup, I am also sad now.
I made Pam a homemade, page-a-day calendar for Christmas one year. It was a great idea in theory, and a less successful one in practice. There had to be many days that year when Pam was rolling her eyes when she ripped to the next page. There were 365 pages! They couldn't all be winners! Please remember that as you keep reading fucking 200 fucking memories!
You know, after getting in deep shit with the theater program for blacking out before the Into the Woods fun run, you would think that we would learn our lesson. Not so. There was the infamous Guys and Dolls fun run, which I've discussed before. But I also fondly recall the God's Favorite fun run. Well, "recall" might be too strong of a word. The only clear memory I have of that drunken sojourn in the theater is the cast deciding to play one scene with no pants on. Or maybe it was just me with no pants. I don't remember. We were almost kicked out of the Masque for that night. Again.
I already talked about a great fucking night with new friends in Vegas, but not discussed in that blog post was another group of friends from our five-month vacation there—Pam's work friends. They were... fine. They wanted to take Pam out for her last day working at Sunrise Hospital, so me and her met the crew at a Mexican restaurant at the Monte Carlo Casino. All was well and good, but at the end, they stuck us with the majority of the bill. It was Pam's going away party, you would think they'd be treating her or something. Nah. Fucking jabronis. Good riddance, Las Vegas!!!
I can't really blame the vast majority of our friends for not coming to see the baby when she was born. It was kind of shitty, but at the same time, I'm not going to be a Seinfeldian cliché and insist that they "gotta see the baby," nor am I going to be a hypocrite (I didn't visit too many babies before Willow was born). So, I say, water under the bridge. To the five friends who DID come to visit and hang with our little family during those first few weeks, I say thank you. You know who you are, and you should know that you will be forever endeared in our hearts for reaching out during that time.
I did not know what Waitress was about before I bought Pam tickets to a show at the Forrest Theater, but it ended up being a pretty great musical to see with a 6-months-pregnant wife.
We organized Halloween parties at the Casbah Caterers three years in a row. All three years, our crew of 80-something family and friends had a great time (my own personal alcoholism-related issues at the last one notwithstanding). In my opinion, you can't really top the first year. We were all a little younger, a little more flippant with the open bar, and repeats are never as exciting, ya know? Maybe we'll give this party a go sometime in my 30s.
A couple seasons ago, I was at Wrigley Field for a bachelor party. It was a spring after, but fucking Chicago, man, the weather was atrocious. Slugging beers didn't protect us from the wind's bitter cut, and we bailed after 6 1/2 innings. As it turns out, we saw exactly half of the game in person. The other half of a very frustrating 13-inning game was watched across the street at a nice, warm bar. I'd say that the bar was about half Phillies fan and half Cubs fans. The bachelor was accepting shots every half inning from new Chicago friends, so I'm not sure if he even remembers the absolutely embarrassing end to this awful game. Great fucking weekend though.
About a dozen of our closest friends traveled up to Knoebels Grove one Labor Day Weekend for a camping trip. Park rules be damned, we got set to drinking early and often. As night turned darker and darker, me and Kev got drunker and drunker, and outlasted everyone else who retired to bed. I guess no one could sleep with me and Kev talking so loudly, because every few minutes, another person's head would pop out of a tent and ask us if we could please shut the fuck up. I ate a lot of crow the next morning.
Finishing Harry Potter was one of my favorite memories from my teenage years, so I was enthralled when Cursed Child was published. The screenplay isn't as beloved as its parent series, for sure, but I enjoyed it enough. It took me exactly one day to read the entire thing on the Wildwood beach. I still take great offense to Rowling's skulduggery when it comes to time travel, but other than that, consider me a fan. It was just nice to spend some time with these characters again, no matter how, um, out of character they acted sometimes.
A few years ago, my family joined up with a couple of other families at a house in Hatboro. It was dubbed a "Shelbourne Reunion," since we had all grown up on the same city block (or thereabouts). It was nice seeing people I hadn't seen in forever, and it was nice catching up and drinking some beers and reminiscing. I take offense, however, to one tense moment though with an old friend, who made the following claim: "Yeah, Joe used to be so smart, until he discovered alcohol." Some asshole calling me dumb after not interacting with me for a decade just didn't sit very well with me.
Things weren't going well in the Fall of 2013 (for reasons I've harped on way too frequently already), but I had the weekend off so I joined a birthday party on a boat on the Delaware River with a bunch of friends and an open bar. I was given the microphone at one point and made a very drunken speech. It was prepared, so it made sense, but I still look back and cringe. I can imagine that whatever I said was sarcastic and depressing, because that's how I was feeling during those few weeks that fall. That my youth had ended, and I was stuck in employment hell, and not even a fun boat party could save me now. I'm surprised I didn't just jump overboard afterward.
Harry getting permanent-markered was one of the funniest parts of the decade, but he wholeheartedly disagrees, so out of respect for him, I will refrain from going into details.
I try to stick it to La Salle as much as I can, so during a brief photo shoot for Pam and my engagement pictures, we made sure to include one of us drinking beers in the catwalks of the theater. Don't tell me what I can't do!
I wasn't huge into going to Finnegan's Wake for happy hour while in school. It was a decent deal—$20 for two hours all-you-can-drink—but it was a pain to get to, and $20 for two hours is more expensive than $10 drink-all-night at a house party with, like, people you actually wanted to hang out with? But I remember there was one time (out of three attempts) at Finnegan's that was actually a blast. It may have had a lot to do with the fact that it took place on the night of most fraternity and sorority pledge nights, so it ended up being a good crowd heading to Northern Liberties. I hung with rugby girls, I made peace with ex-girlfriends, and caught up with my long-lost honors program friends (I had lost touch with most of 'em because I was banned from the townhouses, where they all lived). That big Finnegan's building on Spring Garden has been closed for like four years now (soon to be GoPuff HQ), but at least I can say I had one single fun night there.
One time I was at a Phillies game with my dad, and a short, disheveled, and very intoxicated middle-aged man came up and gave me a hug. After he walked away, my dad: "...Who in the world was that?" "The McNally's cook." "Get the hell out of here."
For my third and final act as an underager, I got cited by the police for underage drinking with only eleven months to go. I was court-ordered to attend a Teen Alcohol Abuse program, and I was 20.5 goddamn years old. When I went to sign up for the class, the receptionist asked "Are you here to pick up your child?"
The Rockledge cops gave me even more trouble that summer, but luckily there was no harm done for me personally. I had been drinking a lot the night before, and so, on a Saturday night, I just hung at a friend's house for a couple hours, and decided to come home early and get to bed to rest up. I didn't drink anything that night. When I got home, I found my sister Jenny and like twenty of her friends playing beer pong on the dining room table, and I opened up the fridge to find the most Hurricane 40s I'd ever seen in one place at the same time. I wanted nothing to do with this, and went to bed. Sometime around 3 AM, someone starts banging on my bedroom door. "Open up! Police! Stop hiding!" I said, officer, I wasn't hiding, I was sleeping. "Sure buddy, join the lineup." Everyone was breathalyzed. I blew a .00. "Hmm, guess you were telling the truth." The police then went through the house and took the rest of the alcohol, including an unopened case of High Life I had stored in the garage. I guess as a reward for not getting a fourth underage, my dad went to the police station and got my case of beer back, making me possibly the only underage kid in history to ever receive alcohol from the Rockledge Police Department.
Me and Pam were in L.A. to see a Phillies v. Dodgers game, and at the hotel, we saw the snottiest little kids in history. And I mean this literally—big thick ropes of snot pouring out of these kids' noses. Their parents didn't seem too concerned when the snot made its way to the various hotel furniture pieces in the lobby. We left that continental breakfast buffet as fast as we could. Imagine how we felt when we see those same kids walking up the steps in the nosebleed section of Dodger Stadium where we were sitting, four empty seats in front of us.
The last time I ever partied at college was for Brianna's 21st birthday party at West Chester. Somehow, by some divine grace, Pam, my sister Jenn, my brother-in-law Bob, and I all had off on a Tuesday, so we could all drive up Monday night and party on her actual birthday. All the classic college tropes were employed that night—beer pong in the dorm room, cherry bombs at a shit campus bar, late night blackout 7 Eleven taquitos, sleeping on a pull-out couch. All to celebrate the only K*** who never got an underage drinking charge.
We used to play softball with friends and acquaintances at Fox Chase Rec every Tuesday night. There were definitely some friends who were more, uh, competent at the sport than others. I considered myself middle-of-the-pack in terms of skills. I held my ground in left field, and occasionally made contact with the ball at the plate. But does no one remember that one time I hit a walk-off grand slam?! C'mon!
On a random Saturday night, Pam and I met up with friends Drew and Christian. This was the night that I discovered my favorite cocktail in the city, the "Blue Trash" at Tiki. We may have all enjoyed it a little too much that night. At one point, Pam and I saw the female bartender pinches Christian's ear and dragging him out of the bar. "Hey, do you mind if we ask what that guy did." "Yeah, he fucking walked behind the bar and then tripped and fell on the floor!"
Kev's family has a Poconos house that we visit every couple years. One year, people were shooting Hamm's cans off the deck into the water, and one of the cans sunk to the bottom of the lake. At the end of the weekend, we figured it might be a good idea to dive down and get the can, so as not to pollute and all that. My buddy Ed dives down and pulls out a can. It's real dirty, and all this slimy black goo starts pouring out of it. You can't even see the label, it's so dirty. Clearly, this is not the can shot by the BB gun. But wait, Ed says, hold up a minute. He polishes off the can with his hand a little. As it turns out, it was indeed a Hamm's can. A pop-top Hamm's can from like the 1970s or something. I think that lake might be a time machine maybe? We still have the old can on our mantelpiece.
I honestly don't think I've written about this day in January 2009 on this blog, though it is one of my fondest memories. On move-in day of my fourth semester, we snuck a keg into the dorms. The task itself was pretty easy, because St. Basil's Dorms provided these big blue containers on wheels for all your suitcases and whatnot, so we just put a keg of Miller Lite in one and covered it up with clothes. Easy peasy. The Eagles and Cardinals were facing off in the NFC Championship that afternoon, and my friend Santina had the foresight to buy a ton of wings, so we all sat around the dorm room, watching the birds, hot wings and cold beer. It was a great fucking day. After the keg was kicked, the red wine starts getting passed around, and I'm about to slip under a blackout, when all of a sudden... the fire alarm! My roommates appear out of nowhere, we all immediately sober up, and run around the room like a pack of lunatics, doing our best to hide the empty keg. No one thought there was a fire, but everyone knew that there was a real danger approaching our room—the RAs. One sight of a fucking KEG in the DORMS would have absolutely meant EXPULSION from student housing. I don't remember exactly what we did to hide that shit. I'm thinking trash bags, crates, suitcases piled on top. If the RAs saw anything, they didn't say anything, because we were allowed to sleep in our own beds that night. By the Skin of My Teeth—A Lasallian Story.
That weird night at McNally's. You know the one.
Okay, we're halfway through our memories, and I want you to know that the best memory of my 20s was only kept back until now for dramatic effect. I got married to the love of my life on 8/31/2014. Like every great wedding day, it was a big party designed as a love letter to each other and to all our closest friends and family. We got drunk, the dance floor was packed, we had some laughs, and most importantly, I committed the rest of my life to Pam. I remember every second of that day.
Like every angsty 20-year-old male, I read Watchmen (read? looked at?), and I was fucking enthralled by its outwardly nihilistic but secretly hopeful outlook on humanity, so much so that I tried to wrap up a Power Hour by talking about the optimism of a big blue penis.
Okay, back to the wedding, because it was just too good a day to move past. One of my concerns (it was a stupid concern, but still, a concern) was that the DJ would play what we wanted him to play. I had no foolish notions that DJ Dave should be consistently playing mid-'00s indie rock, because no one would dance to that. But we insisted that the lineup of lame-ass family party dance songs—"Macarena," "Chicken Dance," you know what I mean—should be stricken from the playlists. And there were five songs that I wanted saved till the end, songs carefully curated for maximum dancing among guests of all ages ("The Twist," "Twist and Shout," "Shout," "Ain't Too Proud to Beg," and "Rosalita"). And shit, man, the DJ did great. The dance floor was packed. Pam and I found ourselves on shoulders during "Shout." It was a true celebration. I was even glad that the very last song wasn't a showstopper, but a mediocre pop song very much of its time. "Fancy" by Iggy Azaela ended our night, and for the most part I say fuck that song, but it's place at the end of the playlist at least put a timestamp on our wedding night. Like, thinking back to everyone dancing to that song (me and Pam included, of course), I will always roll my eyes and think, "Holy shit, that was soooo 2014."
Speaking of good songs, every time Pam and I roll into Wildwood, we blast "Thunder Road" out of the car windows and scream along to the lyrics and yell "We're back!!" and I can't wait for Willow to learn the lyrics and participate.
Okay, one more time with the wedding, for now. The image of Pam in her wedding dress is burned into my brain. I think about it at least once a day.
There's always people in your life you just feel comfortable with, no matter how much time has passed in between hangouts. My mind goes back to one random fucking day a couple years ago, when me and Kev and Mike met up at Byrne's for wings and beers, and just shot the shit for a few hours. As we get older, there's less and less time for small moments between friends, but whenever they do happen, I feel at peace.
Those same friends helped out when me and Pam were finally ready to move into our new house. The big issue was: how the fuck are we going to fit the box spring up the stairs? The thing barely fit in the truck from Doylestown to Port Richmond, let alone up that tiny rowhome stairwell. But that's what Google is for; instructions are abound on the internet about how to cut a box spring almost in half, bend the springs hamburger-style, and unfold it once you are at the top of the steps. Plenty of Hamm's Light for the friends that helped us achieve this task.
About a month after we moved in, we threw not one, but two housewarming parties (our house is too small for one big shindig). The first night was mostly just family, so that was the night with a much better food selection. But the second night was all friends, and it got a little wild. Somehow, I had convinced Pam to let us play a homegrown drinking game I dubbed "Tickets." Basically, everyone pays $5 and gets 10 tickets to start, and the whole party is a series of small bets to try and earn or win tickets from other people. People were stealing jackets, kissing each other, doing naked face-first snow angels on the back deck, I mean, this shit escalated quickly. There were some bets so vile that I have been sworn to secrecy not to discuss. It was an awesome way to break in our new home. (We'll have been there five years next week, if you can believe it!)
On the final night before Woodstock's lease was finally up, after three years and ten different inhabitants, we all gathered in its sacred halls to say goodbye. Goodbye to the deck overlooking North Philly. Goodbye to the cockroaches and the rats. Goodbye to Miss Gerry for putting up with everyone's shit. Goodbye to the smoosh room and the smoke room and the billiard room (all the same room). Goodbye to Kev's lingering stench in the upstairs closet, even two years after he had moved out. Goodbye to the stolen Polar Bear Club poster and the stolen Miley Cyrus poster and the stolen painting of Dwyer as a pirate. While we sucked back cheap malt liquor one last time on those leftover retirement home couches, we passed around a soccer ball, and whoever had the ball would share their favorite memory of Woodstock. God, I miss that place.
It would have been a dumb way too die, but I survived; on New Year's Eve, in subfreezing temperatures, me and a few other friends jumped in the Ocean City ocean, naked, at like one in the morning, to start the year off right.
I already wrote about it, but it's worth mentioning again how damn easy it is to run ten miles when you have something that you are nervous about waiting at the end. I wonder if I would sweat or be out of breath during a 26.2 mile full marathon if I had a ring in my pocket during the run. If the Broad Street Run 2013 is any indication, I can do anything with Pam as my guide and my motivation.
At 12:01 AM on December 1, 2009, three friends and I walked into the Rockledge Pub, and I ordered a beer. It was probably the 2,000th beer of my lifetime, but it was my very first beer that I legally consumed within the confines of federal law. With that $2 Miller High Life, a lifetime of fear of LCB and MADD and the dastardly Rockledge Police Department evaporated in an instant.
I had to interview a fourteen-year-old girl one time and ask her if she was ever sexually molested by her older brother. I had to stop the interview because she wouldn't stop taking selfies. #DHSatMyHouse
The way the La Salle Apartments are set up is there are seven different buildings, with four apartments in each building, and four students to an apartment. At least, that's how I thought the layout to be until a secret passageway was discovered in the C-block building, leading to a hitherto unknown abandoned apartment. The best way to describe the place would be the Upside Down from Stranger Things. The apartment layout was the same, but the electricity didn't work, there was a layer of dirt and grime over everything, various broken pieces of furniture lay about. Of course, in our minds, this would be the perfect place to get drunk. So during the Blizzard of '10, someone picked the lock to the newly-christened "Apartment C0," and we brought cases of Natty Light and strobe lights and had ourselves a shindig in La Salle's Upside Down. I think people ended up naked? Let's not talk about specifics.
My old department used to investigate why kids in Philadelphia weren't going to school. Basically, I was Principal Ed Rooney, minus the B&E. For the most part, teens were truant because they didn't care, and younger kids were truant because their parents didn't care. But the strangest case I ever had was this preteen student who had recently stopped going to school. He explained to me that his reasoning was that he had received a B in math class, and he felt he deserved an A. The B would mess up his perfect 4.0 GPA. He would refuse to attend school unless he got the grade he thought he deserved. I was speechless then, and I'm still speechless now. Having a 3.99 GPA doesn't necessarily mean you aren't a dumbass.
By the time Willow was 24 hours old, her dad had had about three hours of sleep in the previous 48, so my mind was hazy and I was at the end of my rope. Happy, for sure, but still going a little bit crazy, ya know what I mean? Willow was in the ICU for minor sugar-level concerns, so we had to hang out among the sharp crying and the great beeping machines during most of our stay. It was like two in the morning, and I decided to try out feeding my daughter the two oz. of formula that she needed. After maybe half an ounce, she threw it all up, and I was holding her horizontally, so that shit when all over her face and my hands. I don't want to say "everyone freaked out," because that's not true, but I was a little slow on the uptake about what to do, and everyone knew it. I should've picked her up right away so that she didn't re-swallow any of the throw up, and I didn't do it quickly enough for comfort. That was probably my low-point in the six-plus months of being a father so far. I felt like at that moment that maybe I couldn't do this, maybe I couldn't protect my daughter from harm. As it turns out, I just needed more sleep, and once I got it, I felt ready to face parenthood's challenges vis-à-vis courage. At that moment, though, I felt like a fucking failure.
We live in a dense neighborhood, and so our property's rear yard backs right up against the side of another home. We have a small garden that goes directly up to the side wall of this other house. It's an abandoned property, possibly gutted by some previous fire, and boarded up with government plywood. Whoever the jamook is who owns the place at one point knocked on our front door and said that it was illegal for our garden to be up against his house. First of all, I don't know what he was looking for. How can we have an empty space between dirt and a house? That's not physically possible. Second, who the fuck are you? Are you the same dude whose house is falling apart, often leaving debris and old pieces of crumbling tar in our yard? How about you worry about your own house?
Back when I was a young lad of 20......... okay, wait, we gotta go back to that neighbor, because now I'm all fired up. Some fucking nerve of this guy, huh? We haven't seen him since I chased him off our stoop three years ago, but I'm not exaggerating about the fact that the house is falling apart right onto our back deck. I attempted to take action once and called our "esteemed" 311 service. An L&I investigator showed up at our door one day when we were at work, but luckily a contractor was there as well, so the contractor let the guy in the backyard to "inspect." Any reasonable person could see that the roof on the neighbor's house is crumbling and poses a danger to the neighbors; no one ever said that any reasonable people work for the City of Philadelphia government. I got an email informing me that "the investigation has been closed" with absolutely no indication as to why. No fucking clue. So I guess when I get hit in the head with a chimney while I'm pulling leaves, I'll just have to take action then.
I don't think there's a specific memory I can point to, but discovering methods to steal music and television on the internet was probably the most life-changing discovery of the decade. I could never in a million years afford the entertainment I consume. God bless kingdom-leaks, uTorrent, The Pirate Bay, and all the rest of you scoundrels.
I worked from 7 AM to 7 PM one New Year's Day, and decided to catch up with Pammy after I was discharged. She had been drinking with some nursing friends all morning and afternoon, and decided to join the fray on Two Street for the post-Mummers Parade. Please note, this is no place for a sober person. It is crowded, loud, obnoxious, and intimidating without a positive BAC number. But I trudge through the trash (literal, figurative), looking for Pam. She was texting me updates as to where she was: "I'm on Ellsworth!" Five minutes later: "I'm on Wharton!" Five minutes after that: "I'm on Tasker!" I finally catch up with her and realize that her location keeps moving because she is sitting on a big box truck moving down 2nd Street. I am implored to join the group on top of this moving box truck. Let me stress again that this is no place for a sober person. There are no guardrails and there are low-hanging live wires. Somehow I made it through that first day of the year alive. Never again will I step foot on Two Street without at least fifteen alcohol servings in my stomach. NEVER.
I only worked at Avis Budget Group for like five weeks and it was five years ago, but I seem to have a disproportionate amount to say about it. Oh well. This is the last one, promise. So on my last full day there, around the time I was leaning toward quitting, I spent a surprisingly satisfying day out on the blacktop, shepherding hundreds and hundreds of returns through the parking lot. Since the people driving them into the lot don't own the cars, they can tend to be irresponsible with them, and a lot people just lock the keys in the damn vehicle and walk away with no repercussions. It's the job of the employees, therefore, to get in those locked cars without keys. I learned how the method that day. You take a wedge, and pry the car door open a little bit. In that small space, you stick a balloon-like pump, and pump the rubber sphere up so that the space between door and car grows big enough to stick a long-hooked wire into. That wire pulls the car handle, popping the lock and opening the door. After like the fourth time I performed this procedure, I had the hang of it, and other employees were starting to joke around: "Haha, dude, you could probably quit and just steal cars for a living!" I laughed along, said, "yup, definitely going to quit and start stealing cars," and laughed some more, and didn't tell anyone that I was absolutely quitting as soon as I left them. As far as any of those guys know, that rookie manager really did quit to start a life of carjacking, and it's been Avis Budget Group urban legend ever since.
Sometimes great days shouldn't try to be repeated. Radio 104.5 learned that lesson the hard way when their beloved WinterJam concert festival at Schmidt's Piazza over the years devolved into sardine-can-tight hoards of sweaty drunk teenagers, pissing on playgrounds and having rough doggy-style sex against the windows facing the concert venue. But that very first WinterJam, before it was trendy, was an amazing day. Subpar emo pop bands sound a lot better while it's snowing and you're outside and you're drinking cold Coors Banquets and eating contraband pretzels and you're with friends.
When Pam was super-pregnant, the hardest part of her day was lying down in bed, because it took so much effort for her to just roll over. It was like she was spooning a warm sack of potatoes. Of course, this meant that her husband had to take what was left of the bed space, meaning the six inches on the rightside edge, and then keep the rest of his body suspended off the side. The sacrifices we all make, right? (Pam is reading this right now, eyes ablaze, yelling: "What do you mean, the sacrifices WE make?!?!?!)
I didn't live in Las Vegas in order to start a career, but I couldn't live somewhere for five months without at least getting a part-time shit job. I found about 20 hours a week at a real shady telemarketer agency called Advantage Consulting, Inc. The hook for this company was that we are telemarketers FOR CHARITY. Allegedly I was making cold calls and collecting money to build hospitals and help university non-profits attract students with fancier facilities. I dunno, I bought it at the time, and was glad that my hours contributed to getting Life Flight off the ground. Looking back, though, I could see that maybe not all the money that was collected over the phone went toward noble causes. I have to imagine some back-office stooges were lining their pockets too. It was Las fucking Vegas, for christ's sake, you think anyone acts with any morals in that town? But whatever. I was low on the totem pole. I did what I was told. And sometimes, I took home $100 bonuses for making the most calls (which ends up being like $99.50 even after taxes, because Las Vegas is an insanely cheap place to live if you can refrain from degenerate gambling). There's not a chance the place still exists (I even needed the IRS' help to get my W2 months later because no one was picking up the phone). There is some evidence left on google, including this hilarious Yelp review, but nothing dates past 2013. Maybe it was all a fever dream in the desert, and there was never an Advantage Consulting at all...
Pam and I were on a booze cruise during a random trip to Milwaukee one year. Something about drinking on a boat really sets my mind at ease. We even got to extend our tour by an hour (with continued open bar), which was the good news. The bad news is that that hour was spend trying to help another boat that had run aground by some large rocks. It was fucking strange, man. There were like 20 people on this other boat, and all of them were just standing on the deck, staring at us. Not a word of help or thanks or anything. Just stares. I felt like I was in a Stephen King book or something. The mimosas helped to ease the jitters I guess.
We had this running joke in the Zipcar offices of continuously pressing each other about who each person's "work bang" was. Urban Dictionary does not have a definition for this, so I'll define it myself. "Work bang" is a term used in a discussion about a hypothetical situation in which you had to choose one of your coworkers to have sex with. That chosen person is known as your "work bang." It's all hypothetical; no one is forcing you to have sex with anyone else. But since the office was so small, the conversation was somewhat limited, which made it funnier in my eyes. It wasn't a harassment thing either, the girls were just as inappropriate in these laughter-filled conversations as the men. I dunno, though, maybe Pam was right about the whole thing, as she would inevitably roll her eyes when we played this game and accuse us of just being young and dumb and horny. That was Zipcar, true.
Pam's family dog, Murphy, was the goofiest dog I ever had the pleasure of meeting. The old joke goes: "If you're trying to stop yourself from crying, picture Murphy's teeth. If you're trying to make yourself cry, picture Murphy's breath." I'll always picture him in the backyard, just straight up eating gravel, and loving every minute of it.
Having grown up watching the Wolf Pack cheer on Randy Wolf and Padilla's Flotillas cheer on Vincent Padilla, et al, it felt only right that my friends and I add a chapter to the book of Phillies fandom. The 2016 Phillies season saw the creation and unveiling of Odubel Herrera's personal cheering section, "Odubel's Zoo-bels." Everyone dressed up as a different zoo animal, and everyone got drunk, and we hung a big banner in the nosebleeds announcing our presence. I'm not sure if Odubel himself acknowledged us, but hey, we were on the news!
LCR is a high-stakes dice game that we usually bust out for special occasions, or like usually when we rent a vacation house with a pool table. You put X amount of money in the pot per person, and after plenty of dice rolls, whoever ends up with the final chip wins the pot. The stakes get pretty high when it's $20 per person with 15 people. I paid for my whole weekend at Sam's bachelor party because I was so lucky at LCR. (At other bachelor parties, not so lucky; Dwyer walked away with like $400 at Harry's bachelor party.)
I created an Instagram account. Some people said it was hilarious. Some people said it was the dumbest, most inane thing they've every had the displeasure of witnessing. I feel like every artist needs this dichotomy of opinions from his audience if he truly aspires to greatness.
One time I bet Kev that he couldn't kick through my bedroom door. It was a bad bet.
The only time I got in a drunken fight and WASN'T at fault was at a bar in Roxborough, then called Union Jack's Pub. They allegedly had some bangin' wings on the menu, and I was drinking beer on a semi-empty stomach, so I ordered up a basket. They were as good as advertised. The only minor quip was that the bartender didn't give me an extra plate on which to place my bone scraps. No big deal, I just placed them all in the nearest receptacle, which happened to be an empty beer glass. The bartender flipped out—"Now I have to wash this glass! Are you serious?!" Let the record show that he was the one that didn't give me a choice about where to put the wing bones. On top of that, what, he wasn't planning on washing the used beer glass? And finally, is this really a reason to flip out on a customer? We yelled "Fuck you!" at the guy as we left (way sooner than we would've otherwise), and I haven't been back since.
A couple years ago, my supervisor caught me at like 4:30 in the afternoon, saying that I needed to go out into the field to place a child who was living with a child molester. This child wasn't even on my caseload, I was only chosen for the assignment because I was last sucker still at the office a half hour before closing. What could I do? Even though we were celebrating my wife's birthday that night, I had to go to North Philly and remove a child from his home. His mom (the girlfriend of the child molester), treated me very kindly indeed. For about two hours straight, she called me every name in the book, continuously, over and over. "You're a fucking asshole. You're going to hell. Fuck you, fucking bitch. How dare you." Etc, etc. It was like some type of torture. When you hear someone say you are a terrible person three hundred times in a row, you start to believe it, ya know? It was the worst assignment I've ever had for this job. And you better fucking believe that was the last time I stepped foot in that office past four o'clock.
I ran 13.1 miles one time, which was the longest I had and have ever run. I wouldn't be surprised if that personal record stands until I die. I had my eyes closed during the last 0.1 miles. I couldn't physically open them. Hardest thing I've ever done in my life, in terms of pure physical strain on the body.
Me and Pam were bored one afternoon in fucking Cork, Ireland of all places, so we turned to a dear friend that always seems to take us away from the monotony—alcohol. A quick google revealed that through the city there was a "Heritage Pub Trail" of sorts, mostly made up of old dumpy-looking Irish pubs down alleyways and around dark corners. We were intrigued, and took the bait. We had no idea at first what exactly all the bars had in common, or what type of "heritage" we were supposed to be tracing. They all had one thing in common; all these bars, in a somewhat anachronistic fashion, featured the same new craft beers on tap from the same brewery. Didn't really matter, because we were exploring the city by drinking its beer, and that, to us, was worth it no matter the reason. Still, the question lingered. Finally, at the final bar, we struck up conversation with the man behind the bar. As it turns out, he was the owner of the brewery that brewed all these craft beers that we had seen (and drank) all day. And as it also turns out, he was the person that masterminded the "Heritage Pub Trail" through all these bars just to give people an excuse to drink his beer. AND as it also also turns out, he was a great fucking dude who appreciated that we had purchased his beer all day, and so he took us across the street to the actual brewery tasting room, and got us nice and drunk with a couple of other co-owners, all on the house.
Thinking about our trip to Ireland gets me thinking about my cousin Timmy (technically cousin-once-removed), who worked at a pub in Ireland after he graduated college, I guess just to get away from America for a while and get in touch with his roots. Timmy passed away three years ago when his car crashed on the highway. His death hit my family hard, because of the unexpectedness of it, and because of how much he was loved, and how much he will be missed.
I want to remember my grandmom too. She passed away not too long after Grandpop, but unlike Grandpop, she was truly with us till her dying day, her beautiful mind fully intact. I remember fondly the last time me and Pam went to see her. She was at Holy Redeemer Hospital, and it must have been right after Easter, because she spent the whole visit trying to get us to take home some Easter candy. That was Grandmom's life mission, to provide for her grandkids in small but meaningful ways. I miss the hell out of her.
Christ, I need a good memory to segue from all this misery. I don't want to be crude and insensitive and have this follow-up memory be about, like, getting drunk in the woods or something. How about my cousin Bea's wedding? It was Pam's first K*** family wedding, and we all danced and had a great time. Grandmom and Timmy were both there, so we can picture both of them, on the dance floor, enjoying themselves as well. Fuck, I love weddings. I love family. I love open bars.
My family went to a fancy (kind of fancy, anyway) Italian restaurant in Center City to celebrate Aunt Dee Dee's birthday. It was a boisterous atmosphere, loud but in a good way. Behind our crew sat a group of 20 or so UPenn kids, clearly taking full advantage of the BYOB rules with boxes of Franzia. Their party escalated to the point where they were playing Slap the Bag in the middle of this restaurant, which was hilarious, and didn't particularly bother anyone around them, as far as I could tell. After we ate our entrées, the K***s all sang happy birthday to Dee Dee. The ivy league kids, getting wind that they had a birthday girl in their midst, insisted that Dee also play slap the bag with them. Of course, everyone was all on board. She put the valve up to her mouth, and we all—the whole restaurant, it seemed like—started to group count the seconds that Dee Dee kept chugging. ONE! TWO! THREE! then smash cut to TWENTY-FIVE! TWENTY-SIX! The count keeps going with intermingled smatterings of "Holy shit!!!" and "Are you fucking serious?!" and "Keep going!!" Finally, Aunt Dee Dee pulls the bag away at something like an incredulous thirty seconds, and everyone goes nuts at the restaurant record. This forty-something schooled a bunch of cocky Penn kids. My family, we were dying, couldn't stop laughing. But the capper of this story is when my Mom asked Dee Dee how in the world she drank for that long. Her response: "I couldn't get the thing open, so I didn't drink any."
When I was cast in the play Recent Tragic Events, the rest of the cast and I were given the script over winter holiday and told to be off-book when we got back. I played a sleazy ne'er-do-well named Ron who talked armchair psychobabble through a marijuana-induced squint. It was fucking awesome. My favorite part was that there were F-bombs abound throughout the script. "Not so fast," was La Salle's oh-so-typical response, and word came down from the prudish Dean of Students that the curse words would be scrubbed from the script, because it "wasn't appropriate for a Catholic University." Lame (so lame that the Collegian wrote an editorial about it). On Friday and Saturday nights of the show, I kept my mouth clean, and played by the rules. The Sunday matinee finale was a different story. I didn't plan on saying "Fuck" onstage, but after my co-star Hannah "slipped" and dropped an F-bomb, I similarly "slipped" and dropped like five more. The producer was off-stage making a motion like he was slitting his throat. Hannah and I were summoned, a few days later, to an administrative meeting where we would discuss our insolence. Hannah claimed that hers was an accident, and that flew, because she only said fuck once. I couldn't quite claim that it was an accident, because if so, it was an accident that I kept making over and over. So my defense was that I was a shitty actor, and I kept forgetting to censor myself. For only time in my life, La Salle wholeheartedly agreed with my defense of my wrongdoing, if only because my defense was: "I suck."
After being told to stop drinking because it was only noon and we had a long day ahead of us, I witnessed Ant chug an entire pint of vodka and then order us a Lyft.
I saw Titus Andronicus three times in my 20s. The third time was the drunkest, probably. The second time was the weirdest, personally. The first time, though, will always be the best in my mind. I know Titus brings their all to every show, but there was a reckless abandon to that first show that was not as present subsequently. Maybe that had more to do with my own reckless abandon at the time. Maybe being 20-years-old makes it a lot easier to push and pull through the pit than it is at 28. Maybe the fact that they were playing almost all of The Monitor made it the most imperative show. Maybe I'm just looking at it all through rose-colored glasses, and everything that happened when I'm younger will always be considered better than when it happened again and I'm older. I dunno. Who cares. Titus Andronicus rocks.
In junior year I participated in a sorority-sponsored male beauty pageant. Unlike Mac, I wasn't going for gasps, I was going for cheap laughs. The first portion of the pageant was the "talent" section of the show. For my "talent," I took a Hurricane 40 bottle and chugged its contents, right onstage. The Dean of Greek Life was backstage, and fucking livid (picture someone who looks like Pete from 30 Rock and you'll get the idea). "How DARE you?!" and all that shit. I yelled right back, "clearly you didn't see the sign in the audience!" While I was chugging, I had someone hold up a sign in front of the audience that read: "IT'S JUST APPLE JUICE." That was the truth. Just throw this memory on the pile of other memories where I put my foot on the line of disciplinary action and wiggle my big toe smugly. A lot of my stories from La Salle are about how the administration created a collegial environment of immaturity and hardassedness, but you should know that I was definitely part of the problem.
My favorite inside joke between Pam and I has to do with this stress ball I got as a joke one Christmas in a Friends Pollyanna, except the stress ball is actually shaped like a penis. Somehow, Pam and I started to try to hide it with each other's clothes, in desk drawers, under each other's pillows, and especially in each other's luggage. One time, we got to the airport and weighed our bags. With the limit at 40 lbs per bag, Pam's weighed something like 40.07, some infinitesimal amount over the limit. So I unzippered the top part, held the penis up, and said, "Could this be the reason?"
I accidentally closed the car's trunk door on Pam's face one time. Like, she was bleeding and everything. Ever since then, every time I am about to close the trunk door, I yell "CLEAR?!" This has been going on for like six years, and I haven't mutilated her since.
My full-time job right out of college doesn't get a lot of play here on the blogs, for a few reasons. First, even though it was full-time, it was about as far from a "career" as I could possibly get. Second, my mom worked there, and yes, my employment was via nepotism. Third, it was just fucking boring. Nothing exciting ever happened. Ever. My workday consisted of sorting thousands and thousands of digital documents (mostly medical supply receipts) into different categories. I would sit there all day looking at a page that had been scanned in, and decide one of thirteen options, and then move to the next page. There was no supervision, either, so I did as little work as was feasible without getting fired. If I theoretically could've sorted 2,000 pages a day, I ended up only actually sorting 200. I binged the entire Mad Men series while my boss wasn't looking. It was wild. So I don't really have any stories to tell about PSMS, but you should know that it was how I spent nine months of my early twenties, and it was... something.
There was that time when me, Dwy, Maeve, and Sara all sat around a table in a North Philly Pizza Hut and made a blood pact that we would all get laid that summer.
There was that time when me and Stephan got lost in Camden after leaving an all-you-can-drink Camden Riversharks game and walking in the completely wrong direction.
There was that time when we competed in a Super Case Race (30 cans and a bottle of wine), and it turned into a "complete, and utter, barf-o-rama."
There was that time when the pep band drank beers behind the drum set during a women's home basketball game.
There was that time when me, Pam, "Last Resort" Dwyer, Brit, and crazy cat lady Casey all kept drinking the next morning after the Halloween party, and stayed drunk, and somehow Brit had a Tinder date right in the middle of our hang, and we ordered pizza, and Dwyer had to get picked up by his parents and somehow turned that into a pick-up line, and we argued about politics, and kept drinking, kept the partying going, which sometimes end up being the very best days.
One time me and Pam were met up with some friends in Vegas whom I had met on the Las Vegas subreddit (I know). The guy, Eric, had just met this girl (name lost to the sands of time), at a bar they were at previously, and had been hooked up as beer pong partners (oh Vegas), and won a beer pong tournament together, the grand prize being a cruise...? This the story they told us when we met up at the Griffin, a candlelit dive bar near Fremont Street. I guess, even though they won at beer pong, they weren't dominant in the game, because the girl could barely stand up straight she was so drunk. At one point, she looks like she's hugging Eric, but soon Pam and I realize that it's no hug, she's just using him to block where she's throwing up right on the floor. Eric says that he has to take this chick home, and me and Pam slowly back away to the other side of the room, and wait for the bouncer to shine his flashlight at the puke puddle, then shine it all around the bar, looking for the already-gone culprit, and seeing nothing on our faces but total innocence and bewilderment.
The brief post-Joe history of my old '91 Camry can be told in two sentences. On Christmas Day 2011, I gave the car to my sister Brianna (I was traveling to Vegas), so that she could use it to cart kegs around campus like I did in college. She wanted an upgrade and sold it to the son of a neighbor, who in just a few weeks started using it to deliver Domino's Pizza, and then crashed it into a creek.
When I was 22, I had to buy a new laptop, since apparently in my sleep I peed on my old one.
One Irish Weekend, Harry had gone out to the store, and was taking a really long time. We started to get worried. As it turns out, he had been home for a while, but he was just afraid to get out of his car. Because the turn he made into the garage was a little too wide, and he crashed his car right through the wall. Harry's niece, who was like three at the time, kept yelling, "Harry hit wall! Harry hit wall!"
Pam and I got married at the Rosebank Winery in Newtown. On weekends, that winery has tastings that typically cost $10 a person. We decided to check it out a few months before the wedding, mainly to get a sense of what wines we'd like to be served at the reception. We made small talk with the guy at the front desk, and mentioned that we were getting married at Rosebank, and so he says, "oh, then you don't have to pay for the tasting." You better believe that we took advantage of this free offer, and came back to Rosebank like four times between then and the wedding. If someone is offering you free wine, you take the free wine.
Apparently this is not a thing anywhere else in the country, but in the tri-state area, wedding showers are always a surprise. Pam didn't even want to have a shower, let alone not know when it was happening. But she lives in Philadelphia, so she has no fucking choice. And because she was so against the idea, I of course worked really hard at making sure that whole thing was a surprise, much to her chagrin. The way I got her to the steps of the banquet hall without her suspecting was so lame, but it worked. The night before, I said, "Hey, you know what I read the other day? The creator of Rick and Morty grew up in Doylestown." This is not true, I'm just laying the trap. Pam couldn't give two fucks about Rick and Morty, so I knew she wouldn't think twice about this. "Yeah, apparently a lot of the animation in the show is based on shit in Doylestown." The next morning, we had brunch plans with my in-laws. "Hey, this is going to sound so lame, but there's this church that we're passing on the way up there that apparently is featured in my favorite Rick and Morty episode. Would it be too lame to, like, pull over and take a picture?" And from there it was just a matter of pulling into the parking lot and driving up to the door. A very hungover Pam finally sighs and says: "...this is my shower, isn't it? ugghhhhghghghh"
I feel like a few of these memories have already touched on the fact that Kev gets very protective of his abode, whether that means getting pissed when someone smashes an egg all over his kitchen (#48), or when someone steals his Polar Bear Club poster (#109). It's real easy to get under Kev's skin when he has guests over. So on Fourth of July a few years ago, we took busting his balls about this to the extreme, and created a new drinking game called "Roof Rage." The premise of the game was simple. After you are finished your beer, you have to throw your beer can on the roof above the porch (the roof that Kev's bedroom window looks out onto). The only catch is that Kev cannot know that the entire rest of the party is playing this game. If Kev sees even one person throw a beer can on the roof, the party is over, and we all lose. I'm proud to say that we won this round of Roof Rage, and poor Kev had to sweep about 150 empty cans of beer off his roof the next morning.
Another drinking game we created at Kev's house has become even more notorious over the years. During the tail end of a party (no idea which one), I found myself in the kitchen with friends Cindy and Maryrose. All three of us couldn't stop yawning, so we decided to create a game that would wake us up a little bit. "Circle Slap" was born. Basically, we all stand in a circle. One person starts, and slaps the person to their left. That person slaps the person to their left, but the slap has to be harder than the slap they received originally. And so on and so forth, slaps escalating until inevitably a drunk boyfriend takes offense to someone slapping his girlfriend as hard as they can, and the game has to break up before someone goes to the hospital. The game has been suggested as a joke about twenty times more often than we actually play it, because no one is a big fan of physical assault, apparently.
A recurring dream I have is the 911 dream; I continuously find myself in situations in my dreams where I have to call 911. I think this idea was implanted in my brain from that year I worked as a 911 calltaker, listening to literally thousands of emergency calls in my short tenure there. In real life, though, I've really only had to call 911 a few times. Maybe the worst was when I was walking through the very bleak Southwest Philly on assignment, and happened to walk past a woman with a baby in one hand, and a 12-inch butcher's knife in the other, and she's not taking that much care in moving the baby away from the knife as she swings it around in an attempt to stab her boyfriend.
I also called 911 last New Year's Day, but it was on the completely other end of the spectrum in terms of seriousness. Pam's cousin and his two friends asked if they could stay over our house New Year's Eve since they were partying in Center City (Port Richmond is closer than the suburbs, I suppose). Despite both Pam and me staying sober, we actually ended up getting home later than them, and when we arrived at the front door of our house, we saw that someone had thrown up on the sidewalk (they were freshly 21 years old, I know how that goes). And the vomit was frozen. Fuck it, clean up can wait till morning, right? So we slip into bed. Next thing you know, at like 3:30 in the morning, as we're lying in bed, we hear someone hit the ground hard outside the window. An older couple, clearly drunk, were walking down the street, and the guy had slipped on the ice vomit and broken his glasses. So it's 3:30 in the morning, and this guy is standing outside our house, yelling at the top of his lungs: "CLEAR YOUR FUCKING SIDEWALK!! CLEAR YOUR FUCKING SIDEWALK!!" while his girlfriend is saying "Write down that address! We're gonna sue!" They have one month left before the statute of limitations runs out, so I guess I will keep you updated if we get sued for this HORRENDOUS PORT RICHMOND CRIME. (Oh yeah, the 911 part. I tried to call 911 the next morning to report a "vandalism" of ice vomit, as kind of a C.Y.A. measure. The 911 operator just laughed.)
On our honeymoon, we had our own personal butler, who immediately offered to buy us weed, but who really ended up just bringing personal pizzas to our lounge chairs by the pool every day.
We visited our friends Sean and Wendy in Lancaster a few years ago, and spent a good chunk of the day at a local winery, where I started drinking a really sweet fruity wine, and didn't stop drinking it for the rest of the day. I drank so much of it that it literally caused me to have to get root canal surgery that same week.
One of the most challenging runs for Monday Beer Runners was always the Ben Franklin Bridge. It was about a mile and half one way, but the challenge came during the third quarter of the run. It's hard to tell while you are driving across, but that bridge is steep! Running uphill against the Delaware River winds is no easy task. Fuck, I miss Beer Runners.
When Willow was 11 days old, we brought her to her first bar, which I'm sorry to say was Evil Genius Brewery. We were pretty nervous, new parents bringing their newborn out into the wild unknown. So it was a blessing to walk in and see a line of other strollers and coaches at the front door, and a bunch of other parents greeting us with, "Congrats! We've been coming to bars with our kids for years!" It made us feel comfortable, like this baby was welcome, ya know?
For every drinking game, I can think of time in my life that I can point to and say, that was the best game of that we've ever played. For "Cheers to the Guv'nah," that perfect game was played at Irish Weekend 2015 with the family. The highlight was my dad having to "do an Irish Jig" when he pulled a five card, and Irish jigging right into the couch, completely snapping off one of its legs.
The same day as the Eagles' infamous "Snow Bowl" in early December 2013, I was attempting to get home to Rockledge (my second-to-last day living in Rockledge, if my dates are correct). My shift ended at 3 PM, and so the plan, despite the blizzard, was to take regional rail to Fox Chase. I stood on the platform while three trains passed me without stopping. Plan B was to take the BSL (almost completely underground, so no delays) to Broad and Olney, where I would pray for an 18 bus to take me home. Getting to Olney was no sweat. But I waited on the corner for about 90 minutes, and didn't see a single bus go by, so I just said fuck it, and walked home. Google Maps tells me now that the distance home was five and half miles, which, in a foot of snow while wearing Chuck Taylors, probably took two hours. What other option did I have, though, but to plug in the iPod and hit the road? Consider it an adventure.
A bunch of us were drinking around a table on a porch in Ocean City, NJ one night while others were lighting off fireworks. All of sudden, our friend Lamson, after thinking it was a good idea to light four sparklers at the same time, yells, "FUCK!! MY HAND!!!" and runs past us into the house. No one moved or reacted in any way, which looking back, is kind of funny. It's not like we didn't care that he received second-degree burns on his hand, I think it was more a matter of Lamson's tomfoolery in getting his hand burned and yelling some nonsense into the night sky, all of that kind of seeming like par for the course, like nothing Lamson can do would surprise anyone anymore. More succinctly: that is so Lamson. Gotta love that kid.
This isn't really a memory, per se, but I thought it would be cool to calculate the percentage of time during my 20s I called each of my residences "home." According to my math: almost exactly 50% of my 20s, I lived in Port Richmond (minus nine days, to be exact). For 36.6% of that time I lived in Rockledge, PA. During 5.83% of my 20s did I live at Woodstock. For 4.16% of my 20s I lived in the Candlewood Suites in Las Vegas. And for 3.33% of them I lived in St. Basil's Court Dormitory. This does not include those many nights I "lived" at Pam's old apartment in the Gayborhood, or on Maeve and Sara's couch in C2.
I feel like a lot of these memories are about drinking games (maybe I should write a book about them?), but let's get one more in here. Our friend Pat brought to the table a game called Pizza Box during a house party in Hoboken, NJ. You spread out an actual pizza box, and flip a coin onto it. If the coin is mostly in a blank space, you draw a picture and create a drinking rule associated with that picture. If your coin lands mostly on a picture already drawn, you have to perform the drinking rule attached to it. This can get as complicated as you want it. Our end result.
"Did Joe jump in the pool last night?!" —my MIL, after finding my wet bathing suit the morning after Hurricane Irene. Sorry Sue, your daughter is dating a troublemaker.
We had Pam's 30th birthday party at Moriarty's on the third floor. The plan was that I would buy the food, and the alcohol would be at a cash bar. Moriarty's kitchen provided the chicken tenders, wings, fries, all that good stuff, but I was allowed to bring desserts from outside. I didn't go too crazy (alcohol is the true dessert of any party, in my opinion), but I at least wanted to get a few cookie cakes to honor her birthday. At the Port Richmond Shoprite, I bought three cakes, and asked the bakery department to write one word on each of the cakes: 1) HAPPY, 2) BIRTHDAY, 3) PAM. Simple enough. She gave me the emblazoned cakes back, and I walked to the register. While in line, I took a look at the cakes. One said HAPPY, one said BIRTHDAY, and the final one said... BAM. I brought the cake back, laughing. The baker says: "Sorry, I have a cousin named Bam. I thought you said Bam." The BAM cake was eaten first at the party.
I remember every chicken finger I've ever eaten at Raising Cane's. Please franchise in Philadelphia, I'm begging you!!!!!
One time a stripper sat down on the floor in her pajamas, ate a bag of Cheetos, and probably had more $1 bills thrown at her than the rest of the dancers combined. It's better if I don't write the context for this one.
Pam was doing some 3 AM online shopping and bought me six sessions of laser hair removal for my back. The idea of doing something like this made me deeply uncomfortable (i.e. did Pam not find me attractive in my current hairy state, could I still preach body positivity if I was actively trying to change my own body, will I be perceived as vain even though I didn't necessarily choose for this to happen, and so on). But like a good husband, I dutifully went to each session, to have a technician rub a laser on my back for twenty minutes. People see my currently hairy back and ask, "Wait, I thought you had laser hair removal?" And I explain that each session claims to remove 10% of your hair in that area, and since I only had six sessions, my back is not hairless (and because I was so hairy to begin with, 40% of the normal is still pretty hairy).
On Pike Hike '14, I got caught up in the moment and tore my shirt off during the final song of the evening, so the DJ turned off the music completely and announced in the microphone that he wouldn't turn it back on until I put my shirt back on. Like, c'mon dude, THAT'S what is considered crossing the line at fucking McNally's? I could probably do a rail of coke off the bubble hockey machine or get to third base with a girl in line for the bathroom, but I can't take my shirt off on the dance floor?! Weak shit. Fuck that bar, and fuck that DJ with his own worn-down vinyl copy of the "Wobble Baby" single.
Okay, but my favorite McNally's memory happened at the tail end of Pam's and my "Going Away Party," before we left for Las Vegas (for only five month, but hey, why not use it as an excuse to party with friends?). It had been snowing all night, but my car was parked in the parking lot. My dad was there, and I guess a little more sober than me and our friends, so he drove it back to the house with me, Dwyer, and Drew in the car. It's 2 AM., in the middle of this snowstorm. As the car is warming up, this very drunk kid walks up to the car, all cross-eyed and slurred, "Can I get a ride?" My dad has no clue who this is, he's thinking he's one of our friends that he's never met. Then the kid tries getting in the car, right next to Dwyer. Dwyer says, "Sorry dude! My aunt's dying! We have to go right now!" and boots the kid out of the car. I say, "Dad, drive!" and my dad peels out of the parking lot in the '91 Camry. We all look back, and there's the kid, still on the ground of the parking lot, trying to get up, slipping, falling back down, as we drive off into the night.
Stupidly I had my phone out to text when I was crossing Frankford at Girard, when suddenly the phone was snatched right out of my hands. This was the day that I tried to fight a group of fifteen-year-olds for stealing my phone. (Don't believe me?) I have a lot of feelings about that day (was I too indifferent in confirming to the police which captured teens were responsible, are police detectives in this city too numb to give a shit about petty theft, should I have punched a kid in the face), but my biggest feeling is one of surprise that I even took action at all. I was proud of the fact that I finally stood up for myself, even if, again, it was against kids half my age.
After a two and half years working truancy investigation, I moved to the Hotline, which thus far has been infinitely less stressful. On my first day, I showed up a couple minutes early, and was chilling at my desk my myself, before the rest of my unit got there. All of a sudden, Mayor Kenney and a few of his aids walk in. Mayor Kenney is introducing himself to the workers on my floor, which at the moment is just me. He shakes my hand and we introduce ourselves. "So, Mr. K***, how long have you worked on the Hotline?" "About five minutes now, sir."
We all have pop culture that we are fond of solely because it was introduced to us as children, and since it struck a chord then, it stays with us now. If you discovered it for the first time as an adult, it would seem ridiculous, but you hold onto those good feelings from when you are younger. I had the distinct displeasure of experiencing one of Pam's favorite childhood entertainments when we went to see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Keswick Theater a few years ago. About halfway through the second act I started to get real jealous of Jesus hanging up there nailed to a cross.
SEPTA acts up all the time, but some times are worse than others. One time they kicked a rush hour-amount of travelers off the El at Berks, and by the time a fleet of shuttle buses showed up, there were at least 500 people swarming the intersection. Every shuttle bus was packed, and every rider was miserable. But you know how, when you pack 50 people together into a tight space, every emotion is heightened? Mostly it's misery, and you can stare are a person you've never met before and you just have that connection instantly, because you share that misery in common. But occasionally, that same tightly packed group is just as likely to combust with laughter. On this particular shuttle bus, we were squeezed in as tight as we could be, with the last person on literally pressing his nose against the front glass, and everyone is silent as we drive to the next stop in collective misery. Then, out of the silence, in the middle of the bus, a homeless guy starts yelling as loud as he can: "DRIVER, I HAVE TO PEEEEEEEEE!!!! PULL OVER MR. DRIVER, I GOTTA PEEEEEEEE!!!" I think/hope he was being sarcastic, but either way, he had the entire bus in stitches.
I happened to be drinking with my fair-weather Patriots fan friend Drew on December 5, 2015, on the night before an Eagles vs. Patriots game that by all accounts was expected to be a Patriots blowout. Drinking $2 High Lifes at Fishtown Tavern, I say to Drew, "I'll bet you the Eagles win tomorrow." "Haha yeah right." "If the Patriots win, I'll give you $1, if the Eagles win, you give me $100." "Deal." Smash cut to the biggest upset of an otherwise disappointing season. Everyone was really into the game, even Pam, because not only did we want Tom Brady (a.k.a. FUCK TOMB) upset, but also because everyone wanted Drew out $100. He was a man of his word, though, when the Bird finally came out on top, and I had the $100 in my hands eventually, which I promptly put on black when me and Drew and the gang went to Vegas (it was red).
The last time I peed the bed was one week before my 20th birthday, so I've almost gone an entire decade of my life without pissing myself. This is cause for celebration, folks! I guess I can't say the same about puking, but at least on that count me and Pam are tied, so it evens out (Pam after she joined the Century Club with me and Lauren, myself after a particularly rough Christmas party that I barely even remember).
It's kind of funny how strongly your employment affects the course of your life. I received a call from the Laf in the spring of 2012, asking if I wanted to interview for the Activities Director job. I was very interested, but I was living out west at the time, 2500 miles away, and they told me that they were starting interviews posthaste, but thanks anyway. This meant that I returned to Philadelphia unemployed, until I happened to see my old friend Christina, who was just leaving her job at Zipcar, and one thing led to another, and so on. I have to imagine that my life would look nothing like it does now if I had gotten a job as a Laf director. Seeing as I like my life now, I'm pretty damn grateful that fate prevented me from taking that path.
You already know all about Latin Kings, but did you also know that while we were making that game, my friend Derek was throwing up regurgitated black stout beer all over our couch cushions? We were right in the middle of creating a hit drinking game, so the only cleanup we did was to throw the cushions out into the blizzard going on outside. The next morning, we dug up the cushions from under the thick layer of snow, and found that all the vomit was gone. Science can't explain this.
I organized a bachelor party and there was a stabbing.
Pam took us on a trip to Baltimore to celebrate my college graduation. We had a pleasant weekend, except for one single, ineffable moment of horror. We were walking past an alleyway with a great metal pipe attached to the side wall, and crawling down that pipe, from a great height, at a great speed, was the single biggest rat I have ever witnessed, or will ever witness. If you think I'm exaggerating than you must think Quint from Jaws was exaggerating too—that rat was bigger than my family's dog Chloe. Call it two feet long, and rounder than a farm pig. It could've swallowed my foot if we had stuck around to test the theory. We, uh, did not stick around.
One project that I wish I had kept going was the K*** Family Record Club, a blog that me and Pam jointly created, and kept going for, eh, maybe five weeks? The premise was that every week, one of us would choose an album to listen to, and each of us would write our own review or reflection for the album during that week. We had a good time, until it got to be too much effort. I often think about rebooting the franchise, but Pam's workload is just too heavy to allow for any extracurricular writing. (I migrated a lot of what I wrote for that blog to PoYB, if you are interested. I hesitate to link to the actual blog, because it has my last name plastered on there; there's a lot of four-letter words I'll write on PoYB, but I won't write that one.)
My friends and I went through a very brief period in our lives when we enjoyed doing some illegal fishing at Pennypack Creek. It's not like we were catching anything significant, but it was nice to just chill on a summer afternoon with your boys and some beers. But I was obsessed with getting away with our "crimes" as well (a constant theme in my youth). You needed a permit to fish, and clearly we did not have permits, so my head was on a swivel, looking for park rangers. I had read somewhere that undercover police would try to trip you up by asking "how are the fish today?" and if you answer like you know how the fish are, then they can cite you for fishing illegally. I told everyone that day, repeatedly, to just play dumb if anyone asked about our fishing rods. Just don't answer. Etc. I hammered this into my friends' brains. After the day was done, we were walking back toward the cars, and of course someone asks, "how were the fish?" and I just couldn't stop myself from answering, "not too bad!" Cue everyone: "JOE, are you fucking serious?! After all that?!" I'm an idiot, in case you didn't realize that after reading 18,000 words in this blog post.
I hate the Villanova Wildcats with a burning passion (you can read all about it here). Fuck that fucking team. I hate them so much that I purposefully handicap myself in my March Madness brackets every year to avoid wishing them any success. The name of my bracket for each tournament is "NOVA WILL LOSE IN ROUND 1," and I put them losing to the 16-seed. Had I put Nova even winning one game last year on my bracket, I would've won $100. But I'd rather be poor and root against those fucking losers than be rich and have to watch another goddamn fucking Wildcats parade down Market Street (even though they are clearly a team from the surburbs?!?)!!!!
I am so lucky to have a wife who has a passion for music. Our Musical Tastes Venn Diagram isn't 100% overlap (she has her Hamilton soundtrack on repeat, I have Damian Abraham's booming vocals), but the middle section of the diagram is nice and thick. It's just nice knowing that she feels shit when the music is on; in my opinion, that makes someone deep in character. Like, I'll never forget how into it she was when we went to the Local Natives concert. As a whole, I think they are a swell band, and don't mind when they pop up on my iPod every once in a while, but to Pam, Sunlit Youth was life-affirming, and the concert made her cry. I can empathize with the feeling, even if I didn't really feel it myself at that particular show. I just love when she loves, is all, and I felt the love at the Electric Factory that night.
I am so ashamed. It was the morning of Philly's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. For some, that means lining up along the Parkway and standing in the cold with family and friends and watching the various ~~fake~~ Irish organizations walk past and wave. To others, mainly teenagers of Northeast Philly, it's a day for drinking Vlad out of Gatorade bottles and making an ass of yourself on regional rail with impunity from the PPD. I should know, I was once an asshole teenager from the Northeast myself. I was one of them. That's why it brought me so much shame and displeasure and disgust to be working the NE police radios that particular morning, and a call came in about teens drinking at Fox Chase Rec. I had no choice. I had to send the police. I had to bust up the party. I am so ashamed.
In anticipation of the premiere of Degrassi: The Boiling Point, me and Sara did a power hour, and with each shot you had to tell one of your favorite Degrassi memories.
This group of teenagers thinks it's cool to just sit on our front steps and act all tough. I usually just hold the crying baby up to the screen door until they go away. I'm about three years away from starting to yell "get off my lawn whippersnappers!"
Pam tells me all about the good times she had at the Manor Apartments, an apartment tower east of La Salle's campus that used to be owned by La Salle, so color me excited when one of the families I was investigating for truancy concerns happened to live in the apartment complex. I was expecting building full of young partiers, singing show tunes over cold Hurricane 40s. What I found was probably the closest thing to a real haunted house that I've ever been in. First I got lost in the basement hallway, which had bloodstained walls around every corner, and rickety single bulbs hanging from wires that suggested the perfect lighting for a stabbing. I finally escaped, and made it to the elevator, which closed like a slaughter factory's elevator would, these big steel doors that I didn't think would ever open. I got out onto the balcony, maybe the fourth floor, and whoever was on the fifth floor was throwing shit off the balcony into the dumpster below. As I stood at the railing, flying past me went first a thirty-foot-wide roll of carpet. Next, they threw a whole couch of the fifth floor, and that crashed below and splintered. For the finale, they threw an entire refrigerator, which shook the whole apartment complex when it shattered on the ground. I thought I was going to die. After finally finding the goddamn apartment where the family lived, I tried to leave through the outside courtyard (avoiding the murder basement this time). As if a sign from god telling me never to return to this devilish place, I passed a giant burning bush on the way out toward Olney Ave. Yes, I know that La Salle kids used to have memorable nights in these hallowed halls, but I'm never fucking going back to that horrorshow. I don't want to die being chainsawed to death at an old La Salle dormitory.
People lie to me all the time in this line of work. The most egregious was when a very nice man confirmed for me that he did not have a criminal record. Since he was going to be accepting his grandson into his care, I had to double check. The criminal background check came back... he had been guilty of first-degree murder. We, uhhh, did not place the child in his care.
I haven't really written to much about politics here (kind of touched on it a little at #28), even though I've spent a lot of the last three years with a lot hate in my heart toward the people who run this country. I dunno, this is supposed to be a look back at the times that shaped me as a 20-something, so to reflect too often on my political views and actions would paint me as a twisted, bitter old man, and I'm not trying to do that. Like, I could talk about the time we watched the first Presidential Debate at Xfinity Live after a beer runners. Hillary won handily, but it still hurts me to reflect on that night, about how her opponent acted like a fucking ignorant fourth grade child, and how people cheered for him anyway. I could've talked about the time me and Pam went to Schmidt's Piazza to watch the final night of the DNC, which at the time felt uplifting, like Clinton and the rest of the Democrats were giving us hope for a better future in this country. Now, even though I think her speech about wanting the best for ALL Americans was genuine, I know too that this was her promise only because she knew it was (allegedly) the best way to combat her xenophobic opponent. She was just painting herself as the opposite of the hateful man going against her; even if she truly is his opposite (the jury is out), that doesn't mean it isn't a political ploy. See, here I am, taking any positives from my experiences with late-'10s politics, and turning them into negatives. It's just hard to have faith in this country at this time, when so many people actively work toward its demise. Maybe my 30s will be better. Please vote.
One time I bought a toothbrush from my Uber driver.
Pam was in labor before the baby was born at 11:47 PM. I've never seen someone so brave while in so much pain. I've never been more proud of my wife. I've never been more excited to create new memories with someone, this slimy pooping little creature. She won't remember it, but I always will. The moment I met Willow.
It's funny how I remember so many of the dumb little moments, but those big, life-altering minutes sometimes don't even get registered at all. It's like you blackout when you know this is an Important Life Moment. I was talking earlier about how I remember every moment from our wedding, but that's not necessarily true. I remember most of it, and a lot of the good stuff for sure, but when I think back to our vows and our I Dos, my mind is on mute. Clearly it happened—there are pictures, and I see it in my mind. But I think sometimes our brains acknowledge that this is a big one, and maybe it shouldn't even be audio recording. My brain wanted me to be living in the moment in the most literal sense. I remember the look of conviction and love in Pam's eyes. I remember the first kiss. But the memory is silent. Luckily, I get to relive the memory every day, not in my mind, but in actual real life. Every morning that you wake up, you make a choice to stay married, to keep loving your spouse, to keep building that life together. I am lucky because every morning, I make that right choice. I don't really need the memory.

Tomorrow night, I'll be celebrating my 30th birthday with family and friends at my parents' house, the site of so many of these memories from my 20s. While writing this whole big blog post, I spent a lot of time reminiscing, looking back, laughing out loud at all the stupid and fun and crazy shit that my life has contained in the past ten years. That in itself is a memory, this whole nostalgic exercise. But when I meet up in Rockledge tomorrow night, I don't want to look back like I did here. Tomorrow night's party will be a time to look forward, to celebrate the start of a new decade of my life. There will be some reminiscing, I'm sure, but I'm ready to leave my 20s behind. Let's do this shit.

Puke on Your Birthday

Friday, November 30, 2018

My 20s