Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 166: Joe

Prompt: "A song that was mentioned in a Song Challenge write-up but never chosen as the featured song by anyone"

Selected by Joe

Song found on Day 1 in Sunny's write-up for "Starting Over" by Reba McEntire

"I Will Buy You a New Life"

Everclear

So Much for the Afterglow, 1997

At the beginning of the year, I had aspirations of keeping an Excel spreadsheet going of all the information compiled throughout Yearlong Song Challenge, all the songs chosen and artist repetitions, all the themes that kept popping up in people's writings, all the extraneous art—the music, the movies, the books—that were mentioned by those bloggers experiencing life outside of the blog. I think I stopped after Day 3. You have to remember that this thing used to pull 20+ posts per day, at the beginning. It was a lot of work, and the Excel spreadsheet was the first to go.

So I don't have a list of every song that was mentioned but never chosen this year. For today's prompt selection, I started from the beginning, and went through the posts in order until I found one. It was by chance that Sunny's was the first to pop up. Then again, a lot of this is by chance—for every day of YSC, I've plugged numbers into a random number set generator, and that's how we decide the order of the blog posts. I have chosen Everclear's mediocre '90s quasi-hit "I Will Buy You a New Life" in a random fashion, but that feels right, because life is random too. Pulling this song from Sunny's blog post was no more or less random than Sunny's decision to write on this blog multiple times a week for almost five years now.

I had no idea what this blog post was going to be when I sat down to write about this stupid Everclear song, but now I know. The last sentence of that previous paragraph has (randomly) set me on the path that I now know I was always fated to travel down today. I'm going now free-write about how fate led each of the other nine current YSC participants to write on this blog today. This is similar to the "how I met each person" bit from Day 31, but each of those moments described therein will now be discussed in the context of the entire story of how we ended up here.

I will also use a random number generator to decide the order in which I will discuss each person's role in the blogging cosmos.

Nate — Nate is spending a lot of time here because writing is in his blood, in his fucking bones, and he has a blog but he recently described it as "nearly defunct," but he can't help himself with the writing, and so here he is. We wouldn't have stayed in touch after college if he and I hadn't met certain friends at separate times, but also had at least somewhat overlapping tastes in music, both of which meant opportunities to socialize. Also, maybe we are similar in the mindset of "I am out of shape and I need to be in better shape and I will continue to make mild efforts to address this," which led to Nate's participation in Beer Runners, which probably helped shore up any natural damage to friendship that might have happened in the post-college years. Oh, and geographical proximity, for a bit, which meant carpooling at the very least. And all of those have separate limbs of fate branching out (e.g. willingness to live in "up-and-coming neighborhoods," etc. etc.), but all collapse on sharing an alma mater, and, yes, Nate eventually dating one of the first friends I met at college, and plus also Mandy, who has a tendency to latch onto older guys with similar tastes (platonically speaking, or not), and I had to be friends with Mandy before that, enough that I would've been brought by her to an older (fatter?!) dude's dorm room pre-Hold Steady. Might not have been friends with Mandy in high school if she hadn't broken up with boyfriend during our senior year (boyfriend who was then a freshman at La Salle and would later become my friend too). All three of us had to make separate decisions to attend a dying institution. Nate had to play football and not know that La Salle's football program was in even worse shape than La Salle as a whole. I had to choose La Salle because it was geographically closer to home (even though I wouldn't have articulated it that way then). My parents had to choose to move ten minutes away from my childhood home in Lawndale instead of, say, 45 minutes, deeper into the suburbs, which may have affected my decision to attend a shit school in North Philly. We don't have to go back this far for everyone, since many of these decision trees will end up back at my decision to attend La Salle.

Maeve — I don't know if I ever asked Maeve why she chose La Salle. That seems like a farther reach, cosmically and geographically speaking, than some idiot from Northeast Philadelphia choosing La Salle. Fill in the blanks on how she got to that decision. She was born to parents who instilled within her a love for theater. That means Maeve is getting involved in theater at college. I had a different path toward that extracurricular but we both ended up at the same place. We also ended up at underage drinking through slightly different paths but that put us on the same side of the theater divide, socially speaking. My underage drinking getting me banned from the dorms means that I didn't have the wherewithal to run for the Masque E-Board position that would've pitted me against Maeve near the beginning of our true friendship (that Maeve would have and obviously did do a better job than I ever would or could have is moot in this case). Maeve chose to live in La Salle Apartments instead of the Townhouses, which means that I was allowed at her apartment, whereas a lot of friends who lived in the Townhouses temporarily faded from my life during that time. Maeve had to be raised in a way that made her kind and welcoming, which then meant that she was cool with this guy crashing on her couch almost every weekend. She had to make the decision to stay in Philadelphia after college (which, I did too, but again, that's not as tall of an ask for me). She needed to keep being VP of Personnel and keep organizing events and hangouts. She needed to be present enough that when I started asking around for people to write on the blog every day for a whole summer, that she'd be on the list of people I asked. And then that experience needed to be meaningful enough that she wanted to do it again the following year. I suppose I needed to be patient enough with tardiness that I'd choose to be friends with Maeve for all this time too.

Gilson — I had heard from Sam—who outright earns the superlative of Most Gossipy Friend, and I love him for that—that there was some issue with my acquaintance Gilson, who I hadn't seen or heard from in a couple years, something with the heart, which was no joke in one's 30s. I don't know if I had also heard from gossipy Sam or maybe inferred from Nate's "nearly defunct" blog (this blog post specifically) that Gilson was sober. Neither of these facts were what led me to ask Gilson to be part of YSC; I was really just basically going through all the names at the top of this blog and trying to think who would be a good fit. Gilson's name was up there because he had written a review for Hookworms, which he only wrote because it coincidentally had some significant meaning for him at the time (and because Gilson, as he has since established on the blog, has no issue listening to music from so-called "cancelled" artists). I knew from that review that he was a good writer, and so it felt natural to reach out to him. He wouldn't have known that RC was covering Hookworms if (I think) Nate hadn't added him to the original Facebook message (that we used first, in lieu of email, before I quit Facebook, which happened the week that Gilson picked INXS for RC, which was basically the last thing that happened before Gilson disappeared from my life for a few years). This means he needed to befriend Nate, and I forget if that story has been mentioned or summed up on this blog or not. Gilson needed to choose to go to La Salle. Fate put him in the class of '07, which means I didn't go to school with him, which means our friendship would've taken a different shape if we had ever seen each other around campus (similarly, if he had had any type of friendship with my future wife, who is also class of '07). Not for nothing, I think the fact that he is one of like three people in my life who is taller than me makes him memorable, and thus, I remembered him when gathering the YSC squad.

Zach — Zach speculated earlier in the year as to how he got roped into Puke on Your Birthday's email. The answer to that is Sam, who seems to tie more than a few of the dudes of this blog into its orbit. So we could go off on a tangent about our mutual friend Sam, say something about when me and him hung out during that one spring break when he saw a tweet of mine and realized that we were two of the only people around campus left and we got drunk at Hannah's house when she wasn't there and I definitely did not hook up with Hannah's roommate, but that's too far away for a blurb nominally about Zach, who, as I described previously, was in the periphery during a few key Sam and Hannah events, and, though memorable (was there something to do with Hannah's mom at their wedding? is that too personal to bring up, or was that a bit, or what?), was probably not in my life to the extent that I'd be asking Sam about him, or know that he was out of the country or why. If I were to work backward from there, then I'd have to pick up the trail of breadcrumbs from Zach's blog posts this year—the job in journalism, which coincided with similar journalism jobs for friends I've already described, which came after Zach decided not to be a food critic, etc. The confluence of fate occurs at the juncture of one person having the desire to write and the other person having the balls to maintain a space to write on, in 2024, on this internet that is pretty unkind to those types of spaces in general, and yet here we are.

Bridget — Like many paths of fate that end on PoYB, this one runs right through another person. I am fairly confident I would not be friends with Bridget if I wasn't first friends with her sister Maeve. I'm running through alternate scenarios from the multiverse, and I can't find any that would reasonably lead here otherwise. I had friends who went to Scranton, but none who would've run in the same circles, and none her year, and none who I was close enough to that I was leaving my own shitshow college experience to drive two hours and have another one at that school. I did visit Scranton once and I met people and I partied at different house parties, but this is a few years before Bridget got there. And even if I had gone to visit an acquaintance and I had attended a party that Bridget also happened to attend and I had met her in some weird twist, then what are the chances that that interaction would've then led, a decade later, to her writing for this blog? Still not likely. So no, I think the easiest path here was the one we found—she grew up with a strong emotional bond to family, she had reasons to move to Philadelphia that must have included at least partially the fact that her sister was here already, a sister who was still hanging out with friends from college who are all-in-all, despite the GOSSIP, good people, and welcoming, and so it makes sense that the decision to live in Phily would lead to a decision to join this one friend group, that happened to contain a guy who decided to restart the blog he and another friend group had made just around the same time that Bridget was moving into the dorms at Scranton University.

Brianna — This is the one that's gonna diverge the farthest from that Day 31 post, because it's not just a matter of being born to the same parents and living in the same house. If it was, then I'd be writing one of these for middle child Jenny as well, and I'm not, because she doesn't write for this blog, except when I literally sit down next to her and force her to write. So what's the difference here? What sort of fate led one sister to write 180+ blog posts for her brother's blog in one year, and the other to refuse to engage at all on a consistent basis? I don't know, but I suppose the path runs through music and through writing, for both me and for her (but not for Jenny). Both hobbies/skills honed on separate but parallel tracks, outside of the home. Not that our parents necessarily discouraged writing or seeking out music, but it wasn't actively encouraged either. We're four years apart so I don't know what type of feedback Bri was getting from Mom and Dad regarding homework because I wasn't there when it mattered for her, but if it was anything like mine, it was all "good work" and a general appreciation for decent-to-good grades and nothing specific about anything written, no thoughts given to any essays at all really. Which is fine, parents are under no obligation to do anything except keep you alive, and Mr. and Mrs. K. did that and then some, and did so willingly and provided a safe and nurturing environment out of the love of their hearts... but I wouldn't say that anyone was developing a deep love of any sort of vocation like this. So where, and why, and who, and when, I couldn't say for anyone but myself, but I'm filling in the blanks here. Brianna is a teacher, and I can imagine that the way one needs to express themselves as a teacher might be at least in the same ballpark as the way one might need to express themselves during extracurricular blogging sessions. And the music thing is something Brianna is already documenting throughout this current blog project, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions there. But wiping all this way, I'd say that maybe an alternate path that we might consider is the fact that we were raised being told that you are there for family, and maybe Brianna felt like she needed to be there for her brother as he and his friends wrote themselves into insanity (with her getting a taste for the insanity through 2023's yearlong project of Infinite Jest book club).

Sara — I think you could pull details from what I've already written here and get a general sense of what stars aligned to get Sara on here today for one of her thrice-weekly blog posts, but with maybe a couple differences. Consider all of life's events in the suburbs of Baltimore that led her to attend university at the same place and time. Consider the couch that stood empty on most weeknights in the living room that she was renting with Maeve on campus that was suddenly not empty on the weekends due to a tall drunk sweaty elf that was crashing on it. Consider the decision to stay in Philadelphia, and the superhuman effort it takes to maintain friendships with fucking anyone in a post-collegiate world, let alone some asshole with a blog. I would say, however, that, at least during college, Sara's place in my life threatened to be that of a bit player more so than others, perhaps, just simply due to her non-involvement (or unofficial involvement) with the theater program, that being the thing that tied a lot of us together. Maybe I would have only remembered her as the dame over whom Kyle P. and Drew P. came to literal fists at Casbah Caterers on the night SigEp and AXP had their formals the same night but on different floors of the hall, were it not for, ya know, everything else that's happened. And maybe she meets her husband at a different time too, maybe the timeline is thrown off, maybe she has a child earlier, or later, and doesn't feel the need to reconnect with adults in some tangible way, a way that she finds through some song challenge malarky. Who knows, man.

Sunny — If each of these starts with "when did the person start writing every week," then I start the farthest back with Sunny (if there is a difference between "writing most weeks" and "literally writing every week"). It makes sense that Sunny is writing a blog post today for Yearlong Song Challenge because it's been five years and Sunny's written a blog post every week for all that time and so why wouldn't he do YSC. He's also expressed in the past some FOMO for not doing Summer Song Challenge. I assume he didn't want to do Summer Song Challenge because the previous summer's Grannie Gone Wild Challenge burned him out on summer projects. But he was the only one who took on that Reba Challenge because he's the only one here who is willing to at least take a chance on all my worst ideas here at Puke on Your Birthday. I hang out with Sunny in-person maybe six times a year but read his words most days of my life, so there's a bond there, as strong as one could be when it is built over the fragile gossamer wires of the world wide web. He ended up starting Record Club because he had taken part in a Your Favorite Movie interview. He did that because he saw links for previous interviews... on Facebook, probably? Or was this another instance of Sam stick his greasy nose through the cracked doorway of fate? Sunny went to high school with Sam. That's how Sunny ended up on that improv team, the only dude I didn't know previous to seeing them perform. Sunny getting invited to boys' book club and currently standing as the only member who has never missed any of our 24 official meetings (and one unofficial meeting in K Lot). Lots of Sunny's past is still rather mysterious to me, which is okay, though some of it is unspooling on the threads of YSC this year. I would say, however, that the biggest hand of fate that we'd want to know, if we are truly tracing the story here, is what about Sunny's upbringing or life experiences made him into the type of person who just seems to be down to partake in whatever bullshit his friends are doing, whatever seems fun, whatever seems like it's gonna result in the fullest life experience. Not everyone is like that, ya know. Not these days.

Allison — I've thus far tried to figure out why my friends are writing for Yearlong Song Challenge today, what led them to this moment, all the millions of factors that came together in the perfect way to create this, this moment, right now, this blog post, and those alongside it. I don't think the answer for Allison would be too far off from others, in terms of the broad details. La Salle, the Masque, living in Philadelphia, good writer, some drinking mixed in there to act as the mortar for the brick wall of our friend group, and so on. You can mix up some of the details—I've almost never known Allison outside of her relationship with Stephan, and maybe blogging is something you are more prone to do when you "settle down," which in some ways happened for her earlier than others? I don't know. Maybe that's grasping at straws. Also, maybe consider the overlying fact here for everyone that being friends with me is a choice, and maybe that choice looks different for some than it does for others. Like maybe Allison's choice looked different after an unnamed moment in time in which she was angry at me—everyone has had a good reason at some point or another—and so I know through the fact that she still chooses to be in my life means that she's a kind and ultimately forgiving person. Why are you writing for Puke on Your Birthday? A billion fucking reasons for each person. Why are you, one of ten people here, still writing for Yearlong Song Challenge, after eleven months and 165 previous blog posts? I have to imagine there is a reason out there that ties us all together. I think we're all searching for something. That's my theory. I see it in Allison's writings the most, I think, that search. It's fascinating to see because the search looks different when you already have a lot of what you've always wished for. Then it becomes what else. I'm thinking about the blog posts about the gym (apologies to Allison, I seem to be writing more in her blurb than those for others, that's the RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR for ya, baby!!), going to the Y in the early morning hours. I see the parallel track there, the quest for self-improvement, and the need to document it. I think if you looked at the motivation for what keeps her on that bike, it might look like a similar motivation that keeps the emails coming to my inbox three times a week, right on schedule. That if you keep going you're gonna discover something about yourself that will have made it worth it.

Okay, now for everyone—it would surely be too pat to try to tie in this stupid fucking Everclear song into what I ended up saying here, about how we are all here for a reason. But maybe there's something in it. The lyrics about a guy making the case that he can make your dreams come true if you just stick with him. That's not me, I'm not that guy. Neither is this blog, I don't think. Puke on Your Birthday will not buy you a garden. But maybe it can be the garden, the one in which your flowers bloom. You can't buy a new life, here or anywhere. Instead, every day, just a little at a time, we can work on ourselves, try to make tiny changes, and where better than here, on a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old Blogspot blog.

I didn't think that this was going to be the blog post I wrote today. But here is where my life has led. To this moment. Almost exactly 36 years in the making, plus every decision made by others before that, the stars exploding trillions of years ago in just a way to get us to this minute in time, when we can sit back and listen to a fucking Everclear song and ponder about our place in the universe, and what it means that we are who we are, where we are, and why we are. It gets a little heavy sometimes, to think about it. Everclear does not help.