A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.
"Crash Years"
The New Pornographers
from Together
2010
My outlook and my understanding of the year 2025 is a little disjointed. I think this is because I am so entrenched in the current moment—with work, with family, with social life—that it's become really hard to remember what things were like in January. I could make the case that there's a lot that's changed, and I could just as easily make the case that not much has changed at all. I suppose this is how life typically operates, especially as the years continue to pile on top of one another. This is not unique. And yet 2025 felt unique. Not really sure what to make of the juxtaposition there.
It doesn't help that a lot of the change was purposefully kept to the right of the stage ("stage" = "blog") this year, and I'm not here to blow my own cover or anything. Okay, here's an entry that I'm comfortable talking about: I hit 1,000 days sober this year. A few weeks ago, actually. Which is not actually all that important in the grand scheme of things—those in the online sober community call it you "Comma Day," but in actuality, it's just another arbitrary marker of time, just a small little opportunity to pat yourself on that back and check in and tell yourself that everything is going to be okay.
1,000 days marks time for me in this way: it's time to start getting weird with it. I have long missed the nights when I felt like anything could happen, and I might walk crookedly away and marvel at how wild we found ourselves under the haze of soft substances. It's tricky to remove the substances and still try to find the weird in a safe and healthy way, but in approaching my Comma Day, I felt that it was time to make strides toward the weird and see what happens.
I can report, here on the final day of 2025, and with 1023 days of sobriety under my belt, that there were a handful of nights this past year where I reached that place again. Not the same way, of course, because nothing can ever be the same again, not really. But I found new avenues to weirdness, and I walked down those roads a little bit, and mostly liked what I found. Or was at least intrigued by what I saw. And I definitely felt the unpredictability of life once more, felt the space where anything could happen and very often did. It felt good. If there's one takeaway from the year we just had, it's this.
What's cool about making sincere attempts to find yourself is that, when you do, lots of other aspects of your life click into place. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I feel like 2025 has been one of my favorite years of marriage with Pam, probably since we got married. You're gonna hate me for this, but I have to quote Reba Hart here: "People change. They grow. But if the people grow and the marriage doesn't, that's when you sprout a Barbra Jean." There's nuance to consider about this statement off the blog, but on the blog, I will say that the people here (me and Pam) grew a lot, and the marriage grew with it. A lot. I feel closer to my wife now that I ever have. Marital relationship +1 this year.
Familial relationship -1 this year, but it's a soft minus, and only because of very normal concerns. Namely, that my two(-now-three)-year-old wore me down. A lot. The thing I know for certain is that all children her age are like this, and we just have to get through it. My older two kids were most assuredly like this, but I just don't remember. There will be a day, years from now, when I reread this blog post and chuckle because I no longer remember how difficult it was to be a parent in this particular context. I'm excited to reach that point. The crazier part is that things have never been better with the older two. My oldest is smart as fuck, my middle child has the sharpest sense of justice and empathy of anyone I know, and both are slowly but surely learning to be kind to each other and others. I like hanging out with them. I'm putting up with my youngest. She'll get there. Mark the point on the path here with a stick in the dirt, so that I can marvel at how far we've come, later on. Looking forward to the days when we can hang out as a family unit instead of playing hot potato every second of the day (and night).
My family life is still at least 1.5x harder than it needs to be because of my job, more specifically the work requirement to be in the office for no fucking reason. Every time I'm stuck waiting for the bus in the rain, every time a train is 20 minutes late, every time I step out into the cold dawn at the start of a 90-minute trip one way, I think about how much I hate our mayor. It hasn't gotten easier, this intense negative emotion toward one person, with a promotion. If anything, it's gotten worse. My new job requirements really don't need to be done in the office, but I'm still here. What else to say about the promotion, though? I dunno. I've probably written enough about it in the margins already. It's fine, it pays more, it's what I wanted just because my last gig was so stagnant, and now that I'm not stagnant but instead always on the move, I don't really have much time for regret. In conclusion: fuck work.
Something I feared would happen with the new job was that I wouldn't have time to write on this stupid blog anymore. Let the fact that I am currently typing this during work hours prove that the fears were somewhat unfounded. I do feel like my time on this website is constricted because of the demands of the job, but those demands were—as I could have easily predicted, based on everything I know about my work environment from the past eleven years—conflated. It's all about knowing what kind of shit needs to be dealt with immediately, and what can be put off for a bit (or indefinitely). That sort of thing comes somewhat naturally to me. I'm typing this because I don't have anything I need to do right now, and despite the fact that there are a thousand little things that need to be done. It's both. The blog survives.
But I do feel things slow down around here a little bit. No fault of anyone's but my own. In fact, I think that it's probably a good thing. I've reached a point where maybe I feel like everything that needs to be said has already been said. Puke on Your Birthday will keep the lights on because there are groups and activities that use this as home base (Record Club, Film Club, MMM, etc.), but all the other shit that I write is lately being written through pure muscle memory, and is more often than not a repeat of things I've already written about before.
And I dunno, maybe I'm feeling a bit disillusioned as well. This is a recent emotion, or at least is stronger recently than it ever has been before, so maybe this doesn't fit into the "year in review" thing I have cooking here, but still... I'm starting to wonder if Puke on Your Birthday doesn't fulfill my emotional needs as much as I always assumed that it did in the past. This is how I express my truth, right? I write what I feel. The point of the writing of the truth is that I need other people to see that truth and to know me. Which is a contrast to something like Instagram, where people also post in a similar way (publicly, online), just through different means (pictures and small captions instead of essays; facades vs. breaking walls down to see truth).
The problem is that most people don't give a shit. I say "most" and not "all" because I don't want to forget about all the small moments throughout 2025 in which someone told me that they read something that I wrote and that they had a reaction to it. Do you understand how good that makes me feel? How validating? Contrast it with something like when I asked someone if they read the reviews for New Brunswick Scream Band Taylor Swift and I was told "yeah, everyone's but yours." Which isn't a visceral hurt necessarily because no one is obligated to read any of the bullshit I write. I'll admit to pain deep below the surface, though. Pain in knowing that I poured a piece of my heart into something that I wrote and that it wasn't read because it was too long. I get that it's long, but there's a reason it was long. I had something to say. And there's a bit of a cumulative effect, I think, over the course of a decade, when incidents of not being read so far greatly outweigh being read, that it just starts to get to me a little.
But I'm not on Instagram, ya know? I'm not on social media. That's a choice I made. I am starting to fear recently that I got off of social media too early, that these past five years have been healthy for me mentally but have been even more detrimental to me socially. This is not a complaint at all, but more so a symptom of what I'm talking about, just a very small, unimportant example: I don't think many people know when my birthday is anymore. They don't because there's no announcement made by or for me on social media. The other piece is that I don't want to post that kind of shit. I still think it's fucking embarrassing and lacks humility to post about your life on social media. But what I'm saying now is I guess I get it. It's phony, but the phoniness can still make you feel good. You post some fucking bullshit photo of your family and how lovey dovey you are (leaving out the fact that your three-year-old is a terror because that's uncouth to say in an Instagram caption), and people like and comment pleasantries, and even if it's phony, it still makes you feel good.
The truly pitiful part about writing all this is that there are people who care. I'm not saying otherwise. There are members of the Puke on Your Birthday community who at the very least pretend that they read anything that I write, if not actually read it. Like social media, even if it's phony, it still feels good. And the funniest part about it is that I've come to depend on this place in a very real way. We all need something. I have Puke on Your Birthday. And so it's gotten to the point in my life—and this speaks more to my issues with lagging social stamina in my life as I get older—that I consider the members of this website to be the people who know me best (outside of Pam and my kids, I don't need to clarify that, do I?). I try really hard to present the most honest version of myself on this website, and so it falls to the people who are here to know me in an honest way.
The best way to say all this, the only way, really, is to say that I am thankful for my friends who are here, and who make some stabs throughout the year in knowing me, knowing who I am and what I think and how I feel. It makes me a pathetic little man to need this, but I do, I need it. I need to write. It's the pressure valve. It's the only thing keeping me from going all John Hinckley Jr. on our Mayor Ronald Reagan, the only thing keeping me sane. It keeps the wolves at bay. But isn't it interesting, that I would attempt to frame it that way here? That I would say that the writing is what keeps me sane, and yet conveniently leave out the other piece, equally necessary: that the idea of people reading it also keeps me sane. And that facade has crumbled, piece by tiny piece, throughout the years, little comments about writing too much, and the unwillingness to engage because I write too much, and the disappointing knowledge of someone casually forgoing a chance to know me. Shit hurts when it happens. And it makes me hang onto the people who do engage even tighter. Which is probably pretty annoying for them! And probably acts as a repellent in some sense!
Hopefully it makes sense to bury these very embarrassing feelings toward the bottom of a very long blog post. That way I know there won't be too many people reading it.
I don't know why I'm writing about any of this in a blog post that was supposed to be a Year in Review for 2025 anyway.
I guess my feelings on the matter are a culmination of the year on the blog, and an indicator that maybe it's time to slow things down even further, stop depending on something that's never really going to satisfy me, no matter how hard I try. And then find other ways to connect with my friends, whom I care for deeply. You know who you are. I'm too shy to name y'all in print. You're the ones still reading this, here and now. I appreciate you. I want you in my life, and I'm thankful you are.
I think I can do better at staying connected to the people I care about. Maybe not leaning on the blog to do the lion's share of that will be good for me, a challenge that I can meet and overcome and feel good about. Because time is limited here in this stage of adulthood. Making time for connections is harder than ever. No one has time for anything, let alone reading a goddamn blog. And yet I still yearn to feel connected to the people I care about.
So yeah.... weird year! Hahaha. But in general—and especially with all this blog nonsense pushed to the side—a really good year. An interesting year. A year of change in many ways. A memorable year for sure, even if I can't actually remember most of it.
