Tryptophan VI

I'm not writing this on Thanksgiving Day. That's sort of the whole point of the blog post that ends up here annually—I'm writing some bullshit in advance, just to put it in the slot and consider it another day of blogging on the books, check it off, move onto the next day, whatever Record Club reviews come in. Today's the 1577th day in a row that Puke on Your Birthday is posting something, and it doesn't end on major federal holidays.

That "no skips" mandate is self-enforced, of course. None of this matters, not really. The world is not going to end if we spend a whole day without any new words on this blog. It would be weird, I guess, if someone visited the blog expecting to see a new post and only seeing an old post from yesterday, but what would the reaction be? Probably something like "hmm, alright," and then quickly moving onto the next website on the daily internet-scrolling rolodex. The streak continues because I care, that's basically it.

The streak started on August 4, 2021, but I didn't actually acknowledge my intentions of a streak until Day #2, August 5th. I got semi-drunk (it's okay to admit that now, I think) and thought long and hard about this blog's place in my life. This reflection stretched all the way back to December 2017, when I found myself in a pretty bad funk and turned to writing, and eventually realized that the job I had started earlier in the year was actually pretty conducive to writing extracurricularly. And so that kept going for a couple years, until I was ready to go back to school, autumn of 2021, and I wondered whether I was still going to have time for that.

My style has always been to break through the brick wall when it comes to this shit. The solution to my worries about having time to blog was to commit fully to blogging, every day, no skips. And that worked! There were some weeks when I was totally jammed up with papers and I would bang out four short bullshit blog posts, but that was for emergencies only. Other than that, I made it through my entire post-graduate career putting words to the digital screen every day. Then I graduated, and landed right back at that same fucking job I started all this shit with, and so it wasn't really that hard to consider that I could continue to blog. I don't know the math but I'm guessing that in these past two and a half years, I'm averaging ten blog posts a week.

Here's why this is important. It's not a matter of keeping some streak alive, and it's not a matter of "providing content," whatever the fuck that means. It is a matter of mental health. Sincerely. I have discovered over the past eight years that the more I write, the better I feel. I've gotten through so much shit by writing about it. I assume there is a ceiling to this phenomenon, like maybe I lived a charmed life and haven't experienced any true harrowing hardship and thus haven't experienced anything that I literally can't write through. But as it stands now, I write, and I feel better. I need this place.

It's fun and it's easy because I don't actually have to sit down and write a serious blog post about something serious in my life. More often than not, something is bothering me and I write through it and then all of a sudden my album review for the week is written too. It was helpful to write some oblique bullshit copout album review when Pam had a miscarriage, for example. I don't know how, especially because you read that thing and have no idea what's behind it, but it helped me. I wrote it and I was able to channel some of the grief I was feeling into it and I felt a little better. It was helpful to get drunk on Monday at lunch and write an unhinged jazz album review on my phone notepad sitting at the bar at McGillin's at 11 AM and then get sober on Wednesday and then read that shit on Friday morning, Day #3, one of the first of many confirmations that maybe sobriety was the best choice for me. I'm not saying every post is life-or-death, but I am saying that the outlet I have here, just in case I need it, has been so beneficial to me that I'm honestly choking up a little bit writing about it.

So here's the deal: that's ending soon. Not the streak, not the writing, not the blog. The job. In fact, by the time you read this, it's already ended. I'm writing this one week before publishing, and three hours before my final shift at my previous job ends. I finally got that fucking promotion, so for the past three days (I'm assuming, but ya never know), I've been sitting in my own office, door closed, reading emails, trying to get acclimated to whatever this fucking thing is going to entail, and probably, all things considered, not blogging much, or probably at all. Anything you read in the past week was written in advance.

I only have a guess about the future, and I could very well eat my words eventually, and if that happens, I'll write about the word-eating with a healthy dose of humility. But I get the sense that I will be okay once I get situated and know what I'm doing. The new job's requirements speak to my strengths, I think. I'm good at organizing and I'm good at staying on top of my shit and I'm good at shepherding people to where they need to be. All skills that I honed, believe it or not, acting as de facto editor-in-chief of Puke on Your Birthday. So my guess is that I will reach a point, maybe in January or so, when I find that the wheels are moving at a good pace and I will have some downtime to blog. Not as much as I do now, in between the writing of child abuse reports, but definitely some.

So there's two things to consider here. The first is emotional, i.e. am I going to be okay if I don't have this space throughout the day to express myself in the way I've chosen to or process some minor hardship by writing about it? The answer is that I don't know. I know that I need to leave this job that I am ending at the time of this writing because, I dunno, it's just fucking time to move on, and I'm tired of it, and most days I hate it here in this space that I've inhabited for the better part of eight and a half years. I know that taking a promotion, and the pay bump and all that, will benefit my family, and they are the only reason I'm doing any of this shit in the first place. I know that, long-term, moving up is what you're supposed to do, and there really isn't any hobby on earth that could get in the way of that, no matter how important it is to my mental health.

To address that first piece though, you have to consider the fact that I'm still going to be writing. It's not going to be at the same time of day, and it's not going to be anywhere near the same pace or quantity, but it's still going to be here. I'm already picturing a couple evenings or early mornings or lunch breaks or bus rides that feature some tip-tapping away on a keyboard or phone notepad app. Not because I want to, but because I need to. And if I need to do something, then I usually get it done.

But so the second piece to consider it that pace of output on Puke on Your Birthday, and letting you know what to expect, now that you can't expect around two new blog posts from me per day. So I'd like to map that out here, as I see it, only because that would be helpful for me to do so, and as I've already established, I'm only writing in the first place because it's helpful for me, so I'm chasing that.

I think we can use that 1577-day-and-counting blogging streak as our guiding principle here and say that, if the streak needs to continue, then it'll continue. It's just going to have to be a more reasonable expectation as to what the day-to-day looks like. Probably a lot fewer two-a-days, and definitely not from solely me. A lot of the lesser columns are going to freeze or end or become monthly instead of weekly. And I think that there are ways to get other people to cover some days without me having to worry about it, so that maybe I'm writing six blog posts a week and then everything else is filled in by our motivated blog contributors.

The big features stay put, even if some of the word counts in my contributions are gonna have to come down a little bit. Okay, so let's map out a typical week.

SUNDAY: Record Club Album of the Week write-up

MONDAY: Monday Morning Mixtape

TUESDAY: Top Five Tuesday

WEDNESDAY: miscellaneous

THURSDAY: Film Club group write-up / discussion

FRIDAY: Record Club reviews and discussion

SATURDAY: miscellaneous

Miscellaneous could be any of the other running features that are not going to be weekly anymore, or they could be some random bullshit to fill the gap. Maybe 'Til Death goes bi-weekly and hits on of those days. Maybe I have time to watch an extra movie that week and give it a quick write-up for Film Club. Maybe I have nothing and write 300 words on the El ride to work about a song that's been on my mind. Maybe someone else writes a great blog post and emails it to me and we publish it on one of those days.

Top Five Tuesday is an idea that I've been mulling for a little bit now, and might be a nice way to get some blog posts in the bank. The premise is the same that it's always been on the blog: a top-five list about any subject, with short blurbs attached to each. If 20 different people submitted a short Top Five Tuesday blog post, that's 20 weeks that I don't have to worry about. Everyone's got a good Top Five in 'em. So that's something I'll be pushing to build up in December.

I'll again stress that none of this is actually important. I am acknowledging that. I know. But what I'm doing here is basically just keeping the blog alive. You don't understand how devastating that would be to my psyche if this all went away completely. At worst, we're gonna get some quick posts up here, keep the comment sections open, and keep the lights on, so that when there comes a time for the next life transition, the blog will still be here, ready to be embraced and brought to its full potential. I don't have time for that right this second, and that's okay. I will be okay.

Does that make sense? I hope it does. Maybe I'm talking into the wind right now, especially buried on this holiday when no reasonable person should be visiting Puke on Your Birthday. The main point is that I need Puke on Your Birthday, and I've been a little bit stressed about losing certain aspects of this blog, and I at the very least don't want to lose the aspect of the blog that helps me keep my head on straight. That's all.

Okay, go enjoy your turkey, I'll be here tomorrow. Well, tomorrow's a city holiday too, so work isn't jamming me up until Monday. So: I will be here Monday. And every day in between. And every day after that too. Puke on Your Birthday forever.