This is Puke on Your Birthday's 1000th blog post. Congrats, everybody. To celebrate, here my top 1000 memories from blogging!!!!
1. That time we bought Hurricane forties and drank at a construction property off of Susquehanna Ave., and me and Mandy and Mike decided to start a blog.
2. Not sure why anyone agreed to call it "Puke on Your Birthday," which is a terrible name for a blog, but I guess at age nineteen, the memory of puking on my eighteenth birthday after a power hour was still fresh on everyone's mind.
3. The head of the construction crew working the project probably saw that someone tripped the alarm and came to see if anyone was stealing copper wires and pipes, but instead just found some teens drinking malt liquor, and decided to let us stay.
4. I rode my dad's bike home, and it didn't have functioning breaks, I'm pretty sure?
5. Anyways, I started the blog that night. I guess. This was over eleven years ago.
6. There were other blogs. I had a personal one where I would write some emo shit and some music reviews... ya know, until PoYB became the place to dump all my emo shit and my music reviews.
7. I mostly bitched on that blog about how I was banned from the townhouses.
8. Anyways, Puke started as a "neighborhood blog," back when we all still lived in the old neighborhood.
9. That's why the picture on the top right of this screen is the Burholme Park water tower. We used to dream about scaling the fence around it and climbing up to the top, a la the Moon Tower from Dazed and Confused.
10. I miss caring about the place I lived that much. I love Port Richmond, but our little corner of the Great Northeast seemed magical when we were growing up...
11. ...but that probably had a lot to do with the fact that we were teens and the world was our oyster, and we could've lived anywhere and still felt those same magical feelings.
12. This blog tried to capture that feeling, at one point, to varying degrees of success.
13. The first blog post I ever wrote for PoYB was about some dude who used to buy us alcohol when we were underage.
14. I wish I knew more about this guy, and what ever happened to him. I would probably try to do some type of fake "serious journalist" bullshit for this blog and write a follow-up about him.
15. Though, I know that doing something like that would be unethical. It would be using someone's pain and misery for our blog enjoyment. I dunno. I wouldn't even know what he looks like.
16. I used to give him rides in parents' car, though, to the Wine and Spirits on Rising Sun Ave. I'm sure my mom and dad would be horrified to read this. I'm putting this at #16 so they stop reading.
17. Honestly, I'm not even sure if my parents have ever known the existence of Puke on Your Birthday. I gave my mom a link to Record Club's tag one time, but I doubt she ever followed up on it.
18. I don't think there's much on here that would be life-ending if my parents read it. Anything like that wouldn't be written in the first place. In fact, that's probably a good guideline for public blog writing in general—if you don't want your mom to know about it, DON'T FUCKING WRITE ABOUT IT.
19. I'm sure other parents have read Puke on Your Birthday. I don't know. I don't really ask when I'm with that type of company.
20. It's possible that friends have told me their parents read it? Though maybe I'm mixing that up with my old xanga.
21. That blog post I just linked to, the one about my old xanga site, still stands as the most clicked on blog post I've ever written. I guess it was the right balance of nostalgia? I have no idea.
22. Maybe it's just that it's a low bar to clear. When most of my posts get 0 to 1 clicks at most, it's not that hard to be the most-clicked.
23. Anyways, this blog used to have a steady roster of three-to-five writers.
24. I already mentioned Mandy and Mike. Nick used to write a little bit here too, and Dave eventually came on board when he needed an outlet for his frustrations from a flailing journalism career.
25. I usually tried to force other friends to write for it. One time I got Jim to write an Entourage review.
26. I also remember trying to force Frank to write something.
27. Being Frank, it took him a decade to comply, but he finally did.
28. Mandy used to live across the hall from me during that first semester that we had Puke in our lives. That made it easy for me to peer pressure her into writing shit.
29-43. It looks like she wrote fifteen posts. Some highlights: adderrall, lesbians, the first of many PoYB It's a Wonderful Life posts, Nickleback, etc. etc.
44. Me and Mandy went through a rough patch toward the end of Summer 2009, which maybe me and her will write about on this blog eventually, if we both find ourselves feeling drunk and emo around an audio recorder sometime.
45. The stake in the heart of our friendship at the time (we're cool now, thankfully) was removing her posting privileges from this blog. THAT'LL SHOW HER I said, somewhat pathetically.
46. Dave brought a certain degree of pedigree to the blog. He was writing for local sports papers at the time, I believe, and so a lot of his posts show some of the hallmarks of actually be trained to write.
47. Most of Dave's ten posts are long-form, which inspired me to always write that way on this blog (that, and a pushback against Twitter's 140-character-limit culture).
48-57. Some highlights: Dave hates Dallas fans, Dave hates sequels and reboots, Dave hates teens, Dave hates not being able to see the roofs of South Philly homes
58. Nick wrote some good shit. I always picture him as someone who would've fit in really well on La Salle's Improv 101 team, had he stuck around La Salle for more than half a semester. So, he's funny, is what I'm trying to say. Not that I'll ever admit that to his face!
59-61. Even his throwaway bullshit posts were funny, in a so-bad-they-are-good way.
62. One time Pam said that Nick looks like Kermit the Frog when he dances, and I cannot believe that Nick stopped writing on PoYB before he could defend himself against such a perfect insult.
63. Mike is a lawyer, so he hates that I'm writing about him on this blog.
64. I don't know what Mike wrote about. He deleted all his posts once he realized that he wanted to go to law school.
65. I asked him recently if he had saved anything he had written back then, and his response was a sarcastic, "Is that a serious question?"
66. I know he wrote about the band fun. one time, and—credit where credit is due—this was before they blew up in 2012 with the whole "We Are Young" thing.
67. I also know that he wrote about his memories hanging out in his parents' pool. I guess this was when his parents had decided to get rid of said pool. I remember the title was " A Pool-ogy," which I thought was a decent play on words.
68. He wrote something about me for my 21st birthday, which basically amounted to a roast, but like Frank Reynolds in that one episode of It's Always Sunny, I can appreciate that roasts can be a good way to show your affection for someone.
69-420. I do know for a fact that Mike wrote hundreds and hundreds of posts that mainly consisted of drug references, dick pics, crude jokes, and detailed descriptions of his sexual proclivities.
421. Those posts are all gone, and now Mike has a lawyering license, and sticks to writing about New Zealand pop punk.
422. There are plenty of other contributors to this blog. You can see them all gathered on one of the sidebars to your right.
423. Mostly, I force my friends to write about music. I'm thankful that I actually have friends that allow themselves to be peer-pressured into doing so.
424. I guess I've written a few blog posts in my day as well.
425. There are 764 posts tagged with the "Joe" tag.
426-427. That's not including any Your Favorite Movie posts (which take hours to create) or Album of the Week posts (which take minutes to create), because... I dunno why, it just seemed weird to tag those as my own, since they require help from others.
428. Anyways, I've wasted a lot of time on here. Which is silly.
429. But also relatively innocuous.
430. My dad asked me recently—referring to Your Favorite Movie specifically, but it could apply to blogging in general—"Yeah, but why do you do this? What's the point?" He wasn't being a dick; he was legitimately confused/curious.
431. The best way to think about it is to think about if I decided to take up building model trains in my basement. I have spare time in my life, and I fill it with something that gives me small pleasures. It does not benefit society in any measurable way. It's just a fucking hobby.
432. Let's talk about some of those "small pleasures." I have some favorite blog posts I've written, for sure.
433. First: You could probably break up Puke on Your Birthday's life into four distinct eras. We'll talk about each one separately. We have 567 more memories to fill out to get to 1000, so why the fuck not?
434. Okay, so there were The Early Days. This lasts from post #1 (the Andy one) to about the time Mike got out of dodge, and I just got busy with life and decided to give blogging a rest.
435. Some of my favorite blog posts that I wrote from that time, just skimming through them now: talking about my friends;
436. A review of the pilot for The O.C.
437. (which eventually got a sequel)
438. (which, I guess I should say that I don't necessarily agree with every blog post I've ever written, but I'm mainly listing ones here that I think reached some semblance of being well-written);
439. I had a séance with John Lennon;
440. Recapping the horrors of an old dorm room (me and Sean were just laughing our asses off about this a couple weeks ago);
441. Kev's and my old beer pong team (my cousin ended up marrying the sister of the villain in this story, and we laugh about it often);
442. This one proves that people actually used to comment on blogs;
443. This one proves that I've always written these long retrospectives, and I'll continue to do so forever;
444. I wrote about an old strip club, which marks probably the only time I've actually done research for anything on this blog
445. (and, okay, probably not the only time I've written about strip clubs, but Pam isn't cool with me going to strip clubs anymore, so I'll stop writing about them too, I swear!!!!!!!);
446. I wrote a really, really dumb post about saving your parking spot (like, really, really dumb), but at least it got a great comment down at the bottom;
447. I had fun making fun of the worst comic ever;
448. I dunno, now it just seems like I'm listing shit. This was supposed to be memories. I have some memories about actually writing posts, I guess?
449. Like, I used to think that I excelled in blogging if I did so drunkenly. There were plenty of nights that I would pop down in front of my laptop in Rockledge with one eye open and write a whole bunch of shit.
450. Those are the posts that don't seem to have aged all that well. Like this Taking Back Sunday concert review. Actually, naw, fuck it, that wasn't that bad.
451. But the point was that I was pretty drunk writing that. I've learned my lesson (No I haven't).
452. After a late 2010, the blog shut down for a while. "Rested," maybe. I would occasionally come back for some one-offs, most of them about Harry Potter.
453. Also, I blogged throughout the first half of 2012 under a different, more family-friendly blog umbrella. This was when me and Pam were living in Vegas.
454. Most of those posts have aged HORRIBLY. I was writing about our day-to-day lives out west, and yeah, our parents enjoyed it, but I can't imagine anyone else did. It was fucking masturbatory.
455. Fuck it. I moved all those posts over to PoYB at one point, so if you wanna read about our time in the city of sin for some fucking reason, click on the link.
456. Also during this period of "rest" from blogging, I was unemployed for a couple weeks, and decided that I would use some of that time to revive Puke. It didn't last long, and there isn't much there worth reading.
457. Okay, maybe this musical breakups one is okay.
458. Or maybe this list? I dunno. Clearly I was bored.
459. There is one post during that time period that I think about whenever I'm deciding whether I should write about a particular subject. I'm referring to the one about the Boy in the Box.
460. I guess it technically checked one box that was important when PoYB had originally started—the story takes place in Fox Chase, a neighborhood that we grew up in. But over time, I've decided that it's not the kind of shit I want to write about here.
461. That whole mode of thinking started when I told Pam that I wrote about it, and she responded, "Why?" and I didn't really have an answer for her.
462. This story about a murdered mystery boy has been covered from plenty of different angles, as I noted in the blog post, and Puke did the absolute bare minimum to put a personal spin on it. I'm not a journalist. Just stating the facts is not something we do here.
463. Now, I could see some scenario in which I use the story to try to pivot and speak about my own life, how I can relate, how I can empathize in a tangential way, or some such bullshit like that. And I do that a lot nowadays, use unrelated things to pivot to some emo treacle. But there needs to be an extra layer there. Writing about a news story isn't enough.
464. So anyways, I got hired by Zipcar by the end of that summer, and that job was not conducive to writing blog posts on the side, so besides some end-of-year music round-ups, I didn't blog at all for a few years.
465. Enter the third era of Puke on Your Birthday. This era, like the Vegas era, starts on a completely different blog, with a completely separate project, which I called Joe's New Summer.
466. The conceit was that I would do something "new" every day of a summer, from Memorial Day Friday to Labor Day.
467. "New" was a fluctuating concept, of course. Some days were more bullshit than others.
468. But I was able to say that I indeed did something new every day of the summer. Better yet, it gave me an excuse to blog about something every day.
469. Or, at least, I would blog for every day. Meaning that every day of the summer ended up having a blog post attached to it, but a lot of the time, those posts were written after the fact, and back-dated.
470-571. So that was 102 blog posts, lovingly typed up on Wordpress. Sometimes I literally just wrote about what I did that day. Some days, in the most Joe-K***-fashion ever, I would use the new thing as an excuse to write about something completely different. I don't feel like linking to anything here. Just check out the full list HERE.
572. And yeah, obviously I eventually moved all those posts over to Puke on Your Birthday as well, and they count toward the 1000. I wrote them on a blog, why wouldn't they count? I just wanted all my shit in the same place, ya know?
573. (I have another project being cooked up for 2020 that is in a very similar vein as Joe's New Summer, that will involve even more silly inane blog content, so look out for that one on 1/1/2020.)
574. That whole project gave me a taste of what it felt like to blog again. It felt fucking good. Also, I had moved to a job that I could actually blog while on the clock, so the time felt right to revive Puke again.
575. Also, there was that whole sobriety thing in late 2017. I don't know if I'll ever delve into the details about how why the sobriety stint happened. I've thought about it recently, but I don't think enough time has passed. It would be too painful for certain people reading.
576. But my point is that, the summer was over, I wasn't drinking anymore, and I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started blogging again. That lasted a few months, probably till the end of the year. But there were a lot of posts. Most of them shit (sensing a pattern?!). A lot of them were a skip down memory lane.
577. The Fourth Era, and the one we are currently in, began in early 2018. After a few weeks off, I started writing about music a lot. (I started drinking again too, so there's that.)
578. And it took me a little longer to get the balance right, but eventually, I started writing about music and personal shit in about equal measures.
579-618. There was Record Club, starting in February 2019, forty weeks and counting. Friends can listen to the same album and write reviews. It's fun!
619. And then Your Favorite Movie, which I already write enough for so I won't waste your time here.
620. But I did run into a high school acquaintance randomly the other day, and during our 30-second conversation he mentioned that he "saw those movie interviews" I was posting. So I guess the plastering of Facebook with links is working? I don't know. I don't know how I feel about someone I barely know only knowing me as that fucking guy who interviews friends about movies? It was strange.
621. Boy oh boy, this blog has been a great timewaster. Workdays fly by. I'm being serious here.
622. There's been some housecleaning over the past couple years.
623. I've organized everything with tags so you can easily separate posts by "nostalgia" or "drinking" or "Charlie Watts sucks ass."
624. I've changed all the - to —. Well, maybe not all of them. If you see a - that needs to be changed to a —, send me an email!
625. I've also changed all the "POYB" to the correct abbreviation style, "PoYB." Prepositions don't get capitalized in the middle of a phrase!!!!!!!
626. Also, I try not to write anyone's last name on here. Especially my own.
627. I've only had to straight-up delete one single blog post ever from this site, and that was one whose whole conceit was dependent on typing my last name. Basically, I googled other "Joe K***s" on the internet, and described why they sucked. It didn't work with the asterisks.
628. I've wanted to delete certain posts, but I think I'm going to stick with the Warner Bros. technique—keep 'em up for historical value, but make it clear that I know longer think this way.
629-960. Is anything still reading this?
961. I can't stress enough how much Record Club has juked the stats on this race to 1000 posts. When other people are writing for this blog, the posts stack up a lot more quickly. Not that there are dozens of reviews every week, but there's at least one or two more each week than there would've been otherwise.
962. And man, it's so damn fun getting friends in on the Puke on Your Birthday fun again. It was lonely in that decade that it was just me.
963. My favorite album that we've done, in terms of the actual music, is probably Dogrel.
964. My favorite album that we've done, in terms of writing the review for, was probably either Lizzo or Hozier.
965. My favorite album that we've done, in terms of the reaction that it elicited from the group, was obviously Ashlee Simpson.
966. I compare Record Club with Beer Runners in my mind a lot, at least in a conceptual framework type of way. Both clubs are ostensibly about something (writing, running), but are actually about something else (listening, drinking). I roped the same friends into both. Both clubs had plenty of members but only a handful of weekly participants. No repeats for either albums or bars. Not repeating is easy because there are so many albums and so many bars to choose from.
967. Also, writing about Beer Runners was pretty fun that one time.
968. Alright, and I'll write about Your Favorite Movie, even though I promised I wouldn't anymore.
969. I've made it pretty clear in the interviews themselves how much I love having an excuse to hang out with friends at this point in my life.
970. But in addition to that, I feel like I'm getting better at conversing with people. I've found that I'm asking more questions when hanging out with friends. What's the opposite of small talk? "Big talk"? I'm doing more of that, whatever you call it.
971. Also, that skill—again, not saying I'm even good at it, just minutely better than I was before—is bleeding over to my work. It's weirdly easier to talk to, for instance, a six-year-old who is getting caught in the middle of her parents' domestic violence concerns, even though our conversation has nothing to do with socio-political metaphors in The Little Mermaid or whatever.
972. My favorite YFM that I've done, in terms of the actual movie, was probably The Big Chill.
973. My favorite YFM that I've done, in terms of thinking about the movie critically, was probably When Harry Met Sally...
974. My favorite YFM that I've done, in terms of how I felt immediately after the conversation, was probably The Wolf of Wall Street, even though I felt worse about it after transcribing.
975. My favorite YFM that I've done, in terms of how I felt when I clicked "publish," was definitely Beetlejuice.
976. My favorite YFM interview overall was probably The Wizard of Oz, mainly because the interviewee was knowledgeable, and it gave me a feeling of, "alright, maybe this whole project is gonna work out." Or maybe Life Aquatic, which made me think that this project could reach the heights that I had hoped for.
977. Alright, talking superlatives is kind of fun. The post that was the most talked about in the real world was probably "Friends of the Blog," which was so dumb, and so fun to write, and caused a weird pocket of drama that I don't even know if I fully understand yet?
978. The non-YFM post that took the longest to write was probably "My 20s." I still go back and read and laugh at some of that shit. I live a good life.
979. I describe a lot of my writing as "dumb" as some kind of defense mechanism, but is there one that is actually THE DUMBEST? Probably. I think the "Let's Contact Satan" one is incredible unfunny and pointless. It started from the idea of "let's write something for post #666" and didn't really go anywhere exciting from there.
980. (I've thought about adding a "humor" tag on occasion, but man, when I read shit like that, I cringe at what I could ever consider "humorous" about anything that I write.)
981. This list was extremely long and pointless and masturbatory.
982-985. That whole short series where I made the same complaint over and over about sharing pictures of your child was a one-joke premise and went on for too long.
986. Oh yeah, this one is bad. It's part of my Joe's New Summer project, and it was one of the few that even Pam admitted was bad.
987-988. But let's talk best, even though I lose my humility by doing so. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the fake MySpace surveys that I wrote (I, II), which I feel like respectively hit the right tones of emo (for I) and humor (for II) that I strive for here. But maybe you think they are respectively cloying (for I) and cringe-worthy (for II). To each their own.
989. I put a lot of heart into that Harry Potter time-turner one from way back in the day. I even rewrote it a few years later for clarity. I'm proud of my argument there. Arguments about stupid shit are the best.
990. The baby names list was a blast too. Funny story—the name "Willow" was originally on this list, but I had to edit it out once we decided on what to name our daughter.
991. I don't know if my years will ever be exciting like my year was in 2014 to warrant such a post as this, but man, that was a good one.
992. The one where I shit on a local pizza mascot was great, only because of what I totally missed (see the comments).
993. My favorite post ever—I think I feel comfortable saying that—has to be "An Hour of Power: The Aftermath." The previous post was created the same night, which was a list of all 61 toasts we gave during a power hour, but I kept the audio recorder running until the party busted up, and transcribed that too, and it captured what I think is the truest documentation ever of what me and my friends used to do back in the day—get drunk, stay safe, and act like fucking idiots.
994. Gosh, I could go on and on. Totally tooting my own horn here—I'm so sorry—but I enjoy going back and reading this stuff. It's like reading an old diary.
995. I don't have any presumption that anyone else truly gives a shit about any of this. Seriously. I am at peace with it. I'm not out there slinging this blog for clicks to get paid. It's just something I do.
996. I don't even think that it's changed anyone's opinion on anything or given anyone anything to think about besides an occasional timewaster.
997. Some of my friends mention blog posts in real life (especially the YFM posts, recently), and that makes me feel good. I am happy that a few people have visited this dumb site a few times.
998. And I'm happy that I have somewhere to write my thoughts, however unimportant or forgettable they are. I'm gonna continue to do it.
999. Think back to that model trains metaphor. If I was into that, I would be happy spending a few hours a week in my basement tinkering with the cars and the tracks. And I would definitely be happy if, very occasionally, a friend pops down to say hey and to maybe say, "wow, this is cool," and then not give it another thought. That would be fine. Same here at the blog. I'm happy that you read this. I'm at peace with the fact that it ultimately means nothing to anyone.
1000. Here's to 1000 more blog posts. Thanks for reading.
