Jesus Told Me I'd Live To See My 500th BLOG-DAY!

Here we are, friends.

Do you believe it?

500 posts.

Five hundred.

Like the Ford Five Hundred. Do you remember that car? Why the fuck did they call it that? Doesn't make any sense. It's good they started calling it the Taurus. Everybody loves a sequel. That reminds me-- this blog is a sequel. Maybe there's one or two of you here who remember the first blog I created, called "Pudd'nhead Nathan." Is the sequel better than the original? I don't know... hard to remember, really. Probably it's just more of the same mullarkey.

I started this blog in March of 2009, on Friday the 13th, to be precise, and we all know how much I love being precise.

One might think that it would be unwise to commence a blog, or any endeavor really, on Friday the 13th, that it would be some sort of doomed adventure, star-crossed, if you will. But I’m the kind of guy who lies on the floor naked and tries to shoot pee-pee into the ceiling fan. Well, not really—but, if I ever got drunk, I’d probably be that kind of guy. Think about that next time you muse quietly to yourself, “God, I’d love to see that Apron guy drunk!”

Trust me. You wouldn’t.

I don’t know that I realized I had started my blog on a Friday the 13th but, looking back on it, I’m glad I did. It’s symbolic and shit. It’s maudlin and funny and depressive and balls-up, and I like to think I embody those adjectives, even if I don’t, or I don’t all at the same time.

I’m not sure how many bloggers out there these days make it to 500 posts, and do so in just over a year and three months. Pretty balls-up, yeah? I don’t know if it’s stick-to-it-ness or O.C.D. or loneliness or mania or a love of words or a love of you or an incessant desire to be heard—I don’t know if it’s the Chilean government that keeps me going every morning, but we can’t blame drugs. I don’t know if it’s Mrs. Apron. My blog is my way of reaching out to her, every day, in addition to the emails and the text-messages and the voicemails we zip back-and-forth to each other throughout the workday. They’re all really love letters to my wife, if we want to be honest here, and all you creepy voyeurs are kind of peeking through the window treatments.

And I may be an insufferable pervert, but I kind of like that. Kin. Kay.

She’s the one who told me I should blog, and I listened. She’s the one who told me I should become and EMT, and I listened. And now we’re talking about becoming a cop—a day I never, ever thought would come. But I’m listening. Anybody who loves to complain in rote, Sex-and-the-City fashion that husbands don’t listen should come talk to me. Or listen to me. Or… they should do… something. To me. I’m very glad that my wife told me to start blogging. She thinks I’m a real writer. God, I love her.

I was thinking about what I ought to blog about on my 500th Blogday, and I really still can’t decide. I write stream-of-consciousness, and I often don’t think about what a post is really going to be about until I’m at least five or six paragraphs in. My wife wanted me to devote a post to an article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer recently that bore this title:

“Cornhole Tournament to Benefit Wounded Veterans”

While it feels admittedly a little puerile, a little Jay Leno, it is pretty funny. May I never be accused of turning my nose up at sophomoric humor. Never. I mean, haven’t the organizers of this event ever seen “Office Space”? (“Watch out for your cornhole, bud.”) Truthfully, though, as funny as it is when naïve individuals without a vulgar bone in their body make an inexplicable blunder like that which opens themselves up to torment and ridicule in the blogosphere by more culturally-aware individuals with middle-school sensibilities, I’m kind of just not fully feeling the cornholeness today. I mean-- it's Sunday. Is anybody reading this sacrilege on Sunday anyway?

Anyway, about these cornhole people: they’re just two good-hearted folks trying to organize an event to raise money for wounded soldiers—and am I crossing a line by belittling them, and poking fun at their little faux pas? Maybe I’m getting old. A sixteen-year-old asked me yesterday if I texted and, when I answered “yes” she cracked up. Little does she know I also blog. And that’s a good thing.

Happy 500th blogday to me. Thanks for coming to the party.

Watch out for your cornhole, bud.