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.

It's My Masonic Apron's 200TH BLOGDAY!

Praise be, my little darlings-- I never thought we'd get here.

Certainly not together.

Today marks 200 posts on this here bloggy-doo, and I'm grateful to you for sticking it out with me. Some of you have been with me since the old Pudd'nhead Nathan days-- you dealt with the abrupt cancellation of that blog, and you dutifully tied on your masonic apron and followed me along this path.

You've waded through countless posts about anxiety, personal incompetence, home ownership, dead cops, lost friendships, home ownership, suburban inferiority, a nice, chunky sampling of some Dear Apron ire, and the sporadic rant.

You've even continued reading after I made the decision to stop spending hours of my time searching for funny hyperlink pictures.

Well, shit-- you're all kinds of swell.

Funny thing is-- my 200th Blogday almost didn't happen today-- because I couldn't remember my blogger password for a minute or so there. No password? No post.

Actually, it's kind of a good thing that this happened, because I didn't know what I was going to write about until I forgot my password, then remembered it, then realized that this minor event underscored a uniquely 21st century dilemma that I have no doubt a lot of us are having-- and what better way to celebrate a 200th blogday than by bitching about something that affects not just me, but you, too? Here's the dilemma:

I have too fucking many usernames and passwords.

I mean, Jesus Christ. What the dick?

Here's a short list of all the institutions/websites I frequent with at least moderate regularity that force me to keep track of a username and password:

Auto Insurance website

Credit Card website

My bank's website

My cellphone company's website

Health insurance website

Student loan website

Online class website

PayPal

Ebay

Photobucket

Shutterfly (yes, we do both-- one for business, one for pleasure. Yowza!)

Email

Work email

Facebook

Amazon

And, of course

www.blogger.com

And Icerocket, the blog tracking software I use so that I know when I am visited by Guelph, Ontario or Fishers, Indiana or Elmhurst, Illinois. Hi, y'alls! I see you!

And that's just a sampling of websites that require username and password entry. There are at least eight or nine that I have to use for work purposes that I can frequently never remember. I just had to ask my boss how to log into the Theatre Alliance website because I couldn't remember the username and password. Pretty sad.

But, seriously, how's a brotha supposed to keep track of all his skeez like that? Are we supposed to write it all down, every username and every password for all our websites-- even our financial institutions and such, so that any petty pilferer or day laborer who happens to be working in our house can access anything and everything online? I know we're not supposed to make all our usernames and passwords exactly the same, because then, one someone has one, they have them all.

Right?

This isn't just me, right?

So, I make them slightly different, but then I can never remember which variant of which username or password goes with what website. And, of course, the credit card website is the one I can never remember, and it's one of the few websites that, if you get it wrong three times, sorry! You're locked out until tomorrow. Try again, please.

How did it come to this? Sure, usernames and passwords are good ideas in theory, but sometimes all this security blows up in our faces when we try to pay our credit card bill online. We ought to be rewarded for "going green" and getting paperless statements-- instead we're forced to commit to memory dozens of usernames and passwords until they start leaking out of our ears. I mean, yeah, we're young and virile now, but as Generation Y or whatever the fuck we are ages, we're never going to be able to remember all this shit.

Will "Password Retrieval Services" start springing up all over the place, created by some enterprising bastard wishing to capitalize off the graying of America's online generation? Will websites start charging you a dollar every time you can't remember your password, like your R.A. used to do when you couldn't find your dorm room key?

Speaking of higher education, I think the first online password I ever created was in college. This demonstrates how old I am. My freshman year, I was shoved in a cramped dorm room with a shoulder-tufted leviathan who grunted instead of speaking, showered in Aqua Velva and possessed a remarkably cro-magnon forehead. The dorm building was one of the oldest on the campus, the windows only opened a crack, there was no air conditioning and the floors were movie theatre sticky. The dorm's name was Walz.

My online password for all of freshman year?

ihatewalz