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Well, folks, here it is: July 11, 2014, ten years to the day from the moment I wrote some not particularly cogent commentary on Non Sequitur, for some reason, and a blog was born. I was 29 years old then, so I’ve been writing this blog for half of my adult life. It’s given me so much, in terms of learning to be funny, and in terms of connecting with other people, and I’ve loved every minute of it. Before I present the best soap plots of the last year, let me recap a few points:

• Despite the valedictory nature of this anniversary celebration I’ve thrown for myself, I am not stopping blogging, as a few worried correspondents have asked. Far from it! I will continue to make jokes about Mary Worth until the newspaper strips, the Internet, or I cease to exist.
• I will, however, be taking the next two weeks off to bask in my own glory, celebrate my 40th birthday next week, and put the finishing touches on my long-overdue novel. Your comments of the week will be up shortly and then you’ll be in the gentle, capable hands of Uncle Lumpy until Monday, July 28th.
• There are major Josh life changes in the offing, though: Amber and I are moving to Los Angeles at the end of August, where I will be attempting to break into comedy writing and performing in as many hopefully paying forms as possible. If you’ve got a yen to work with me, or if you have the inside scoop on a reasonably priced two-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake or thereabouts, drop me a line.

And now, before we hit Blog Year Ten, the top plots of the previous nine years:

1. Tommy the Tweaker
2. Rex and Troy’s Big Gay Golf Game
3. Aldomania
4. Alan the Dope Fiend
5. Sneaky the Raccoon’s Triumph
6. Wilbur’s Illegitimate Not-Son: The Frolicking
7. They Dressed in the Dark
8. Milford Ink
9. Life Is Brutal

What over the past year has been worthy to share the stage with these greats? Well, I was pleased with the first Mark Trail plot of 2014, a test-drive from new Mark Trail scribe James Allen. A pelican leg band led Mark to saintly Jessica the avian biologist and her evil boyfriend Marlin, who was in league with local turtle murderers. Marlin was poaching sea turtle eggs, which is a thing that happens, I guess, which naturally led to fisticuffs. Mark paused the violence long enough to mourn.

Mary Worth briefly left her California home and supposed boyfriend Dr. Jeff to travel to New York City! Ostensibly she was there to see her friend win a major award, but she ended up spending most of the trip hanging out with handsome Broadway legend Ken Kensington, going to art shows and eating thin-crust pizza and other New York stuff. Ken tried to make Mary fall in love with him with his mind powers, and Mary couldn’t help but notice his need for a woman in his life, and also briefly turned into Gollum.

She almost decided to stay, but then nearly got hit by a car, which is as good a reason as any not to dump your boyfriend, I guess.

But I have to say that for Blog Year Ten, my heart has been won over by Judge Parker’s epic, slo-mo tale of love, marriage, screenwriting, and privilege on the high seas and/or in the jungle, which has been happening for literally the entire year. It’s been full of great moments, like: Katherine going bug-eyed with glee as she wins another few thousand dollars to add to the family vault!

April telling her husband-to-be that yeah, she’s going to kill some people if America needs some killing done, so he’d better get used to it!

Judge Parker Senior humiliating some egghead academic who dared to give his terrible, unreadable book a bad review!

Judge Parker Senior making friends with a snake!

The first appearance of April’s dad Abbott, a delightful Hunter S. Thompson lookalike with a pet tarantula!

April’s dowry: some totally illegal diamonds that would get Randy into a bunch of trouble, if it were possible for bad things to ever happen to a Spencer-Driver-Parker!

An assault on Abbott’s jungle compound by his enemies, mere moments after Randy and April’s wedding, much to Judge Parker Senior’s disgust!

April heading out into the jungle in her wedding dress to do what she does best, which is to straight-up gut people like a fish with her huge knife!

Whoops! Don’t worry! The bad guys love Judge Parker Senior’s book! Everybody is saved!

And Randy is justifiably aroused!

Thank you for ten great years, everybody! I feel as rich as a Spencer-Driver-Parker, thanks to all of you. Be nice to Uncle Lumpy and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks!

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2010-11 was another great year for my holy trinity of Mark Trail, Apartment 3-G, and Mary Worth. Just in time for the midterm elections, Mark Trail wove a tale of political intrigue! Seems a mysterious fenced compound popped up on the edge of Mark’s land. Turns out it was the home of a little girl who adopted a deer (note that while I expect Apartment 3-G to conform to some kind of reality, I didn’t even blink at this in Mark Trail), whose stepfather Frank planned to stage caged hunts for bigwigs as some sort of plan to become governor. Obviously the little girl objected, as did (in particularly bad-ass fashion) Mark, ruining everybody’s fun. Frank sure was mad! Deer-kicking mad.

Mark punched him, obviously, and later Frank tried to kill Mark with his car but at the last minute a deer knocked his car off a cliff (haha, I know) and Mark saved him, for further humiliation purposes.

Mary Worth, meanwhile, forwarded the story of Dr. Jeff’s drippy daughter Dr. Adrian, who finally found the love of a good man in handsome cop Scott. Adrian got wedding-planning help from her “outspoken” pal Jill, who didn’t care for Scott, a feeling that was mutual. Later, at the rehearsal dinner, Jill got bombed, literally threw herself at Dr. Jeff, then denounced the concept of marriage in increasingly desperate terms.

Turns out Jill had ideological objections to a traditionally patriarchal institution was just a bitter old maid who had been left at the altar, and Mary literally told her to change the past by altering her memory in either the best or worst session of cognitive-behavioral therapy I’ve ever seen. Jill was too ashamed to come to Adrian’s wedding, of course, but she did spend a wildly overextravagant gift!

But as fantastic as those two plots were (and they were!) in Blog Year Seven my heart was won by Apartment 3-G, which included an adventure for all three of its main characters … as they dressed … in the dark.

Yes, Tommie applied to be on a TV makeover show, and somehow got Margo and Lu Ann roped in as well. Sinister makeover host “Mama Kat” insulted all three gals in turn and then openly announced her intention to annihilate their wills.

Lu Ann had her very sense of self (i.e., her hair) threatened, while Margo just resolved to use the opportunity to get as much free stuff as possible. Later, the girls met their stylist, “Mister Mojo,” who was written as some kind of sassy gay stereotype, though that was undermined by the art, which, as I put it at the time, answered the question “What if Mr. Clean were a supervillain who was also a resurrected undead king from ancient Sumer?”

After enduring some psychological gameswomanship, the girls’ makeovers were revealed. Margo looked like herself, with longer hair and exposed shoulders.

Lu Ann was indeed de-blonded, though the characters and the syndicate colorists couldn’t agree on the final results.

And Tommie … well, I guess they combed her hair properly, for once? That was literally it. Her new outfit was also stupid.

The absolute best part, though, was how all three girls immediately went back to their previous boring looks the instant the makeover show ended. For Lu Ann, this meant an introduction to new innovations in the haircare industry, which she was very enthusiastic about.

Coming up next in Blog Year Eight: Funeral fights! Home births! And the dumbest money-making scheme of all time!

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By the sixth year of this blog’s existence, I had pretty much gotten into the groove of what the soaps had to offer. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when some of the plots of 2009-10 shook things up! For instance, Mark had always been a straight-arrow, law-abiding citizen … right up to the time he literally punched a cop in the face.

Don’t worry, Mark didn’t turn evil; it’s just that Rusty was being foolish and got trapped under a car and Mark broke into a store to find a jack but got caught and that sheriff just wouldn’t listen to reason!

In Apartment 3-G, it was the year of delightful Bobbie Merrill, who weaseled her way into the Professor’s practice to get some sleepytime pills, then won his heart with gift baskets and poinsettias and manic episodes. Later, she bought a gun to take out her real target — her estranged husband, Margo’s dad! Turns out she was the one who raised Margo as her own even though Margo’s bio-mom was the maid, which explains a lot about Margo. There was an armed staircase confrontation that sort of petered out, and eventually she was bundled off to a farm private psychiatric facility upstate. The following conversation between Ari and the doctor who referred Bobbie to him demonstrates the low state of professional psychiatry in the A3Giverse:

(And it hasn’t gotten any better lately, either.)

But the champion of long-lost not-relative storylines for Blog Year Six went to Mary Worth. It all began when Wilbur’s girlfriend left town. Left to his own devices, he decided to have a little fun online!

Only to get a very special message.

Kurt Evans was the son of a lady Wilbur had romanced back in college, when he was young and mildly more believable as an object of sexual desire.

Kurt showed up unannounced and the two bonded over some good old-fashioned fishing! Everyone had a good time, except for Wilbur’s actual offspring, who was super not cool with it.

Kurt didn’t want to get a paternity test and Wilbur didn’t push it, which led Dawn to take matters into her own hands and track down Kurt’s real paternal aunt, a delightful drunken snob.

Eventually Kurt agreed to the paternity test, then skipped town before he could be revealed as a fraud, much to Wilbur’s distress and Dawn’s shame. It turned out he just wanted to have a little male bonding time with the least objectionable of his mother’s many paramours, in preparation for his own impending fatherhood, which, good luck with your many inevitable psychological problems, future Kurt Evans-spawn! The two never saw each other again, but at least they’ll always have the memories of their frolicking.

Their frolicking.

SO MUCH FROLICKING. SO MUCH.

Anyway! Tomorrow, year seven: gripping political drama, more drunken loutism, and the first (and last) adventure the A3G gals had together in years!