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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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Blog Year Nine was capped off with throwback to the wacky Gil Thorp summer plots of yore, in a story that began when two fast food ruffians met with vigilante justice in the form of a terrified WHO-O-A! and a mighty, meaty WUD:

Our Hawaiian-shirted hero was a senile former pro wrestler who Gil agreed to wrestle for charity or something, despite the fact that he didn’t even know who Gil was and this would be a good way for him to get terribly injured, probably. Sadly, nobody got terribly injured and actually the old guy probably wasn’t all that senile and it was some kind of double-game long-con wrestling angle.

In Rex Morgan, M.D., yet another wacky elderly patient gave the Morgans free stuff — in this case, a free vacation to San Diego! All they had to do was check up on her rental property, which turned out to be full of sexy ladies who turned out to be strippers with hearts of gold, helping out one of their own who was suffering form breast cancer. Obviously, some of the ladies took a liking to Rex and one maybe flashed him a little, to which he reacted in typical theatrically dickish fashion.

But Blog Year Nine undeniably belonged to an epic seven-month saga in Mary Worth. It began with a cry of psychic pain in the Weston household.

Seems that Dawn got dumped by a dude named Dave, and things got worse when she ran into her ex and his new girlfriend and they invited her to a three-way. Dawn spent a lot of time on the couch watching Game of Thrones and repeating what became the summer of 2012’s catchphrase.

Wilbur decided that a trip to Italy would get Dawn’s mind off her ex. Unfortunately, everywhere she went, she kept having reminders of Dave’s sexy abs and/or genitals thrust in her face.

Determined to cheer up his daughter, Wilbur took her on a cruise ship, which immediately ran aground in a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. As the ship slowly capsized, Wilbur and Dawn saw human desperation at its worst.

Fortunately, the Westons were rescued via helicopter. Wilbur returned to Santa Royale with a new column idea based on his entirely undeserved good fortune.

Dawn, meanwhile, emerged from the experience with a determination to make a difference in the world, and Mary convinced her to volunteer at the hospital, where she befriended a one-armed fellow named Jim. Jim immediately became fixated on Dawn because she looked uncannily like his sister, who died in the boating accident that claimed his arm, which meant that Dawn was now forbidden to approach any body of water, and also required to have sex with him. Dawn rejected him because he was a possessive, delusional creep, but Jim laid in with the guilt.

Anyway, in her very good psychology class Dawn learned that possessive, delusional creeps just need the love friendship of a good woman and that fixes them, and it totally worked and now Jim can hang out near the water without fear and doesn’t want to murder Dawn at all, even a little. He just wants to be friends! And Dawn enjoys her friendship with him. They say that, if you listen closely, you can hear them continuing to enjoy their friendship, even today.

Tomorrow! Our trip through Soap Opera Past finally reaches the present day. What plots from the past year merit recording in the Book of Eternity?

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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!