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Ugggh, everybody, much as sorting through all these plots has been a genuine joy of (re)discovery, it’s also meant some hard choices, and in going back over the 2007-08 blog year, I had an extremely hard time even cutting things back to a winner and three runners up. I could not ignore, for instance, the time that Mary Worth’s boyfriend Jeff’s son Drew “Dr. McHottie” Corey tried to simultaneously romance Wilbur’s daughter Dawn and Mary meddlee Vera, with predictably violent results:

Later, he was forced to admit that Mary and Jeff represented what true love was all about, which, barf.

Over in Gil Thorp, Coach Kaz went on an exciting summer adventure as an undercover detective in the entourage of Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King” and performer of the smash hit “Tarzana Nights.” Kaz punched some dude in the brain and figured out who the rat in Gail’s entourage was (it turned out to be her drummer, aka Burnout Ben Franklin).

And let’s not forget the time that Abbey was secretly fed pot brownies, by her kindly elderly pot-growing next-door neighbors, and then she got super high and she and Sam tried to have sex but she passed out first and this image was involved and it was the worst kind of surreal nightmare.

But when it came to hard-hitting stories about drugs and how they are bad, the winner was definitely Apartment 3-G, which spent much of the year on the saga of Lu Ann’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend Alan, who was addicted to … drugs, of some kind, it was “rock” or “dope” or something, and he got it from “Jones,” his vest-wearing beatnik dealer and eventually tried becoming a dealer himself, but the important thing is that this plot gifted us with some of the dorkiest drug talk ever committed to print. For instance: how does dope make you feel? Does it make you feel super?

How much would you say drugs cost you? Just a part of your paycheck, or most of it, maybe?

When you’re super into dope, are there things other than getting high that you care about?

And, finally, when you’re really worked up about drugs, what is it that can make you calm down?

Alan was eventually gunned down by this crazed bald drug fiend, so, you know, drugs are bad and you should not do them, no matter how sexy Judge Parker makes them seem, the end.

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2006-07 was quite the year in the soaps, guys. Mark Trail encountered a tame bear who couldn’t understand your hostility towards her, which I immortalized in t-shirt form. Later, Mark punched a man’s beard off.

In Gil Thorp, one of Gil’s student athletes accidentally cut his own leg off with a chainsaw. In the spring, a weird lonely old man wandered onto Milford High’s grounds, who helped coach the baseball team and claimed to have played in the Negro Leagues and insisted on being called by a funny nickname.

Turns out he was a fraud, and Gil knew about it but never said anything because he was doing Gil’s job for free so why rock the boat?

Also, in Judge Parker, a substitute butler from a temp agency forced some French punk rockers to strip to their underwear at gunpoint. I swear I didn’t make a single word in that sentence up.

But year three of my blog, without question, belonged to Aldo Kelrast, the man whose name was an anagram for “stalker” because he stalked Mary Worth, stalked her from the first moment he saw her.

Mary gave Aldo the cold shoulder pretty much right away, which didn’t stop him from popping up unexpectedly.

Aldo proved wholly unable to grasp the concept of consent, even when Mary used barbarous foreign tongues to express her disinterest.

Mary eventually had no choice but to arrange an intervention for Aldo, if any group of people brought together in one room to yell at someone counts as an “intervention.” Aldo reacted as most would: by going directly to a liquor store and driving over a cliff to his death. His pudgy, Captain Kangaroo-esque corpse was left in a pile of mangled steel.

This was a huge deal. People went nuts! My blog traffic was off the charts! There was coverage on CNN! There were tribute videos!

Later, Mary and her friends went to his funeral, to make sure he was really dead, and to gloat. It was awkward and fantastic. Cold justice had been meted out, and Mary was victorious. Farewell, Aldo: you didn’t deserve to die, but you shouldn’t have gone around stalking people either.

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The 2005-06 blogging year (I’m going to start calling it the July 11 to July 10 periods under consideration “blogging years”; hopefully this will be the basis for the new calendar, in the Curmudgeonarchy) was another strong one, soap-opera-wise! There was a great Mark Trail series where evil hillbillies kidnapped Andy, which was a thing that they did on the regular, apparently?

Don’t worry, Mark definitely got some good punching in on that one. Meanwhile, Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot revolved around Ted Pearse, a cool and mysterious new basketball prodigy in town who turned out to be homeless, which prompted fans of rival teams to literally dress up as hobos to taunt him.

(Earlier Ted’s friends pretended he had a terrible disease, to make him feel loved? I don’t really understand sports or how men typically relate to each other, guys.)

But 2005-6 was definitely, definitely the the year of Rex and Troy.

Troy was another doctor who tracked down Rex and they had the flirtiest conversation that ever flirted, which I reproduce here in its entirety:

The flirting continued:

They played some golf, or something, and Rex couldn’t stop talking about it the next day:

Then they played more golf and talked about universal health insurance, and were going to start some do-gooder clinic together, but then, uh, Troy turned out to not be a real doctor and fled town to avoid arrest, the end. Rex had to go back to his sham of a marriage/life, but he will always, always remember.

TOMORROW: Who could possibly top the list of the 2006-07 year out of numerous OK I can’t even finish this, it is Aldo, obviously it is Aldo, but tune in anyway to see the runners up. And if you don’t know who Aldo is, prepare for amazement!