Mummies With Benefits

I almost did not remember that today, I become the world’s “most typical” person. And today I once again remember too late the stupid anniversary of this website. Moving forward, let’s just combine both days into a single thing so that I am only severely depressed for one horrible day in August, instead of two.

Never would I have thought to write a post like this. Never would I have thought that one day I’d need to write up something commemorating the continued existence of this site, a period that has now exceeded 10 years. To put it another way, The WAMBAG has seen three February 29ths come and go. That is lunacy to me. I keep begging for the sweet release of death to lift this curse from me, but it never comes. At the start, I didn’t even think we’d be able to sustain a level of attention that would go beyond three weeks. I had already felt like this was a joke taken way, WAY too far by the second month, so all this stopped making sense to me ages ago already.

I was just graduating high school back when we started the site (TOGETHER) and were still treating it like a “Welcome to my life!” type Live Journal page or stream of consciousness Twitter feed instead of the diamond sharp, laser focused, professional blog it is today.

I wasn’t even old enough to drink back then. My stance on alcohol was “Well if it’s an acquired taste, why would I ever want to acquire it? Am I right or am I right? Haha!” It’d be years later before I’d even have my first drink (a cider, so like a girl’s beer) and my exact reaction was THIS IS AMAZING I NEED MORE OF THIS FOREVER. Contrast that to today…when I am still 100% sober, and never drink, ever.

A decade of The WAMBAG. That’s weird thing to write out, to see it in text. Ten years…just seems unreal that it’s even possible, how we just haven’t gotten bored of it or just plain forgotten it entirely. Or more accurately…how it’s still survived even after we’ve all long become bored and forgotten about it. It just won’t die.

I don’t really want to make a habit of going back and rereading my own blog posts, because that is a surefire way to waste a few hours getting into a weird and depressing headspace…but whenever I do happen to go back and read some old posts, it’s a weird experience because I can never remember actually writing any of them. This might be because I do most of my work on this site while under the influence of heavy drugs…but who knows for sure? It’s a strange feeling reading all these terribly written posts that are unmistakably in your voice but yet you have no actual memory of writing them. Like getting amnesia and then walking into your room and seeing all these posters up of stuff you know you used to like…only now you are ashamed of them all. (Like…a Jurassic Park poster? Are you serious?) So that’s why I generally like to stay away from the archives…but once a year, for every one of these anniversary posts, I go back and read all of the previous ones. For insight and a sense of history. And also to basically plagiarize myself over and over again because I ran out of new things to say about this whole thing like eight fucking years ago. But with a large enough sample space, interesting trends start to pop up, and I’ll try to illustrate that here with some very selective excerpts…

August 5, 2002

Ladies and gentlemen, The WAMBAG is fully operational.

August 5, 2004

We did good. We DO good.

August 8, 2006

That’s why I love this place.

August 9, 2007

This was an okay year for The WAMBAG, I think.

August 5, 2009

This place is starting to drive me crazy.

August 9, 2010

I have realized now, after years and years, that this will just never stop.

Man…that really takes kind of a bummer of a turn there over the last few years.

None of this really makes sense to me – none of this has ever really made any sense to me – but it is just the way things are now. It is what it is, and I cannot change it, no matter how much or little I care about it. It’s kind of an acquired taste, really. I just cannot imagine why you would ever want to acquire it.

Here’s to another decade.

“if you visit the whambag homepage, you will learn that it is supposed to be stupid. it’s a webzine that’s like the Onion. dumb on purpose.”