The Daily Booger

WHAT IT’S ABOUT

Let me start by addressing the question I get asked most: “Brad, are you truly afraid of spiders?” The answer to that is, yes. I truly do have an irrational fear of being around spiders, or even touching something a spider has touched, or even being in a room similar to one a spider is rumored to have once been. I don’t know why, but I’ve had a loathing of all things arachnid since I was a little kid. This isn’t abnormal, everyone has an irrational fear of some sort, what sets me apart is that not everyone talks about theirs as much as I do.

The other question I get asked a lot is if I have any shame in me at all for blatantly ripping off the legendary humor author Dave Barry, while still failing to be funny despite the depth of the humor well from which I plagiarize. And the answer to this is, not really.

The thing is, Dave Barry is not an author, he is a genre of writing, albeit a genre of writing based heavily on booger jokes. He is not a sole man who spent years of his life at a desk, trying desperately to dream up some new way of incorporating the phrase “weasel booger” into his overdue newspaper column so that he could get to the bar early, he is the answer to the inner, weary, and yet light-hearted voice of a million human beings crying out for some comedic relief in their dreary, repetitive lives. And he wrote for millions of people doing just that. He amused them, he challenged them, he united them, he offended a lot of them, and he did a lot of it sitting in his underwear eating onion dip straight out of the container.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy trying to be funny, and I enjoy Dave Barry. That, coupled with the fact that I hope he never finds me out, is what brought about the The Daily Booger.

As its name suggests, I publish a fresh new article to The Daily Booger every month or so, if I feel like it. I provide spider updates as they occur and I feel the need to whine about it. Feel free to correlate the number of spider updates I post with my blood pressure, mental health, and overall well being. (Note to life insurance agent: Just kidding.) (Note to readers: Not really.)

HOW IT STARTED

I’ve read a lot, lot, lot of Dave Barry’s columns and books over the years and I’ve grown to love his writing persona. I’ve incorporated a lot of him into my daily life, mostly in the realm of humor. Whenever I try to say or write something funny, I do it Dave style.

Before I started The Daily Booger, I’d written some humor articles on various topics here and there and distributed them to a few people via different avenues. Feedback was usually somewhat positive and I would be encouraged enough to try another humor piece again at some later time. Over time, I was told by a few people that I should “write more” humor articles, as apparently I had the somewhat consistent knack for making some people chuckle. But I was never sure exactly how I would “write more” because I had two problems.

The first problem was that I wasn’t sure how to distribute the articles I would write. I wanted a central location for them so for a while I just put them in a subcategory on my personal website — it wouldn’t do for any serious writing endeavor but it sufficed for just storing a couple so that I could give people links to them. Once I decided to commit to writing humor articles on a somewhat consistent basis, this problem was solved by starting a blog devoted purely to my articles.

The second problem was that if I were to start consistently writing humor articles, as it is with any type of writing, I would need a consistent writing persona. As it turns out, finding a writing persona isn’t easy, especially for humor. As I tried to develop a persona, I carefully experimented with using various personas in my humor, from articles to casual conversation, trying to find something that was a) funny, b) I personally enjoyed, and c) was close to my true personality. I tried a lot of weird persona variants but couldn’t find anything I liked well enough to stick with. The only persona I tried that satisfied my three criteria was where I just blatantly ripped off Dave Barry. This problem was solved by just blatantly ripping off Dave Barry.

However, the Daily Booger is, sort of, my tribute to Dave Barry. He went into retirement after a prolific writing career when he did so that he could stop on a high note “while [he] still thought he was funny”. Having spent his life building the persona and reputation for being a humor guru that he had, he obviously didn’t want to continue writing humor articles until he was so old his keyboard would malfunction daily from drool. Which is perfectly understandable. I, however, have no such persona or reputation for being a humor guru to risk, so I figured why not.

THE NAME

If you’re well versed in your Dave Barry literature, the name should make sense. I mean this in the sense of not really making sense, but still fitting Dave Barry’s style. It’s my tribute to him. You veteran Dave readers know what I mean.

EXPECTED CONTENT

In this blog, I plan write on anything and/or everything, whichever requires the least amount of work. An interesting aspect of Dave Barry’s literary career that encouraged me to start this blog was that he was probably the only professional newspaper columnist who could get away with writing about whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and could make stuff up without having anyone so much as raise an eyebrow. Well, OK, so can presidential election reporters, but they have to later run around blaming “sources” and “bad data” — time that Dave Barry spends opening a new jar of onion dip. But the idea of being restricted by absolutely nothing, including actual facts, in one’s writing is appealing, so that’s the road I’m taking with this blog. I promise to write about nothing specific, and don’t promise not to write about anything specific. I also promise to not write about anything not specifically non-specific, unless it is not too non-specific for my specific guidelines. In which case I may (or may not) write about it anyway, just for yucks.

That said, anything is fair game for this blog, so please remember that nothing I say is in a hostile tone. I try to keep everything light-hearted and humorous. Just because I say that your favorite music sucks does not mean that you personally suck, it just means that you have really poor taste in music.

SPIDER UPDATES

I really hate spiders, as I mentioned at the top of this page, and I get a bit of comic material from my encounters with them so I’ve given them their own category of updates. They’re not as “well-developed” as my normal articles (humor me enough to call my articles “well-developed”), they’re basically just little updates I write quickly after particularly interesting spider encounters.

FOR THOSE OF YOU UNFAMILIAR WITH DAVE BARRY

For those unfamiliar with this “Dave Barry” I keep mentioning, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning legendary humor writer. Now semi-retired, he made his humor career writing a weekly humor column for the Miami Herald and publishing humor books. He even had a brief TV series based on his writing. Check his website for more information on him, including some of his articles.

Almost 100% of my writing style is ripped off shamelessly from him. Presuming you’ve read some of this blog, go read a few of his columns or, better yet, buy one of his books (I’m hoping that plugs like this will keep me out of legal trouble) and you’ll definitely see that the only difference between his writing style and mine is that his style is actually funny, whereas my style sounds like a cheap knock-off of his, which it is. Writing style aside, I rip off a lot of his trademark phrases, as well as a lot of specific one-liners from various articles and books that I find amusing.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dave’s writing you can still read this site, but the corniness of it will be lost on you. Which may or may not actually be a good thing.

Also, keep in mind that, no matter what you read on this blog, I am not making any of it up.