Loosening things up ... this blog doesn't all have to be gloom and doom. Blog what I want. I don't want to attract any traffic here, which I know is a contradiction because, well, it's a fucking blog! I have a public blog on the internet to which I don't want people to come!

That's actually exactly right. I live in a thin, limbo space where I want to get things out, but I don't necessarily want them received.

I've been blog-surfing masochistically, finding myself on countless mind-numbing family blogs about Christians, kids and cooking, while also realizing the inordinate amount of incomparably boring running blogs on the web that make me want to put my fist through my laptop screen.

My blog isn't a running blog or a cycling blog, it's not a "theme" blog, but I run and ride, and I'll blog about runs and rides, knowing full well the subject matter might be incomparably boring to some.

One blog I found on its most recent pages looked like a running blog, detailing achievement and progress, but at first blush there were also posts that were frank, funny, and crude – instantly promising. I also found his running posts interesting, which gave me hope that maybe my running/cycling posts aren't total snoozers.

And ... I'm faster than him, hehe. At least over 3 miles, up to which we're comparable. Until I stopped running in May because of shin splints, I was pretty sure I could do a 10k at around 7:30 miles, or 45 minutes.

But reading back through his blog, he started it with a different and hilarious premise. It started with family memories based on quotes he and his two brothers remembered their father saying when they were growing up. Their father was no prince of the punks, either. He sounded like a foul-mouthed beer-swilling redneck Texas hick, but raised 3 incredibly sensible, observant and intelligent sons.

As he himself mentions, people seemed more interested in the back stories of the quotes, or his version of the back stories, than his own treatment of them, inserting them into Peanuts comics. And his brothers also offer their takes on his stories in the comments.

I guess the attraction for me is that I think it would be interesting to do that with my brothers. Or not. Because my parents weren't colorful characters, and many memories of growing up that we might have to share couldn't be spun in a humorous manner.

There wasn't anything between us and our parents, like "Don't get yerself killed, boy", that could later be interpreted as the best form of affectionate expression one's father could give. My father taught me to play pool, parallel park, and how to quickly memorize the 9s on the multiplication table. That's it.

And with me and my brothers, it would never be the three of us. I'll discuss the other brother with one of them, but that's it, and mostly to give some other third person a picture of what our upbringing was like, and rarely is there any hilarity involved.

That's also to be buffered by my oldest brother having turned out to be very good-natured, kind, conscientious and likable, and my older brother to previously have been the funniest among us. He could always find the funniest aspect of a story or find a funny way to express it. Not now so much, as he's become boring and complacent in normative family life, but he was naturally funny and that doesn't go away.

In the end, that's it for me. The stories we have, the stories we tell, our memories. Those are the blogs I'm looking for.