In the ‘design’ screen when I was setting up my blog, an advice panel on the side told me to think of a catchy title. I tried to think of a pun on my name but all I could think of was ‘Dave’s Blog,’ which is crap, and is in fact one of the titles that they suggest you avoid (whoever ‘they’ are, the mysterious folk who seem to preside over internet content). Of course, the beauty of a blog is that it’s unedited, so I can call it what I want, but I guess if I want people to read it then I should follow a professional’s opinion. Do I want anyone to read it? What the hell’s a blogging professional anyway?

I went with ‘Dave’s Blog’. Sod it, I thought, I don’t care anyway, I only started the bloody thing to get some of my thoughts down and now I don’t seem to have any thoughts. For inspiration I had a look on flickr.com, which is (apparently) almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. This is where you find blogs with photos instead of words, which I thought might be a better option seeing as I live in a picturesque city and own a digital camera. On it I found a thread that consists of pictures of things that people keep in their bags. It was pointless and boring but I found myself running through the slideshow anyway. Most people had iPods in there, obviously, and some who were trying to look cool had a notebook and pencil, as if they were some kind of writer. Nobody really keeps a notepad and pencil in their bag these days.

It’s made me want to look in my own bag to see if there’s anything of note. There’s not. I have a few torn up bits of paper with scribbled notes on, a Tupperware tub that contained Spaghetti Bolognese last week and now smells disgusting, a pen, a photograph of Becky, my car keys and an empty Ribena bottle from when I played squash with my brother in law, Chris, last week when we had that fight.

It was a stupid fight and we both apologised afterwards. We were in the heat of the game, I was three points up on him but he was playing me off the court so he was pissed off that I was getting all the luck. I dinked one to the front wall and he ran all the way from the back of the court to reach it, only managing to drop it in front of my feet. It bounced up nicely and I rolled back my shoulder to bury the point. There’s no way that I aimed the shot at Chris. I thought that he would do his best to get further away from the wall, but I had no idea that he would turn around. I hit it in his direction with the intention that the ball would fly past him too close for his reactions. He turned around, which is a cardinal sin when you’re playing squash. Never face the shot. Never.

He went sprawling on the ground, back against the wall, his hand pressed into his eye socket.

“Shit, Chris,” I shouted, as I dropped my racket and ran towards him.

He was stunned for a minute, then jumped up and grabbed me by my t-shirt.

“What the hell did you think you were doing, you little prick?”

“Come on, Chris.”

“Come on what?” I could smell the sweat on him. He had a rapidly growing red lump just above his eyebrow.

“That looks nasty,” I said, perhaps unhelpfully.

“It canes, for God’s sake.”

“No need for that, mate.”

“Screw you.”

He pushed me forcedly away from him and I fell to the floor.

“Never face the shot,” I said under my breath.

I had never seen him lose his temper before, it was pretty scary. My sister, Emma, is four months pregnant and me and Chris have always got on well, but this was a side to him that I hadn’t seen before. He’s always been pretty sensitive to what I believe too, which makes it all the weirder. The whole thing made me a little wary, and even though he apologised I still made sure I let him win.

I’m looking at the photo of Becky while I’m thinking of all this, wondering whether or not I should scan the picture in and write on the Blog about all the stuff with her. She’s not a part of my life anymore so I’d find it a bit difficult, if I’m honest, because I don’t really feel like she’s mine to write about. A fortnight ago, yes, I’d have no problem with filling the Blogging world in with anything they would want to know, but now even describing her feels a bit wrong. Of course I could give the rough details. I could write about how I’ve always struggled meeting girls because I go to church and all the best ones don’t, and how they all want to have sex with you anyway, which is very much not what I’m after.

I could write about all that but to be honest it’s still a bit raw. I don’t know how people do it, write about all this personal stuff. ‘What is it like to be a not-so-average 30 something woman in the Midwest?’ writes the tagline (which is a term that describes the description at the top of an internet page, look at webglossary.org for more information on such phrases) of one Blog that I found on worldofblogs.com. She goes on, in her latest post, to describe the details of her recent divorce case, with full names and everything. I mean, the guy could sue, some of the stuff she says about him has got to be libel. I found another one in a similar vein (if slightly more private, he’s simply called ‘35 and single!!!’), that charts the life of a recently divorced man. It all makes me a little depressed if I’m honest. Even though she’s shut me firmly out of her life now, I know that Becky wouldn’t be all that impressed if I wrote about her, so I’ll definitely give it a miss.

My phone is vibrating on the desk next to me. It’s Chris, so I think I’ll ignore it.

“I just think you should be careful,” I said to Emma on the phone a few days after the fight at squash.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I don’t want to get into it too much. Just, you know, be careful, that’s all, he might have another side to him that you haven’t seen yet.”

“We’ve been married for four years, David.”

“I know but, with the baby I guess, just, you know.”

“No I don’t know,” she said firmly.

I didn’t know quite what to say, so I stuttered a little.

“Anyway,” she continued. “I would have thought that you’d be the last person I know to be going around judging people.”

“Come on, Emma, I’m just looking out for you.”

“Well, just don’t. Okay?”

Then she hung up. It wasn’t like an argument, that was the strange thing, and if anything I’d say that she seemed annoyed at herself for some reason or other. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s weird, she sounded like she was trying to get something across to me but wasn’t able to. Perhaps he was in the room, threatening her. Perhaps he was threatening to hurt the baby while she was speaking to me, making some kind of obscene hand gesture as a warning of what was to come. I think I’m letting my imagination run away with me.

My Blog’s empty ‘compose’ screen is still staring me in the face. I tried writing a paragraph about not really having anything of interest to say, just as a starter, but I started to bore myself and ended up with just a line of Zs as if the screen had fallen asleep. I flicked through some other Blogs with the aid of a ‘View Random Blog’ function on worldofblogs.com. There was one entitled ‘Only Hot and Fresh Funny Pictures and Jokes’ which hadn’t been updated since June 2001, with only the one entry saying: ‘Welcome to Only Hot and Fresh Funny Pictures and Jokes, we hope you enjoy how this site develops over the coming months.’

You wouldn’t believe how many of these things are written by stay-at-home mothers. Actually I guess it makes sense, they must have a fair chunk of time on their hands during the day whilst the kids are at school. It must be depressing too, spending so much time on your own, which seems to be another factor in the Blogging crowd, them being depressed. They all seem to want to escape from something without really knowing what. Perhaps that’s my problem. There’s nothing that I really want to escape from.

I haven’t found one written by a young person yet. Maybe they are all centralised to a specific Youth Blogging internet server, or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. I bet, actually, what with the nature of youth, a lot of them start a Blog but don’t have the discipline to keep it up. This is most certainly where I will shine. I may not have much to say but I will damn well sit here for an hour or so every night until something pops into my head. The thing is, I guess, I feel like I should have something to say. I’m a twenty-something, I’m actively engaged in a religion with plenty of comments on today’s society, I’ve got an interesting job. There’s loads I should be able to talk about.

To be honest, even though my job is fairly interesting, I don’t want to think about it that much when I’m at home. It’s bad enough when you spend your day hanging around old people, soaking up their smell and their bad habits (like the way I take four sugars in my tea, when I didn’t take any before I started at Oak Hall), even talking like them. Yesterday I found myself saying to mum on the phone, “They just don’t know they’re born do they?” I mean, what the hell was I going on about? I wasn’t even making the comment, it was mum talking about Tommy Roberts shooting air pellets at dad when he was bent over tending to the weeds in the garden. I let out a huge breath of air and said it, then realised what I’d done, made an excuse and hung up the phone.

There’s only one Blog that’s caught my eye since I’ve been surfing and it belongs to a guy called Carlos. Its web domain is hoffmanics.com and it’s one hundred percent dedicated to fictional short stories about David Hasselhoff. They’re all by Carlos, who is thirty-two, from Kansas City, working for a national bank in his home town. There’s no more of an introduction to his character, no list of books or CDs, no likes or dislikes, just the bare bones and three years’ worth of fiction. I read the Blog (which is updated daily, with a new story every day) for hours, swiftly being drawn in by the huge variety of tales about who Carlos affectionately calls ‘The Hoff’. There are some from his Baywatch days, of course, and some charting the rise and rise of his personality in Germany, where people went nuts for his music. Then there are some that describe his later years in semi-retirement, acting occasionally as a television pundit for German sports programming.

Mum wasn’t happy with the way I spoke to Emma, apparently, as she told me on the phone just before I went crazy like an old man and had to hang up.

“You could have been a bit more sensitive,” she said. “You of all people should know about being sensitive.”

“Oh come on mum, what does that mean?”

“You know full well what I mean, David, you’ve made your lifestyle choices and you have to be held account when you go against them.”

“Come on,” I said a little more limply.

“I’m just saying, that’s all.”

“Can we drop it please? I’m tired of all this.”

“Tired of all what?”

“Just drop it.”

“Okay dear,” perhaps she could sense the right time to move on. “You’ll never guess what that bloody Tommy Roberts did to your dad on Saturday.”

It seems that I caught onto Carlos’ Blog at the wrong time. I found it three days ago and I’ve just called it up from my Favorites list to check its daily update. ‘hoffmanics.com is no more!’ it says on the main screen. ‘I’ve decided to pursue other writing projects for now, so check back here in the coming weeks for a more day-to-day diary of what I’m up to.’ Sod that, what a bastard. His was the only Blog that I found with any real integrity, and it genuinely seemed as if he had something that he was passionate to write about, even if it was David Hasselhoff.

My ‘compose’ screen remains empty, as it has done every night this week since I first discovered the world of Blogging and all of its entrapments. I have just written a single sentence, ‘This is a load of chuff,’ but I deleted it because I didn’t think anyone would know what a ‘chuff’ was. In fact, I’m not sure I know what a ‘chuff’ is. Stuff it. My phone is vibrating on the table again. It’s Chris.

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Sam Oborne grew up in the coastal town of Herne Bay but
has recently moved to London and got married. He is
completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Kent
and lives in Putney with his wife.

‘A Line of Zs’ © Sam Oborne, 2007. LITRO is published every
Friday and handed out for free near to London Underground
stations. To get in touch please email litro.fiction@gmail.com
or visit www.litro.co.uk.