I would have taken it for free, you asshole. Okay, not anymore, unless maybe you held a gun to CL’s head and told me I had to (or else). But I promise you that I will be staring at you, laughing the whole time, making you wonder if I’m seeing smurfs or just playing Final Jeopardy in my pants.

Blogs tend to fit into one a few categories: news, politics, vanity. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two (like the niche storyteller: Waiterrant, Clublife, etc.), but that pretty well lumps them all together. I really like the ones by my friends, those that serve a few purposes: keeping a journal, of sorts (the kind of journal kept by people with interesting lives or, at least, interesting perspectives), and maybe trying to work some thoughts into coherency every now and then, sharing their lives in sort of a mass-mail approach (only the kind that you request, instead of sending to everyone like spam). The important thing that separates the friends that I like from those who I like and read daily is an ability to write — maybe not with perfect grammatical precision or punctuation that would give the Pope a throbbing erection or even vocabularies built from the bones of gods and forgotten worlds, though those things never hurt. If you want me to swing by your blog every day, just write about something that interests me, and tell me a good story, or make me laugh, or both.

My blogroll list of links thing over there to the right will never be huge, mostly because I’m not playing a game with people trading links, or even linking to you just because you’re my friend. Rather, I’m more concerned with turning the random readers — those who get here via Google searches for “amputee prostitute” (seriously, creepy anonymous reader, stop that!), or maybe from blogs that link to me — onto really good, regular, funny reading.

Because, believe it or not, you can tell as much about most people by looking at what they read as you can by looking at what they write.

If you want me to link to you, join MySpace and ask me to put you in my Top 8.  That’s what’s important in life anyway, right?