Not About Page
The Welcome Mat
I want you to imagine that you are walking up to the stoop of a house.
It’s a nice, midwestern, suburban house.
The kind that probably contains 1.5 kids, a golden retriever named Greg, and a “junk drawer” somewhere, probably mostly filled with Bic pens whose caps look like they have been the victims of war crimes.
But you are still on the stoop. So both Greg the Golden and the tortured pen-caps are just hypothetical at this point—figments of your imagination.
But what is not a figment of your imagination is the Welcome mat.
It reads Welcome.
Surprising.
But you walk inside, and in the kitchen (probably decorated in some sort of farmhouse motif), across from the war-crime-concealing junk drawer is a sign on the wall.
The sign features a smattering of sappy phrases in happy fonts, which are probably all named something like Southern Belle, Wisconsin Cowgirl, California Cauliflower, Wingdings, etc. The phrases are so arranged as to make it a bit difficult to determine their proper order, running in disparate directions around the sign, but the odd person who pauses to disentangle their presentation will be rewarded with surprisingly weighty content. It turns out that this plank, first taken to be an unassuming piece of farm deco, turns out to be nothing less than a religious credo and philosophical treatise and domestic-political-manifesto all rolled into one.
In other words, these Southern Belle fonts are apparently conveying nothing less than all the things that residents of this house, apparently, do, say, and believe in.
But mostly just do, used in the manner of an overstretched catch-all verb—as commonly seen in non-denominational church lingo about doing life together.
In this house, we say I love you. We say I’m sorry. We say Make America Great Again. We drink wine in the morning, and coffee in the evening (yep, you heard that right). We do laughter. We do 2nd chances. We do crack cocaine.
You are probably thinking, “this is the weirdest house ever.” And also “what a strange extended metaphor I’m being guided through.”
And you are right, on both levels of narration.
You decide to open up the junk drawer.
Next to the tortured pen caps and a couple of those mega-monstrosity packs of double-A batteries your father buys at Costco, there is an old bottle of pills.
Somewhat concerned—and understandably so, given the cocaine part of the sign—you pick up the bottle to investigate.
The label reads:
Welcome to the Blog about Nothing.
If you’d enjoy a bi-weekly dose of nonsense that might make you laugh and might make you think and will definitely make you feel superior to at least three other people in the world, this product might be for you.
May contain: absurdist humor, self-deprecating stories of social embarrassment, satirical critiques of the ridiculousness of modern life, very occasional dashes of real wisdom or insight (but these often as not get lost in the production process), red dye 40.
Side effects could include diarrhea and constipation. Which seems contradictory, if you sit and think about it. Don't sit and think too hard though, you'll give yourself the last side effect: hemorrhoids.
You think, “this is the weirdest little mind-palace exercise I have ever been a part of. But I feel a sense of heartfelt, surprised gratitude that it did not go in a red-pill-blue-pill direction like I was expecting at the end there.”
And also “why is this narrator controlling my thoughts?”
But then you remember that the narrator is not only controlling your thoughts but also your actions, so you take the pill anyway.
Welcome to the Blog About Nothing. We’re glad you’re here.
Not About Us
Lansing ‘Bud’ Brown
Lansing Brown is a musicophile, Branson City Mini Golf Championship winner, lover of Häagen-Dazs caramel cone ice cream, pickup basketball liability, aspiring New Yorker subscriber, husband, and dog dad. When he isn’t writing, you can find him hosting bar trivia twice a week, chowing down fluffernutter sandwiches, or pretending he understands digital marketing. His second favorite place in the world is holding hands with his wife on the couch at home together, snuggling with his pup, and listening to some Sam Cooke. His first favorite being Cabo.
Christian ‘Bud’ Lingner
Christian Lingner is easy to make fun of because he was homeschooled for much of his life and, as a result, struggles with all types of coordination. He knows what athleticism looks like, and he knows what stylish clothing looks like, but he doesn’t know how to make himself look like that. He likes to play his mandolin (close cousin of a lute) and the guitar (close cousin of the ukulele). He takes long walks around the neighborhood, hands clasped behind his back and head in the clouds, writing poems that rhyme. His wife wants to buy a dog but he has seen too many animals die because he was homeschooled on a farm. He teaches middle schoolers a language they already speak.
Coburn Nicholas ‘Coby’ ‘Bud’ Dolloff
Coby Dolloff is exceptionally skilled at recycling jokes from niche meme pages he saw years ago, passing them off as original material to unsuspecting partygoers. He has even considered scaling this habit into one of those $1-per-minute comedy open mics in L.A. (though that would require leaving the house). He enjoys reading, writing, and informing first dates that he is a "writer"—a revelation that likely triggers financial anxiety across the table. Fortunately, a small California liberal arts university inexplicably pays him to keep up this lifestyle. His blog boasts a devoted readership of adoring fans, most notably his mother. Having spent significant time in Branson, MO, St Andrews, Scotland, and Malibu, CA, his personality is an unsettling blend of all three. If you’ve been talking to him for 30 minutes and he hasn’t quoted G.K. Chesterton or Seinfeld, you are probably talking to someone else. Perhaps one of the adoring fans. He loves nothing more than overexplaining a joke, which is why ChatGPT helped him trim this bio.
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