I REALLY don't have time for this...

...but I do it anyway. I didn't watch a single play of today's NFL action. That's unusual, but not unprecedented. But when I got home from the obligatory weekend Costco run this afternoon, I dutifully checked the scores as soon as I could manage, without leaving one of my daughters digging through household cleaners or swan diving off the sofa. Why?

Why? Why? I don't really know. Force of habit? It's not genuine devotion to a single team - my team (Bengals) is so poorly run that I've been lukewarm at best to their existence since about 1991. I've been following the NFL pretty strongly since I was five, or for 36 years. But, most of the time, I like basketball, golf, and baseball better. (baseball? really? well, I guess so...) But whatever is going on right now, on every Sunday I can remember...I follow it.

When I say I REALLY don't have time for this, well, I guess time is what you make of it. I wish I had the drive or discipline to make my business run better or write something brilliant or clean up my garage instead of checking to see if Adrian Peterson ran for 300 yards. (192, not bad) This was, for me, a pretty ho-hum weekend for football - Bengals bye week (whew!), the Browns gaffed on Thursday, nothing really compelling. I'm not a fantasy geek, errrrrr, player, either - I've managed not to get hooked into that. But still I check.

Now I never sit down and watch an entire game. Three or four times a season I go out with a couple friends (also Dads with small children) for MNF, but that's something I never did before - it's more situational and more about going out than the actual football, for me, anyway. If my wife goes shopping on a Sunday, and happens to take one or two of the girls with her, I might watch for a while. A friend of mine is actually getting to do some play-by-play for Fox now, and I watched about 1.5 quarters of him doing the Eagles at Seattle last weekend. Or maybe that was two weeks ago - I can't even remember now. That's the thing - I just fill my head with this stuff, and then it's gone about 15 minutes later. So why bother?

One theory I'm coming up with on the fly is stability. Stability means that even when business is lousy and my financial situation is way worse than at just about any time in my adult life, I know that on every fall Sunday someone will have ran for 133 yards, or caught nine passes for 151, or...done something good that I can really easily understand. I don't even care who it is. And I guess there is comfort, and maybe a little hope, in that.

So what will I write about? Whatever I actually stumble across that 1) I find interesting and 2) I have time to actually observe and think about for a minute. The NFL is what it is, and I will follow it all the way through, but I'm really curious about the Trailblazers this year. They seem to have a lot of interesting and thoughtful personalities, and some weighty expectations, too. Kind of like the incoming Obama administration. (but that's for a different blog!) Most of my friends have the NBA pretty far down on their list, but I've experienced a strange rejuvenation the last couple years. More on that later.