I just read Amy Tan's "Virgin Blogger Moment." She began by noting she had never written a blog entry before and wasn't even sure what blogs are.

This is my first blog entry, too, outside of a dry run I wrote here a couple of days ago, just to see if I was using the software correctly. I doubt anyone read it. Anyway my sense of blogs is that there are no rules, that you can write whatever the hell you feel like writing.

So this is what I'm thinking about:

Earlier today I was watching the Chargers-Titans game on the tube. My ten-year-old daughter came into the room and asked which team I wanted to win. "The Chargers," I said, without hesitation, though we do not live in San Diego and I do not consider myself a fan.

"How come?" she asked.

"They used to be my cousin's favorite team." Then I had to tell her something about my cousin.

This was the second time in the last month I've had to tell this story. The first was while I was being considered for jury duty in Boulder County, Colorado, where I live. It was for a high-profile case, a criminal trial involving the death of an infant, and I did not want to serve on that jury. It would be too disruptive, I thought, and the details are too ugly. For about a day and a half, though, I was in the jury pool, enduring a lengthy screening process.

The prosecutor and the defense attorney each had several hours to address the assembled, would-be jurors and ask a series of questions. Some of the questions were perfunctory, like name-age-occupation, while others hardly seemed germane, like, "Which is better: college football, or pro?" This one was asked of a juror (not me) who had listed "Watching football on TV" as a favorite thing to do — something asked on one of several questionnaires each of us had to fill out.

At one point the defense attorney asked if any of us had ever been the victim of a crime, or known anyone who’d been a crime victim. A number of hands went up. One of the potential jurors described how her neighbor’s kid was struck and killed by a hit and run driver in a gas station. Another described how his cousin had been brutally murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

“What happened?” the defense attorney asked.

“Oh, this guy, this ex-boyfriend – I’m choosing my words carefully, but believe me I have some much harsher words I could use – he came to her apartment one night on some pretext or other, said he’d left something when he moved out a week or so before, and wanted to get it. So she let him in. And when her back was turned, he hit her with a hammer, which he had brought along for that very purpose.”

“When did that happen?” he asked.

And the juror, who happened to be me, replied, “Six years and one month ago.”

“Six years and one month,” the defense attorney repeated, slowly. “So you never forget.”

“Six years, one month and ten days,” I said by way of reply.

“You’re that clear on it?”

“It happened on her birthday.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head in empathy. “And what happened to the man?”

“Well, he was caught right away. It was an open and shut case. He got life in prison. I’m opposed to capital punishment. But I’m wishing him a very long and miserable life behind bars.”

I was excused from jury duty. Whether the story of my cousin's senseless murder played into that, I don't know.

I gave my daughter a sanitized version of the story of my cousin's death, the Reader's Digest, G-rated version. She hugged me; she has a very big heart.

The Chargers won the game.

I don't feel like writing any more. That's one thing about blogs, I guess. You can dump out whenever you choose.