Hi, and welcome to my brand new blog! My name is Brent Searle, and I live in the state of Virginia. Not to be confused with The Virginia Ocean, which it will be called if the rain doesn’t stop soon!

Most likely you are wondering about the title “Blargsblog.” I will dedicate this first post to explaining why I chose that name. It all started on a cold, snowy day in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The year was 2006, and I was working for the resort, teaching little rug rats how to ski. I had a day off, so I went snowboarding with my friend Erika.

We were riding the Pony Express chairlift together, and as our chair passed over a ski run, we saw a guy below flying down the mountain. As he skied, he saw a stand of fir trees and must have thought it would be fun to ski through them, because the next thing Erika and I knew, he turned sharply and headed straight for them. The man disappeared from our sight as he entered the thick trees, but we heard him yelling as he lost control and then fell down.

Now, I thought the guy had simply yelled “Aaaaahhh!” Just a plain old, generic yell. Fortunately, Erika’s keen ears were on the job, because she translated the yell as “Blaaarrg!”

And so the term “blarg” was born. The rest of that day, Erika and I must have said “blarg” to each other about a thousand times. Mostly, it was at the beginning of a sentence and spoken like a pirate. For example, “Blarg, matey, where should we ski next?”

Erika and I soon taught the term “blarg” to our friend Amy. She caught on quick, and we were off and running. As the winter wore on, the three of us started using “blarg” more and more. It evolved into an all-purpose word. We even called each other “Blarg.” As you might imagine, communication got a little confusing at times. We would be sitting around the table eating a meal together, for instance, and one of us would say, “Hey Blarg, could you please pass the blarg?”

If you think about it, it’s the same predicament the smurfs used to be in. If you’re around my age (I’m 40), you probably remember lots of Saturday mornings watching the smurfs on TV. Not only were those little guys called smurfs, but they also used the word “smurf” as a substitute for all sorts of other words.

My friends and I knew we couldn’t be outsmurfed by a race of tiny blue creatures. If they could use “smurf” as an all-purpose word, we could do the same with “blarg.” After all, humans should be a lot smarter than smurfs, right? Consider the following comparison: Let’s say you’re a zombie who loves Halloween. In fact, you love Halloween so much that every year about this time you put brain-o-lanterns on your front porch. After you’ve scooped out the gunk from a brain, look at the space in there. You could fit three or four whole smurfs inside a hollowed-out human brain. That’s how much smarter we are.

Now that I’ve explained the name of my blog, my next post will be about its purpose. Don’t worry, all my posts will not have zombies and brains, but it’s October and I couldn’t resist.

Thank you very much for blarging my first blarg.

All the best,
Brent