Where I am, and where I’m not
If the earth had not shook, I would be in Vina del Mar, Chile right now. I would be tired, watching people play poker, and writing about it with all my heart. I’d be...
Category: Suburban warrior
Reject
I asked a lot of people to marry me when I was in second grade. I never learned to fight very well, so I tried my best to love. Hence, the proposals. I don’t...
Bracketology with a five year-old
That I can win anything in the world of sports prediction is a testament to its ridiculousness. I am not a sports bettor, like those guys seen in an Oddsmonkey review. There’s nothing wrong...
Mastodon Weekend deconstructed
“He probably has a whole generation of writers getting drunk and wondering why they can’t write like that.” –Roger Ebert on Charles Bukowski. In sitcoms the sound of a screeching phonograph needle has taken...
Devolved again
Part of taking a few days to spend with a couple dozen of you closest friends is that you need a few days to rest and and catch up on real life after it’s...
2010 Mastodon Weekend
This morning I awoke to a text from Al. “Bad beat,” he wrote. “Room won’t be ready until 3pm.” He’d been on the road all night and hadn’t slept. The hotel at which he...
The omnivore and the vegan
I was tired when my friend Feldman asked me to do him a favor. “All you have to do is ask Daniel Negreanu a question,” he said. “It can be anything you want.” If...
February minutiae
This 28-day month thing really needs to change. If I were February, I would insist the short-month responsibility work on some rotational basis in which the short month got passed around. June gets awfully...
The Brett Favre of parenting
Guilt is a byproduct of selfishness. Guilt, that tightness around the heart and lump in the throat, reminds us that, but for satisfying our own wants and desires, we might not have overlooked something...
On pretense and population
The reason it’s so easy to remember that people largely suck and are more often than not idiots is because there are so many of them. This is as evident in Chinese smog as...
It’s what we do
It’s chilly out–somewhere in the 40s–and we’re not wearing jackets. The Super Bowl will kick off in two hours.The boy and I stand across from each other and he screams, “Run!” And so I...
January analytics
I’ve found that quests for personal betterment are usually easy to derail with a little unconscious rationalization. A little concession here, a little laziness there. By the time August rolls around, it’s easy to...
Lost letters
I was cleaning up my laptop this week when I ran across something that bore my younger son’s name. I didn’t remember creating the document, and when I opened it up I didn’t recognize...
Picture your year
The problem with Shane getting back into blogging (and knocking off the rust much faster than any writer should be allowed) is that I am back to living inside my head a lot. One...