David Foster Wallace gave me the best writing lesson I ever had in less than four seconds. It was the mid-90’s and he was a professor at Illinois State University and I’d often talk to him in the halls, rambling about tennis or books while he listened politely. When I first met him, I had no
My grandparents took me to Hawaii when I was eight. We all wore matching blue floral shirts to a Don Ho show at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Before the concert started, a man in an E.T. mask came up and asked us if I could be part of the show. We said yes. E.T. told
In Spring of 2009 I half-heartedly ran for RI City Council. Knocking on doors has never been my thing, and the incumbent was a decent man. It was an experiment as I was just starting to write the Lane Evans bio and wanted to see what it was like to run for office. And frankly,
Last spring one of my best friends from St. Louis came to visit me. We gave each other a handshake, exchanged pleasantries, and then sat on my patio to chat and watch the birds. “Did I tell you about dressing up as Elvis for the St. Patrick’s Day parade?” I asked. “Yeah,” he smiled. “Well kind of,
Are all artists are now ice sculptors? We create, they admire, and then its gone. A stadium of poets screaming our verses to a single fan on the field. No true permanence in the land of distraction. Fifteen minutes turned to seconds. The Tweets of Wrath. Why does a sand sculptor create, despite the tide? It can be for
Duke: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Seriously. That night Duke came into my life. He had been living in my grandparents ravine for two weeks. I’d left out trays of meat and kibble doused with bacon grease. Slowly bringing the dish closer and closer to our house each night, hoping to lull him into
When I was about fifteen years old, I read Larry Bird’s biography. It said that he started “hitting his shots” when he was fourteen. It made me practice alone in a neighbors driveway everyday for the next year. But I never did master the jumpshot. It made me realize though, that we read biographies of
