During my first semester of college, in between learning to catch a screaming frisbee behind my back (I should have been in class) and drinking unfathomable amounts of beer (I probably should have been studying), I wandered through a slightly advanced English class — trust me, it wasn’t that advanced — in which I was… Read More If At First …
One late July day in 1999, months after the end to another spectacular season in his Hall of Fame career and just weeks before he was to report back to Detroit for his 11th year in pro football, Barry Sanders fired off a fax (remember those?) to his hometown newspaper (remember those?). “Today,” Sanders wrote,… Read More That Time
The most amazing person I’ve ever met in decades of interviewing people — easily thousands of people; astronauts and farmworkers, scientists and salesmen, doctors and lawyers, tons of professional athletes, and at least one real life cowboy — was a 93-year-old woman with a beehive hairdo who could talk the hair off your head and… Read More Magda
When the topic of my high school athletic career is raised, certainly never by anyone but me, I don’t gin up some story of teen glory. I don’t pretend I was a scrappy point guard on the basketball team, or a good-glove no-hit cog on the baseball team, or (as if anyone would believe it)… Read More Fathers, Sons & Brothers
The whole idea of needles, when you stop to think about it (which I’m already realizing is probably not something you want to do), is pretty medieval. Throw in the slightly kooky concept of vaccines — which are often, but not always, an actual smidgen of the very sickness that you’re trying to avoid —… Read More Coming Out
Anniversaries always provide a convenient time to reflect, especially so now that we’re all trapped helplessly inside our homes while a fricking virus ravages the world outside. Sorry. Venting. Won’t happen again. Positive thoughts, everybody. Positive. While trying to keep from going hair-ripping, batguano crazy recently — I usually do this by researching and writing… Read More 25 Years Inside the Internet
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