Game-set-match

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Dear Head Coach of Women’s Volleyball at Mercer University,

I like volleyball a lot. What may be beside the point is the fact me and my friend Dustin used to partake in spicy burgers in the beer garden at this pub called the Mash Ton in North Portland on Tuesdays in the summers. His friend Shane (yes, another Shane) one day took a photo using a slow shutter speed — many moons later this photo appeared on a website. It appeared that Dustin’s hand was huge and coming out of his shorts holding an oversized glass of beer. I'm there staring off into space in a Chug Life tanktop perfect for wearing to volleyball practice. It’s true I had no clue. I didn’t know what was going on. All in a good fun, as the kids say. I am 43 years-old. I will be sixty in 17 years. The barmaid at the Mash Ton had what you would call a volleyball player’s build. Blonde, probably six-foot-two. We struck up a friendship on a first-name basis. Sarah was her name.

Tell the girls I am out of a job and I have a big heart. A starter for Mt Hood Community College back in the day tells you I’m sporty (Go Raiders). Until one day number 24 (yours truly) tore his hamstring trying to touch his toes during tip-off. He managed to draw a charge before they pulled him and sent him back to the hotel with a bag of McDonalds in one hand and some ice in the other. He fell asleep watching Quantum Leap with his legs up.

That was 23 years ago.

Today, I remain a sizable entity, who despite an infected cuticle, has good court coverage. I have watched the sport from afar, using binoculars mainly, and I have watched the sport up close where the images of ladies in kneepads blur like hillsides from the window of a train. I know the ins and outs. A picture I rapaciously return to is that of five babes in a crouch with their knees bent. I’m like “here comes the white leathery orb, girls! Extend those arms, Bump!”

Volleyball’s a good sport and this should be a lot of fun.

Wallace Shawn talked to Mark Strand

STRAND 

Well, when I read poetry I can’t imagine that what’s in the reader’s head is ever what was in the poet’s head, because there’s usually very little in the poet’s head. 

SHAWN 

You mean . . . 

STRAND 

 I mean, I think the reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn’t try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for. It doesn’t ask you to imagine a place in detail; it suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

from McGuane's The Rescue

He is a big dramatic-looking man, and he was dressed for a wonderful idea he had had the previous evening

Today's Epitaph

Today, in sun, I must look a hard sixty, not my usual forty-three.
Allan Gurganus

Perfect sentiment

Who would you want to write your life story? My wife, Rebecca Wilson, because she loves the ongoing comedy and understood my mum and dad. - Geoff Dyer

Couldn't I just tell you

I was walking the other day, actually it was yesterday, no pardon me it was a few minutes ago and I had a deluge of ideas for this story that begins the day after the narrator puts his dog to sleep and these ideas encompass the entire story including how the dog died actually poisoned by his neighbor George, a struggling writer out of bitterness because the narrator had thought George was terrible and should be doing other things with his life and I thought this is so great, but of course I had forgotten not just my papers, but my pocket journal as well and then by the time i got home I thought the whole thing was crap anyways for all the same reasons that Saunder's outlines here:

"And yes – I always say I try not to write with a definite intention, and that is true. But lately it’s occurred to me that one of the reasons I’m so emphatic about that is to counterbalance my very natural tendency to write with a definite (dogmatic) intention, i.e., to know too well where I’m going. It’s sort of an autocorrect I’m doing on myself to counteract what I know is a lazy or preachy tendency, that doomed a lot of my apprentice stories to lying flat on the page."

 

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-george-saunders/

by the way the fact that the neighbor is named george is just a coincidence.

McGuane on Brautigan

"Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

The soil spoke, at that thing in the wood's bidding

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·      to thrive on an ambience that can't be beat!

·      to feel good!

·      to travel vicariously myself

·      to think living at a hotel is great!

Flaming American at BMA

"His model for Flaming American was a swimmer from Yale whom Hartley met
when staying with the young man's aunt and uncle during the summer of 1939."

6th of July Dunkfest, Baltimore

sponsored by Love and the Eye by the (inestimably) classy Laura Newbern

Lightning storm from my window

The White Alb

Manzarek ate a hardboiled egg. - Joan Didion

Hangover haiku

I am a wienie
had to make a martini
and now I'm sorted.

Son talks to mom

My Secret History

A cyclist went past and cleared his throat and spat a squirt of red betel juice at us, just missing Eden's dress. Eden did not see it as hostility. The man was just a bumpkin on a bike."

- Paul Theroux

I just googled our names and this came up

"those bodacious dudes have an excellent time playing games with death"

cliffhanger

"by the end the only thing I wanted to know was how Wordsworth was going to help that poor soul with his asshole"

News from nowhere

Bit scary not having my team of poets to back me up on this one, Marty. Just me and the Chilean anti-poet and my indefatigable sloth.

A great image

Sometimes I think of my dad in the summer. He’s in the backyard sitting under the small leaf maple tree eating a hot dog with sauerkraut and watching the hummingbirds. They buzz across the suburban lawn shining in the sparkle of the sprinkler’s rainbow mist.