Brad Zellar Justin doesn’t cut it. Every high school football and soccer team in America has a half dozen Justins on its roster, and the name reeks of suburban privilege. It’s a boy-band name, and I’d love to see Justin Morneau go in a different direction. Granted, the big Canuck seems to be doing just fine right … Read more
When he came up through the tunnel, the darkness had not yet lifted and the cicada were still in full damp rattle. The heat had broken in the night, and the coolness was stirring up an apparational moving fog, heavy, moist. The street lights were dropping fuzzed cones of grainy and ineffectual light straight down … Read more
It was Monday morning at Treasure Island casino near Red Wing, somewhere in the vicinity of 5:00 a.m. It was hard to say for certain; I didn’t have a watch, my cell phone was dead, and there were no clocks anywhere. I know the slow, grinding pace of late nights, though, can feel the hours … Read more
“One thing I would never photograph,” Diane Arbus once wrote, “is dogs lying in the mud.” That’s an odd statement coming from a woman who looked so unflinchingly at the weird world around her. Technically there may not be any photographs of dogs lying in the mud in Revelations, the vast retrospective of the photographer’s … Read more
Guillen also told Couch that he has gay friends, attends WNBA games, went to a Madonna concert and plans to go to the Gay Games in Chicago.
This is mine. This. This word. These words. They are mine. They belong to me. Increasingly they may be the only things I can claim with any certainty. They come from me, from the mysteries of my blood, from the contents of my brain, welded together by the sparks traveling in my nerves and up … Read more
Please. Thank you. Preceding or preceded by a transaction with some anonymous servant of convenience, and occasionally involving as well a few other words in the form of a request. For days, sometimes weeks, little more in the way of human conversation. His voice was disppearing further down his throat by the day. He would … Read more
Eureka! Or something perhaps not quite so enthusiastic, but a minor cause for exultation all the same. And why is that? Because the Twins just swept the Red Sox, yes, but also because we’re finally seeing the version of the 2006 team we should have seen back in April. Tony Batista was a bust, and … Read more
Moving books around on the shelves, a quilt of my own making taking shape and standing solid against the wall. All those stories that have both saved and ruined me. This image is somewhere on those shelves: the testicles of Uranus, bobbing in a moon-shattered sea, headed for Cyprus. What a foul and wonderful story. … Read more
I used to think that if I could just get my hands on a sweet potato all my luck would change. If I could just get me some bacon, some butter and eggs, or one of them lollypops. Life’s not so simple, I guess. Boy, did I ever find that out. I was nobody’s rooster, … Read more