Brad Zellar The kind of thing that always happens to me is I’ll go to the store to buy a book on what happened when and I’ll get lost and confused once I get there, forget what I drove out there for, and end up with a book on how to cook things in fifteen minutes, which … Read more
The day the world ended, God sat quietly alone in a huge room, alternately dozing off and turning the pages of a fat scrapbook. God could remember everything, and this no doubt saddened Him. Far below Him there were, here and there, people floating in boats and still –many of them, anyway– praying. There were … Read more
Never quite the bottom, and still rising. That old mystery: buoyancy. The body’s ability to float, the mind similarly gifted. Emerging in a green world, seemingly intent on growing ever greener. The clear, bright splendor of other blooming and glistening things. The furtive kingdom, underworld, underfoot, moving in the shadows at midnight, creeping in the … Read more
–Illustration by James Dankert The things a guy will do for a free burrito. It’s humiliating, but a deal’s a deal, even when it’s not much of a deal. A couple weeks ago I insisted I wouldn’t write a damn word until the Twins clawed their way to .500. When it became apparent that that … Read more
There were three of them, crowded into the front seat of a Volvo station wagon that had 150,000 miles on the odometer. They were angels, and they liked to drive with the windows down and the music loud. They seldom had disagreements about the music; all of them shared a taste for early Elvis Costello, … Read more
He had gone up in his rocket again and again and returned to earth each time with a renewed sense of wonder. Even so, with each return it was harder to come back down. Or, rather, it was harder to be down. He’d gradually grown accustomed to the feeling of being out of this world, … Read more
For years I lived in a rooming house where I shared a bathroom with a giant and a mermaid. The mermaid spent a lot of time in the bathtub. The giant had dodgy hygiene, generally poor social skills, and a full head of bright red hair. There was often discussion around the place as to … Read more
While I’m waiting on Uncle Jumbo I’ll pose this question: Have there been any Dick Such sightings in or around the Metrodome lately? Because I’m really struggling to understand the Twins’ 5.44 ERA and the abysmal performances of Brad Radke, Carlos Silva, and Kyle Lohse. It’s not such a struggle, really, to understand the Lohse … Read more
The rooms in the labyrinth beneath the Christ the King retreat center in Buffalo, Minnesota, are sparsely decorated with religious iconography, and the place has a settled, monastic atmosphere of tranquility. Located on a quiet edge of town, on a bluff overlooking Buffalo Lake, Christ the King advertises itself as a “sacred place for meditation … Read more
He needed to get rid of some of this shit –the books and magazines, the photographs of his war and the places he’d been and the things he’d seen. He needed to get out from under that story; it kept things too fresh for him, even as what he had actually experienced became more unreal … Read more