Brad Zellar Back in my drinking days my stomach would for damn sure be a lousy mess, and my liver would feel like a fat wad of pate throbbing behind my ribs. I couldn’t sleep for shit and I’d be up and down prowling the drafty house all night in the dark, handling the various little talismans … Read more
That, of course, was purportedly legendary whack-job Joaquin Andujar’s favorite word, and it should be the mantra of every fan at this time of the year, when it’s easy to get carried away with the first optimistic rush of spring training. It’s hard, though, not to get carried away. The day pitchers and catchers report … Read more
I don’t know, to be quite honest with you. There does, though, seem to be some confusion on that question, if the handful of puzzled emails I’ve received in the last week are any indication. I’m still trying to get a handle on who stumbles in here, into The Rake‘s little sidecar in cyberspace. I’m … Read more
Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, and dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men. —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons. —Pietro Citati, Kafka One time I was in south … Read more
Welcome to this thing, yet another old thing reconfigured as a new thing. It’ll be mostly about baseball, but I have a wandering mind, so it’ll likely occasionally stray pretty far afield –at some point, I suppose, I’ll feel compelled to talk about other random nonsense as well. Sometimes the random nonsense and the baseball … Read more
Unless you happen to be as rugged as I am—which is, I realize, highly unlikely—you probably aren’t familiar with the Peakbaggers, a loose-knit but increasingly large group of highly motivated self-starters determined to scale the highest points of all fifty states (and, for the true completists among us, the District of Columbia). The Peakbaggers also … Read more
How ashamed must be the loathsome models who wake up in the morning in bed with ZZ Top? In the old bar of my early days as an inebriate there was a mural there on the wall, a tableau of drunken trolls, a forest scene, I seem to remember, a vertitable sprawl of blasted trolls, … Read more
All right, everybody get in line and listen up. I want you gentlemen to get some shut-eye tonight so you can get up and be ready to hump it first thing in the morning. We’ll be traveling seven miles to the east over rugged terrain. Word has it we might be in for some heavy … Read more
Lion, lout, rough beast, sick dog, oracle, and oaf: Hunter S. Thompson, 67 Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who … Read more
I live in Minneapolis, the fiftieth state in the union, known far and wide as the Moon Crater state and Green Grocer to the world. There are over 1000 lakes in Minneapolis, and herds of bearded reindeer in the north country. I’m sorry, Minnesota is the fiftieth state in the union, etc. Minneapolis is the … Read more