Category: Yo Ivanhoe

  • Do I Repeat Myself? Very Well, Then, I Repeat Myself

    For many months, on her way to and from school each day, Gloria had paused at the pet shop window to gaze with a combination of adoration and desire at the pretty little accordion nestled there in wood shavings and newspaper confetti. Each night at the dinner table she would beg her parents to let…

  • The (Perhaps Deservedly) Lost Recordings Of Burt Sikorski, DBA The Burt Sugar Trio

    Every town and city has its share of genuine characters and eccentrics, but I think you could say that it’s somewhat easier to get a real feel for the personalities of such characters in a smaller town, where there are so few public secrets and mysteries, and where what might be mere sidewalk spectacle in…

  • An Endless River of Potatoes

    My first night in that shitty motel room in a tiny Wyoming town I was exhausted and wiped out on malt liquor and I slept in my clothes on top of the bedspread. All night I dreamt of potatoes on a conveyor belt, an endless river of potatoes. I’d driven straight through, twenty hours, to…

  • Nothing At All, Really, Like A Bruce Springsteen Song

    Remember that time you threw your heart from the window of a speeding car? Was it burning? No, not that time. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a water balloon coated with grease. It couldn’t have weighed more than a softball, and it bounced once on the shoulder…

  • Tangled

    I have no desire to be a shepherd of men. But, no, that’s not really true. Perhaps there’s nothing I’d like more than to be a shepherd of men, providing the men in question were willing to play the role of sheep. If they are going to insist on being men, however, no thanks; I…

  • The Finish Line: The Black Bus With The Tinted Windows Is Waiting

    Trust me, even when I go away, I’ve got nowhere else to go. I’m always around, a lurker in my own life. The end of the baseball season is always a painful thing for an obsessive/compulsive man who is a complete slave to routine yet has very few habits –with the exception of bad habits–…