I was driving to work this morning, listening to The Loft, my new favorite SiriusXM station. The DJ listed the songs he’d just played, including some before I tuned in. One was Thunder Road by Cowboy Junkies. Holy magic in the night! I didn’t know that existed! I got to work and immediately looked...
Graffiti Building Coming Down
If you’ve driven northbound through St. Louis on I-55, you’ve seen this building. It’s nestled in the curve of the exit ramp that leads you onto the Poplar Street Bridge, and it’s been a point of interest for many years. I’m not sure what it was in its original lifetime, but some time ago...
USA Cross Country Championships
The United States Cross Country Championships were held in Forest Park in St. Louis today. In addition to juniors races and a couple of local races, the big events were the men’s and women’s championships. The top six finishers of those races will travel to the World Cross Country Championships later this year in...
Early Bird: I’ll Gladly Give Up The Worm If You’ll Just Let Me Sleep
My alarm clock hasn’t gone off all year. It’s usually set for something like 5 a.m., but of late I’ve been finding myself awake—wide awake, unrecoverably awake, electrically awake—at about 3:30 every morning. I reach over, turn the alarm off so it doesn’t wake up my wife 90 minutes hence, and get up to...
Yes, January In St. Louis
January 30, 2012. Various tones of black, white and grey; that’s pretty much it for January here. Taken from the gas station on South Broadway just south of downtown as I pumped just a couple of gallons of their overpriced product....
Suited Up
A pair of tights. A skin-tight shirt made of wicking material. Another shirt, also wicking, with long sleeves and an extended neck. A pair of running pants, or “loose tights” as some call them. A nylon windbreaker jacket. A pair of thick gloves. On my head, a thin knit balaclava as well as a...
A Bookless Library?
Bexar County, Texas, is developing a completely bookless library system. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff is an unabashed book lover with 1,000 first editions in his private collection, but even he sees the writing on the wall. Paper books have lost their allure, and future generations may have little use for them, Wolff contends. So when...
Tumbling Through The Year
(Update: I dropped this idea not long after I started it. Just didn’t really care for the Tumblr platform) On Christmas day, I began a new blog. It’s a picture-a-day project on Tumblr; I’m going to try taking and posting one picture every single day for a year. You can find it here. I...
Quoted
Low River Levels Threaten River Commerce I was quoted in the Webster-Kirkwood Times yesterday. The writer made me seem much more eloquent than I really am....
Questions For The Author
Author Jonathan Franzen, in the essay “On Autobiographical Fiction,” part of his 2012 collection Farther Away, writes that whenever a novelist gives a public talk or reading, he or she is invariably asked four “unpleasant questions.” They are, he writes “apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public.” The...