Lost in Transnation

An occasional quirk of mine is shopping on tranny sites. I have the face of a glum Norwegian logger, and between doing a physical job and living at the gym, I don’t play dress-up very often. When the occasion arises — about once a year, usually a Christmas party — I’m a deer in the [...]

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Is it Just Me…

or is it totally fucked when grown adults in these our United States are so frantic to get into a holiday sale that some poor temp gets his ass trampled to death just trying to get the door open at Wal-Mart?
This is the sort of thing that happens to benighted superstitious illiterates importuning the gods [...]

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Oh, What the Hell

You know how one thing leads to another? There is a panda-like, absurdly young engineer who once came across this shirt while helping me chuck out a load of stuff that had quietly passed its sell-by date in the recesses of my cupboards and storage areas. He refused to believe I had ever actually worn [...]

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Palaestra Flashbacks

An occasional hilarious spectacle in the gym is that of some old musclehead mentoring a younger musclehead-wannabe in the art and science of hoisting weights, with a grave ceremony more appropriate to instruction in religious or military ritual.
It’s not that I scoff at this kind of instruction, it simply cracks me up when Father Feeney [...]

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F*** YOU TURKEYS

Actually, I don’t have a thing against turkeys. Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey for the national bird of the United States, saying that it was, compared to the Bald Eagle, “a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, [...]

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Yeats Said It

…far better than I can.
Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist…
in the summer of 2004 I carried a winsome, roguish young fellow out of his 8th grade graduation ceremony (it made quite the picture as I toted him to the buffet [...]

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The Romance of Science

Among the many things I have always wanted and never quite sprung for, I list a poster of the Periodic Table of the Elements. My interests have yawed from science to poetry and back, and the Periodic Table has both, if you pay attention to the symmetry of the elemental octaves and imagine the dance [...]

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Cosmopolitanity

Jesus Christ.
I just took a moment between appointments and zipped over to the local Whole Paycheck Foods, as she is known in these parts. They had a discount going on kombucha, which is a kind of fermented tea that I can’t quite manage to make myself without the culture going south. I don’t like to [...]

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The Emperor’s Musician

This is sad and beautiful. A big chunk of Seattle turned out this week, wearing goofy hats, at a memorial service for an otherwise unemployed street busker who played the tuba around the city, in front of the opera house and at sporting events. Grown men cried.
Maybe my heart catches on this because of my [...]

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The Spirit of Giving

Every once in a while I kick it around with Stiletto’s old trainer in the gym and I never fail to give him a little shit.
Yesterday he suggested that my Manta Ray squat pad resembled an internal contraceptive device, and I said it wasn’t but that I might be prepared to insert it upon his [...]

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