Learning How to Lose
This was not how I understood myself. I grew up playing everything: basketball, volleyball, soccer, but mostly swimming, where competition felt clean and measurable. You either touched the wall first or you did not.
This was not how I understood myself. I grew up playing everything: basketball, volleyball, soccer, but mostly swimming, where competition felt clean and measurable. You either touched the wall first or you did not.
Anybody who knew Ray knew that Ray liked to do most of the talking. I could never get very far into any of these stories before the conversation turned to something that Ray was more interested in than his influence on me (which, indeed, there was no reason why he should care about this stuff nearly as much as I do). Ray may not have been the best listener, but he always had a lot to say, and what he said made an enormously positive difference in St. Louis.
A brush-up on the toy company’s history points to one simple corporate marketing decision on which this strange trend in crime rests: the death of child’s play, and the rise of adult hobby obsession.
Poetry is a different embodiment in words of the experience of being human. AI does not (yet) understand the mysteries, perspectives, uncertainties, and feelings—the experience itself—of inhabiting a body in the physical world.
The impulse is to think that someone who makes plans for something else also helps bring it about. That fantasy does not seem to be doing us much good as a body politic, but the idea has taken root everywhere, including at Department of State.
Five years. That allotment sounds like a breather, but in fact is not. The plastic jug of GaviLyte is the bell that tolls for me, and also perhaps for thee.
You know how in family obituaries they sometimes single someone out as a “special aunt,” or “special cousin” or “special nephew”? I had that kind of special relationship with a dog one time, a dog I dogsat down to her very last day. It is this feeling of wanting to remember Nala dog that has me telling dog tales today.
I found the book in a box in a storage locker just as I was writing a recent piece about a murderer. The amazing thing, the admirable thing, is that William Steig channeled his deep feeling into art over a very long life. The murder stayed in his dreams.
I could imagine generations of soccer players moving into this apartment with a coffeemaker, a fondue pot, a meat thermometer, what have you, then moving out and leaving it all behind. Since the landlord never inspected the place, there was no need for anyone to ever leave with anything that they did not want to take with them.
The Cardinals under Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog (nicknamed the White Rat) were the daredevils of St. Louis in the 1980s, our biggest disappointments and our greatest heroes. St. Louisans lived and died for the guys who wore the birds on the bat. And this era was named for the style that the Cardinals brought to the game, Whiteyball.