( Read more... )

I was halfway through my third rack when I realized I was celebrating Rob's birthday. I can't count the number of weekday nights we wasted shooting pool at V.I.P. in Catonsville. I was shooting straight pool: soft break, try not to break up the pack too much. Knock one ball out of the pack, sink it, and ideally knock another ball out with the ( Read more... )

I organized a dozen friends to go see my favorite acting company, The California Shakespeare Company, put on Macbeth at their beautiful outdoor theatre in the hills east of Berkeley. We've had some cold, cold nights the last couple of weeks, so I was worried we'd be shivering like Scotsmen with damp kilts in October, but a heat wave swept in and ( Read more... )

I spent some time in conversation with a man my age from St. Petersburg two nights ago. His grandfather was the first to spot Gary Powers doing U2 overflights in the 50s. The grandfather was presented a medal, called a hero, and given a 2-bedroom apartment from the government in gratitude ( Read more... )

If you're interested in entering a random drawing for (up to 6) tickets to see the next-to-last shuttle launch, sign up by Monday here ( Read more... )

OSH, a northern california chain of Home Depot-like hardware stores, just aired a radio commercial in which a sober, deep voiced, slow-speaking man discussed their sales-tax-free weekend, "going on all weekend long, just in time to finish your Burning Man project". He went on to discuss their sale on storage sheds and home gardening supplies ( Read more... )

My high school reunion in Las Vegas was lovely and fun and odd all the same. Facebook has managed to put me back in touch with people I knew for 2 years or less 2 decades or more ago (a hazard of the traveling life). I brought my yearbooks from grades 8-10, the years I was living on Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, and it's a good thing. People kept ( Read more... )

Thinking out loud, feel free to carry on by ( Read more... )

It strikes me, as I wait in a lounge in Las Vegas for a reunion to come about, that I have no idea how old I am. Groups of people come and go and I think, Are they part of my group? No, too young. No, too old. Not military enough. Clearly never lived on a postage stamp of an air base in a foreign country in the middle of a cold war. But who am ( Read more... )

Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled, and if you wondered, Wouldn’t writing be rather confusing without it, he would say No, it was like the constant wash and turn of the sea, sounding even more sibilant in Portuguese than in English, or like a journey taken by a traveller ( Read more... )