I don’t care if you stuff your pockets until it looks like you’re smuggling carburetors. If you’re too macho to carry a bag, that’s your issue. I can imagine how the conversation would go. My father is still alive and it’s Thanksgiving. We’re having dinner at his place. I walk in, say hello to everyone, and he draws a bead on my latest purchase.
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Not everybody loved The Greatest: what Muhammad Ali meant to one racist Southern kid That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer – he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation. – Hunter S. Thompson
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Saturday, June 2, 2012: I drove out to Wolf Camera in Wheat Ridge and bought a Nikon D3100. It was official. I was in the process of retiring from 35 wasted years as a failed poet, and had now decided to learn how to shoot things.
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Spinocerebellar ataxia sucks the joy out of another day… As I have mentioned before, I have a degenerative brain condition. It’s called spinocerebellar ataxia, and is essentially an atrophying of the portion of the brain that coordinates and regulates muscular activity. If you read the details at NIH you’ll probably understand pretty quickly just how nasty it really is. It has
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It was the greatest moment of my life. I attended a high school in rural North Carolina that was probably typical of rural high schools in every way, up to and including the sadistic coach/science teacher archetype. At our school it was Coach Kelly. He ran the wrestling program, was an assistant football coach, and, of course, an educator specializing
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When I was a kid my grandparents and I would sit on the couch and watch television in the evenings. We had all kinds of favorites. Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith, All in the Family, Hee-Haw, Happy Days, The Brady Bunch, The Rockford Files, The Partridge Family, Laverne & Shirley, you name it. Those were great times, even though we only had black and white. And over the air, so usually
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I’m the Forrest Gump of apples. My favorite desserts often involve apples. Apple pie, apple cobbler, apple crisp, apple tarts, baked apples, apple dumplings, stewed apples, apple danish, apple butter, apple kugel, applesauce, apple cake, apple cookies – especially those soft Archways… [sigh] I’m sort of the Forrest Gump of apples. But my childhood was a frustrating one. My grandmother
Read moreThey don’t even know what it is to be a fan. Y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts. – Sapphire, Almost Famous My Last.FM profile says I have played Space Team Electra tracks 1,093 times. But that’s misleading. For starters, Last.FM didn’t launch until three years after the band broke up.
Read moreApril 20, 1999. I remember exactly where I was, exactly what I was doing. My co-worker at US West, Joe Lopez, turned to me and said “hey Sammy, there’s been a shooting at a school down in Littleton.” “Find out everything you can,” I said. I’ll go tell Marti. Marti was Marti Smith, our VP, and thus began some of
Read moreIs José Mourinho an all-time great, or merely the greatest of a generation? Imagine the following scenario. After last year’s Super Bowl win the New England Patriots enter the 2015-16 season as strong contenders to repeat. However, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, they come out of the gate slowly, losing a series of games they’d be expected to win.
Read moreIt’s been a strange couple of years. In August 2013 I moved to Seattle to take a new job. I was leaving the city I love, leaving my friends and my life and diving blind into the great unknown. I’ve done this before, several times, but it gets harder as you get older, especially when it feels like you’re running from
Read moreI love almost everything about Colorado. Almost. Sadly, the climate here tends to have very short transitional seasons, and like a lot of people who grew up in my neck of the woods (NC), my favorites times of year have always been fall and spring. I took the long, moderate, invigorating equinox seasons for granted, I guess.
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SuperShuttle is a smoldering dumpster fire. I returned home from vacation this morning. I had reserved a lift with SuperShuttle to save a few bucks on airport parking. Never again. As we landed I flipped on my phone. I had an e-mail from SuperShuttle explaining how to check in on the mobile. Sweet. I followed the instructions and proceeded to
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One of the symptoms of depression is an addiction to rumination. The vicious cycle of negative thinking that strips us of energy and desire. It is precisely our obsession with working out what makes us unhappy that makes us unhappy. – Chris Corner You don’t walk away from something that was central to your very being for 35 years without
Read moreYesterday was … unsettling. Any time you’re meeting with your physician and the words “brain tumor” come out of her mouth, it’s going to make you sit up a little straighter, even if she’s mostly dismissing it as a possibility. Mostly. As I have noted before, I suffer from a disorder that causes significant vertigo issues and, commencing in the
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lullaby pit 