As a former athlete, I certainly endured plenty of injury: broken toes, fingers, a leg, a shoulder, a tooth, concussions, muscle strains, and a couple of sprain joints major and minor in nature. Some of these rear their arthritic pulse now, thirty years later, like vestiges of glory, imprints of youth stretched by time.
Read MoreThings change. Let’s just start there.
Never more evident
than the day you lunged
for the yellow pickleball bouncing away
(in your head a magnificent shot) and hit
Harlan came to feeling groggy, like he’d swallowed Benadryl and Scotch. He remembered taking ball one, high and outside, then squaring up for the second pitch. He’d wound his bat around a few times like a windmill, his little pre-pitch ritual to show he still, at thirty-four, meant business.
After that? Nada.
Read MoreMy son’s been walking around the house all week doing the Philly Shell. Must’ve been watching some Mayweather fights on his own.
Read MoreA buddy of mine recently tried to set me up with a friend, I’ll call her Melissa, a fellow divorcee with kids and limited time. I agreed because I hadn’t been on a date since before Tinder, before LeBron moved to the Heat, even before the iPhone 3GS. I’d scrolled through enough fake profiles and exchanged my share of messages with bots to realize dating apps are like the 1:30 a.m. urinal conversations I have with myself after too many drinks.
Read More1.
He once took me into the woods, the farthest we could hike in a day, and made me touch a dead squirrel stretched out under a tree. I was terrified, but since it was him, I did it, and I’ll never forget the strange orange fur and the tail, somewhere between soft and bristly.
Read MoreITS NOT HOW U BOWL, ITS HOW U ROLL, or so
says the sign outside the of the tiger bowl in madrid,
iowa. after plaza lanes caught fire and burned everything,
Read MoreAfter college I didn’t have any money, so my friend Ben arranged for me to fight non-sanctioned MMA matches in his basement. I wrestled in high school, had some boxing experience, so most of my opponents were overmatched—junkies, clueless gym rats, fake tough guys. Usually, I would just hip toss the dude and then pound his face in. That was my signature move. The hip toss and pound. It worked right up until it didn't.
Read More#
Backfield set,
5 wide.
#
What the viewer sees in Munch’s woodcut The Trial By Fire:
in the wrinkles of her dress,
between the lines.
Read MoreYou stand on the eighteenth tee box and feel the razor-sharp repair tool in your left pocket. Lately, the tool has been your financial acquisition aid and for five years, you’ve kept it sharpened for your annual three-week golf trip. Hidden from your girlfriend of three years, you have left a blood-tinged bread trail.
Read MoreHeather “Natural” Conway grew up in Waunakee, Wisconsin, a little suburban enclave fifteen minutes outside of Madison, although it might as well have been fifteen hundred miles away as little as the university town had impacted Heather’s life. She was the daughter of Donald Conway, a convicted confidence man and locally famous swindler who was serving twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary for a litany of charges that included, among other things, the formation of a bogus political action committee.
Read MoreIn March 2023, 30-year-old Minneapolis-based publisher Spout Press released Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces, a collection of writing by women that “subvert[s] the traditional idea of ‘locker room talk’ [and] illuminates the conversations women share with family, friends, and strangers.”
Read MoreOn the first day of our trip to St. John, I turn on the outdoor shower and present my naked body to the Caribbean Sea. The view is like a souvenir shop postcard: miles of turquoise water, greenery cascading down from the cliff where I’m perched, a sailboat cruising by with passengers’ bronzed bodies splayed across the bow.
Read MoreI practice my poses in five-inch clear plastic heels. My parts: held on, held up with rhinestone joists. Glued on. Bulletproofed. My flaws are in hiding—behind a shirred hypotenuse bedazzled. Something borrowed from Helen of Troy—bluer than the eyes of men—who’d kill for me.
Read MoreMaddy pushed the door open to her dad’s office, slowly.
“What’s up, kiddo?” he asked brusquely, gnawing a hangnail off his finger.
“I think there’s something wrong with Mommy’s bike,” she said.
Read MoreThe eponymous host of this show is the winking kind of reporter, perfect for our time. He's always almost saying something. Forever stopping short of making a bold prediction by hinting at some impending trade or signing, effectively channeling his hard-won insider information into juvenile teasing.
Read MoreBasketball is vertical unless you’re Chris Paul, who is—I have to note—small. He’s six feet if he stands all the way up. Not particularly long. But set a screen for Chris Paul, and watch all five defenders tense. Getting Chris Paul into a twist with your starting center is a dance you lose every time.
Read MoreThe 1991 Topps Stadium Club Frank Thomas card perfectly captures the arc of the Big Hurt’s powerful right-handed swing. He is photographed in profile, mid swing; the follow-through of the bat is not yet complete, leaving the tip of the bat extending up and away from the viewer, toward the top right hand corner of the card; because of the way his torso is twisted, you can only see the 5 on the back of his jersey, but you can catch a glimpse of the corresponding 3 peeking out from under his arm on the front of the shirt.
Read MoreI swing the bat with a whoosh, meet the ball exactly where it’s meant to be met, timing right, and send it soaring in a long, smooth arc. I pour the Shabbat wine in a blood red arc into the waiting Kiddush cup. The ball lands with a smack in the pocket of the glove. Deep center.
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