I became obsessed with the idea of bunting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to make my own.

After I turned thirty-five, the age of forty circled me like a shark. My dread of it intensified with each passing year. On my thirty-eighth birthday, I braced myself. The movement in the water had

Ironically, hours before we went to see Whoopi, I texted two friends from my bathtub that I didn’t think I would ever write another essay. It was “too hard.” “People only want to vilify you, so they look for words to use to that end, and ignore the rest of what you’ve said.”

Jack Daniel screams his way down my throat & it’s a dry thrust.

Now I’m not dating anymore and I use the gold duffel bag to haul my belongings from one house-sitting gig to the next.

At first, it seemed like a poet’s dream day job. A job of watching, then describing.

“Bit ‘im in the jugular,” the truck driver tells me about the bear ten feet away, describing the day the bear went crazy.

The morning of our second date I drew a card – now I can’t remember which one...

It’s someone’s job to bury the dead.

On my last night in Zhenjiang, the three other laowai and I—each of us western foreigners: three upstaters and a guy from Toronto—walk the condominium-lined miles out to the banks of the Yangtze river.

Summers to Harridge, April 20, 1950: I am writing to inform you of the changes in the Washington ball park. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try to give you a picture.

Maybe you

Crack! The sound of impact, ball on bat...

I couldn’t cut my hair (I’m no sheep) and I sure as hell couldn’t change my love of the Houston Astros.

Canvas after canvas I see my life in scenes the artist cannot know.

I immediately remembered the Sex and the City episode where Samantha wants to sleep with the Franciscan priest she refers to as Friar Fuck.

Do you ever make pieces of origami, folding a sheet of paper over and over intentionally? Do you feel silly? Do you question each fold, or trust that the folds will add up to the frog or the bird you were promised?

They may even remember that while the game licensed team names, logos, and stadiums, and specifically licensed Ken Griffey Jr.'s name, statistics, and likeness—they did not license the names of Major League Baseball's other 699 players.

After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.

Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. 

By the time I arrived at the Phoenix airport the next summer I was thirty pounds heavier. I’d spent the previous nine months eating vending machine moonpies and packaged cookies in my dorm room.

This was the year Canseco was the first to join the 40/40 club, hitting over 40 homeruns and stealing 40 bases in the same season. 

My grandfather, his English name was Benson. As the houseboys opened the gates, he came out on the balcony and fired off a shotgun, boom, one or two blasts.

I made my mom promise me that she was going to live until she was 100 years old, and I would be 82 and we would die together, peacefully, holding hands. 

My siblings and I never liked each other as much as we did on those early mornings; we never made a better team. 

Carefully open the wrapping paper. Inside is Teddy Ruxbin. See his stupid face on the box. Fuck you, Teddy Ruxbin. He reads you bedtime stories if you put a cassette tape in his abdomen.