I read the first half of Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017) at a party, while I was sober. Men were playing darts, making tiny dart holes in the rented apartment walls. I watched them throw darts and cheer and try to teach me how to play, and then drunkenly play with the dogs in the house and then went back to my reading.

“Go outside,” I say, and I settle in with my coffee and my laptop. “Notice how real-world birds aren’t actually angry.” 

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

“Fine, but I get full custody of the mustache,” I said, once we’d finished dividing up all of our things: him Chipotle, me The Red Hot Chili Peppers, him macramé, me black clothing.

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

Danielson sells his dirty socks to perverts on the internet. 

She’s going to be an artist, he told your parents, and he wasn’t wrong, even if you couldn’t hack it in New York. 

Mom says new husbands are like circus peanuts. They go stale after a few weeks, and she wonders, Why the hell do I keep buying these things? I don’t even like them. 

When we first met in the early ‘90s, we had stage names. She went by Kali and I went by Olivia. 

Who says islands needs water? he asked. Mine is a tree island. It’s something surrounded by something different.

For the third time in as many months, I received an automated email from ebay, stating, “An item you’ve been watching has been relisted.” 

1.  It is 1994 and baseball is on strike so I will not see the first place Yankees advance to the playoffs and win the World Series.

You may doubt that the Yankees would have actually won the

“So I started collecting baseball cards.” 

It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world. 

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.

That’s the only way Mays can pitch, 

because he doesn’t play the game 

of fraternity formed on summer ballfields. 

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

Oscar kisses the child through the hard mesh fence designed for the fans’ protection.  He does not like kissing his boy through hard mesh.   

Me at my most beautiful. Me locked in. Me sacrifice stance.

Micah turned pro and the rest of us went regular. 

It is a game of beautiful pauses, pauses that take up so much of the game’s duration that calling them “pauses” seems inaccurate; the moments of action, rather, are what interrupt the long stretches of inaction.

And I had to wonder while I watched the mosh-pits if these kids were even listening.

Ten years removed from my youth baseball experience, I find myself in a car with four baseball-obsessed college buddies, headed toward the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to see the Minnesota Twins play a mid-September game against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I’m here.

He could say from experience

that Babe Ruth was an asshole,

but he never said it on the field.

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?