Personal reflections on my life and experiences.
It’s not because I am a great athlete that I caught the bug. Or maybe it is because I’m not a great athlete that I did. I don’t know. And it’s not that it’s been this lifelong passion. There were probably 15 to 20 years that I didn’t think about it at all, between...
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This weekend I wanted to celebrate the arrival of spring with a night out camping somewhere, so on Saturday afternoon I consulted my little New Mexico campgrounds book for locales near Albuquerque. One chapter focused on campgrounds east and southeast of Albuquerque- locations within an hour of the city, behind the Manzanos. Among the...
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I was driving home from work last night when I thought of that book. It had been years, perhaps decades since I thought about it, but at one time that book embodied a big chunk of what I wanted in life at the time. When I got it, I was almost a junior in...
Read more →Most of the time, I sit down to write and I just stare. Indescript images bubble up in my mind and then fade, unattached to clarity or meaning or significance. I don’t know how writers do it. I always think I’d be a decent writer if I had something to write about. I sift...
Read more →I try to make sense of it, as the days come and go, why some things spin off like they do. There probably is no making sense of it really. Why some people we want to love us want nothing to do with us. Why some people we struggle to like want to be...
Read more →It was a little after one, after our daily stair climb at work, when Nathan sent the note. At first I thought it was peculiar because he and I are friends but we don’t really chat (I’m not a big chatter”), so I just thought may be he was writing to ask a question....
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Then, it was midday, and the sky was a light shade of blue. I sat on a metal bench in front of the long gray brick hall, the light hurting my eyes. People trickled in and out of the gray building. Behind me were rectangles of gardens where, again, a few people walked here...
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I felt fortunate this morning, dealing with a head cold and nowhere to go, to be able to dig into a game I had wanted to play as a teen but that I never had access to. Thankfully, included in the massive haul I picked up at Christmas last year was Avalon Hill’s game...
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After I drove into the lot and parked this morning, I got out of my truck and fumbled around trying to drape my backpack on my right shoulder while holding a phone and a coffee mug in one hand and a folder of papers and a lunch bag in the other, and the backpack...
Read more →Whatever happened to Diamond Rio? I think I used those roller blades maybe twice? I always have this image of falling and breaking my wrists. Why am I so obsessed with board games? Obsessed. Obsessed with cardboard counters and colorful boards and wooden and plastic cubes. Old, new. I think about them too much....
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When I got up this morning, I made a cursory, obligatory visit to Facebook before I went in the kitchen to get something to eat. I mean, it’s what you do in the 21st century: wake up, check your phone, hit the can, check Facebook, eat, clean up, head out the door. I first...
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I do it often enough, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it seems at this time of year it always comes at me, amplified. For many, this season is a period for new starts, and I too feel some of this as December winds down and new calendars are poised to take their place...
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It was about three years ago this month that I somehow ended up sending a Facebook friend request to this guy named Derek on the East Coast. I’d like to say I remember the exact reason for the outreach, but I don’t recall what prompted it. What I do remember is, as a web...
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As a lifelong game fan and a strategy game collector, I had probably the weekend of my life this last weekend. It all started simply enough. I was wrapping up what I was doing at work at about 7 PM on Friday, and I thought I’d drop in on the games section of Craigslist....
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Whenever winter occasionally visits Albuquerque and dulls and bleaches the sky, I am regularly transported back to a few specific memories from my Chicago days. You know- those stills that get burned into our heads of particular moments, particular images. When I lived in the city, after my brief attempt at marriage failed, I...
Read more →It had started for me as a fantastic tribute to a hometown hero. Yesterday, on Sunday afternoon, Albuquerque threw a parade and then had a convocation on the city’s Civic Plaza to recognize Holly Holm, the seasoned Southpaw who gave invincible Ronda Rousey a shellacking in November’s UFC Bantamweight World Championship fight. Holly, as...
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