The Ironman

“I’m crazy,” Dr. Klion says. “I jogged in from West Chester this morning.” “What!?!” “Yeah, I’m doing the Grand Canyon Rim To Rim in five weeks. 46-miles, five-thousand feet up and down, then back again.” Now, the whole reason I go Dr. Mark Klion is because he’s the best kind of crazy. The walls of…

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The Death Of The Hero

The first time I played a proper rock ‘n roll venue was in the fall of 1991. Before the audience, the amps, the lights — before anything, really — the first thing I noticed stepping onto that dismal, sticky, black-box Lost Horizon stage (don’t look for it; it’s not there) was a hand-made sign reading…

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Do Or Do Not (It Wasn’t A Tri)

Ah, the coveted sixty-fourth percentile. Let me be frank: I was neither properly prepared, nor properly trained for Sunday morning’s race. Heck, I wasn’t even properly rested. I’ll chalk some of it to the length of the event (a 2.1M run, 10M ride, and 2.1M run don’t quite constitute The New York City Marathon type…

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I Waited Up

It was somewhere around Forteenth Street on the Downtown F that it dawned on me that maybe I’d been too ambitious with my first rock show in nearly six months. A collection of greatest hits, the ones that come naturally from years of playing? Reasonable. But not the plan. Set lists are like AAA Trip…

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House Call

The city never seemed more hostile. My office phone rang at 5:47. Caller ID indicated it was my wife calling from her cell phone, unusual for that time of day. I was knee-deep into a twice-delayed annual appraisal, but begged off to answer. “Hi honey,” I said, noting the sound of the street in the…

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