Posts by Benjamin
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…
Read MoreI 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…
Read MoreHouse 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…
Read MoreDoctor, Doctor
It’s Monday morning in Dr. Lisa Libertore’s East Side office. Four boxes of medium, sterile, powder-free latex exam gloves crowd the Victorian-themed waiting room here on 85th and Lexington. Eight of us wait restlessly, shifting in our chairs, evading eye contact, and tapping at our respective devices. I fill out a clipboard lousy with forms,…
Read MoreSomeday Soon
Not that anyone noticed, but I took Q1 off from rock ‘n roll. Dateline: December 31, 2008. Between my new job description, marathon training, long-delayed documentary, and never-ending aspirations to rock, I figured something had to give. I’m never gonna’ succeed at anything if I don’t focus up. Something had to give. I chose rock…
Read MoreMy Intrepid Nephews
Can you imagine New York’s $44M, 66-year-old gray behemoth, USS Intrepid, through my pint-sized, toe-headed nephews’ wide eyes? This thing’s 900-feet-long and 190-feet-wide and loaded with thirty aircraft, including a Navy F-14 Tomcat (as in, “I feel the need, the need for speed!), Harrier Jump Jet, F-4 Phantom, Israeli Kfir, French Etendard, Russian MiG-15, 17…
Read MoreOut In The Great Wide Open
I think about Johnny Depp a lot these days. No, it’s not some adolescent crush. It’s everything else. In the last five years, my life has rapidly evolved into a fairly stable, even boring one. Where an average Tuesday night once found me hailing cabs in remote corners of Brooklyn as the sun rose over…
Read MoreMarch (Going On April)
In February, I traveled to and from California three times in as many weeks (with a break in the middle to run a marathon. At the end of that red eye-inducing run, I decided that I could provide greater value to my colleagues, my wife, and myself right here in New York. So I put…
Read MoreExiting The Too Much Information Superhighway
I received an interesting email from an Editor at a Major Online Publication last week. “We’re collecting a number of short pieces written by people that have been written about in the New York Times ‘Modern Love’ series,” it said. “We are basically looking for a response to the original Modern Love piece — either…
Read MoreMcSweeny’s
If I remember correctly (and I have a hunch my mother will correct me if I’m wrong), my Grandma (Mildred Lawrence) Bolster’s lineage traces back to Cork County, Ireland. My grandfather, William Bolster, named his Waterloo, Iowa-based women’s clothier Sweeny’s after his Irish partner. The store’s logo was a bright-green shamrock. Aaaaah, Ireland. Few places…
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