Blog Posts

I moved to New York in 1995 with a Takamine acoustic guitar, MacIntosh SE40, and $400 I’d saved in a Quaker Oats box. I was 24-years-old. The city felt dangerous from the moment I stepped off that Greyhound from Saratoga Springs. It was teeming with people — dirty, loud, delusional people gesturing wildly to no…

It’s a recipe for disaster: a five and three-year-old boys, plastic railroad tracks, a wind-up diesel engine, and two fists full of chocolate eggs. Hollywood blockbuster and dime store novel alike are rife with the plot line. Aunt, uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews gather around the holiday table and chaos ensues. The nephew kicks the…

I have just three, distinct Easter memories. In the first, the year is 1975. I am hunting Easter eggs with my cousins, Kalah and Nancy (she of “Ants, Ants, Ants”) and my brother in the wooded backyard of my Aunt Rosalie’s Baltimore home. I’m wearing plaid pants and a white Lacoste shirt. White, that is,…

“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…

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…

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…