Last night I was telling my writing compadres about how much Wednesdays kick my ass. “I do so much on Wednesday with the Tibbles that by the time eight o’clock rolls around I am pretty sure it’s Thursday.”
But not today. Well not in the sense that I think it’s Thursday. My ass was kicked, make [...]

It’s not often, or ever, that I get to meet authors who have published their short stories in The New Yorker. Yeah, John Updike, Alice Munro, Roddy Doyle, they don’t do too much hanging out in Minnesota, much less at Jags’ house. But last night, wow, we got lucky.
Abam, a classmate of ours in Vodo’s [...]

The good thing about saying goodbye on a bright, sunshiny spring day is that you have sunglasses to hide your watering eyes. I gave Al the most perfect going away gift that there ever was, a gift so beautiful and suitable to the situation that it would require hundreds of words to tell you about [...]

In a few minutes I have to leave for what will likely be the very last lunchclub with my former posse from Hell, Inc. On Saturday Al, the cutest girl on Earth™, will pack up a UHaul and leave us for Fargo, ND. On Monday she starts a new job.
I was chatting with her earlier [...]

My favorite memory of Jags used to be the night when she told us about how she hung out at The Longhorn. I have a fascination with the Longhorn. A bar that I have built up in my mind as the Valhalla of Minnesota rock and roll. Whenever anyone talks about the Longhorn I sit [...]

How my mom voted for Jerry Brown in the Wisconsin primary back in 2000
If Tim Russert’s makeup artist is given actual creative direction to make him look disheveled
Whether Leinie’s Red is the superior Leinie’s (it’s not)
Lloyd Bentson and James Stockdale
Pete Meyers and how he made me fall in love with him by using the word [...]

“I look at you right now and I just want to cry because you’re so nice,” Mary Katherine Gallagher said, crying. “I’m just going to miss working with you guys so much.”

A week or so ago, we were in Lunch Club talking about all the crap in the office that H, the office manager, will have to get rid of now that the office is closing. We were making jokes about how as a parting gift each person will get a stapler, a box of paper [...]

Did you know that yesterday was Blue Monday? Allegedly it’s the most depressing day of the year. Nice. I am glad to have participated in the worldwide pity party.
Blue Monday was the talk of the office today, well until Heath Ledger was found dead. But this Blue Monday phenomenon was news to me until [...]

Sometimes I wish I was the kind of person who could just post a cryptic song lyric and the emoticon for puzzled and call it a day. But I can never seem to do that when there are all those words out there that I can use. If I were that kind of person I [...]

I like to make random, inane bets with most everyone I know. I got gambling in my blood. I once bet someone that I could say all the words to the movie “Almost Famous.” I didn’t win or lose, because we never got around to actually watching the movie together. But I did make the [...]

So there I was sitting on a folding chair on the lower level of the Barnes & Noble at the Galleria. I was supposed to be reading through the stories for class the next day but I was mostly eavesdropping on Jim Walsh’s mom introducing him to all his old neighbors who had shown up [...]

In my weepy, whiny state of agitation yesterday I forgot to mention that there was goodness.
At 2:41 a.m. on November 17th my much-adored and most-beloved coworker Al, the cutest girl on earth&trade became the cutest mom on earth&trade. Baby Gus is here! It will be hard to stop calling him Quixote since that was the [...]

A few months ago The Wrath, a Canuckian co-worker transplanted to the land of 10,000 lakes, was talking about how some friends of his were getting married up in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
“Isn’t it Re-jean-a,” Al, the cutest girl on earth™ asked.
“Uh, no,” we all said. “It’s Ra-jyn-a.”
“Oh,” she said, puckering up her sweet North [...]

I was gently slumbering (ok not really, because that whore 6:30 a.m. came to visit and at 7 a.m. I decided I was going to take a mini-nap or something just to show 6:30 a.m. that I am not messing around with my faithfulness to 7:30 a.m.), when the sweet, sweet jangly guitar bits of [...]