Lugging along next to me on the elliptical is an older gentleman – about the age my dad would have been – wearing two high-tech knee braces, fit with gears and everything, and what looks like an old-fashioned weight belt. He’s a regular at the fitness center, same as me. We’ve acknowledged each other on occasion and said a thing or two in the sauna, but never a real question-and-answer. I’ve always wondered about his knees.

Top Ten of 2012

It’s the 26th of September 2007. I’m driving from work to pick up my daughter at school. On the radio Melissa Block is telling me that “From NPR News, this is All Things Considered” and that

Bad guy has no luck.  Here he is walking the aisles of the home and garden center, checking hoses for flexibility, thickness.  

When it starts to rain we cross the street. I don’t know where we’re going, but something warm and scattered is jumping underneath my skin. He leads me to the door of an apartment building, nudges me onto its small step. Then, smooth as a cloud moving across the sky, he presses his body against mine.

The Way We Sleep, an anthology of prose, comics, interviews, all about how we spend our time in and around beds was published this month by Chicago's Curbside Splendor. Currently on a "blog tour"

This Evan Williams Eggnog has all of what you’d expect in a nog. That strong taste of Christmas, of vanilla and cream and cinnamon and nutmeg.

flowering and husking in the cornfield. Blooming / and ripping ourselves open. Surprising even our kin.

The A.D.T. man has only come to fix the security system, check each connect, repair the wire that’s frayed, reprogram the alarm before he drives off to do the same thing three blocks over. He wants no part in these people’s lives, he has no heart to join their quest for the secure, their rich man fantasy they can protect themselves, if only they will pay.

We imagine all nightmare scenarios, where you do not text us back because you are dead, and won’t we look insensitive for imagining that you hate us.

In the original 1937 edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien promises in his description, “If you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the Wild, and home

Aaron “Jesse Pinkman” Paul and Mister White (aka Heisenberg, aka Walt, aka Bryan “Malcolm’s Dad” Cranston) are making meth in a cavernous and secret meth-cave.

You win the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect but your relativity theory is what makes you famous.

When talking dirty, be sure to use action words and nouns that cause pictures inside people’s heads. End with an image and don't explain. 

The prison is a test market—a closed circuit, a place where candymakers can focus on the choices made when options are limited. Research into what people will eat when they have nowhere to go.

On the one hand, it was tough for Tessa to be let go by the Internet company, but it meant that she could now fulfill a long-deferred dream. She opened her mountain office on a pasture just above

Searching for her mother, as well as caring for the people she loves as they battle for survival, the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis)  - the main character in Beasts of the Southern

You tell Jeff Bridges you fear
your dying breath will be just like
the whimper you make when trying
to remove glitter polish from your
toenails. He sets his guitar down on
the fur

Although Woody Allen (Alvy Singer) might be the most adorable hipster on the face of the planet and I consider his writing/acting/directing to be rather perfect, somehow Diane Keaton (Annie Hall)

No one called it a plague at first.  We weren’t the kind of people who used words like that, words heavy with the suggestion of some greater force, but the idea was there, almost from the beginning, skittering around in the back of my head, peeking out into the light.

tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now

At 32 she whistled for the first time and was alarmed by her talent.

For this non-reader spotlight, I talked to Sean Olumstad. Sean and I met as undergrad theatre majors at Illinois Wesleyan, but Sean made the wise move to pursuing a career in nursing.

On the day we come with Daddy down the mountain, Momma wakes us up early while Daddy's still asleep, pulls out white poster boards, markers from the closet, and together, we draw babies. Heads with black eyes, bodies curled, hands in mouths, a blue cord running from their bellies to somewhere off the page.

Here in the US, it’s often said that the best way to experience the so-called “real” America is to visit small towns. Right along Main Street, sipping low-grade Arabica bean coffee at the counter

Because sharks mate / by just passing for a moment / before separating forever and / because his dog died...