Tap--mmmmmmmmm.

Percussive impact trailing sustain like the afterimage of a meteor across black skies, texture and melody unfolding like steel petals, soft pedals, bleeding quicksilver.

He was born in Australia but his people were Iraqi Jews.  

He played drums before he started fusing guitar and electronics into one of the most distinctive signatures of any living artist.

Collaborations take place in sedate museums and dingy Israeli…

Their love is pretty much like your love, except when Claire came out she discovered that certain folks weren't as progressive as she might've previously imagined.

Anne will run the table on you at billiards, and she turns me on to bizarre comics.  Claire is smart enough to be intimidating, but cool enough to offset it.

The house they rented in Martha's Vineyard for their wedding weekend had a backyard that sloped down to the harbor, where ships of all shapes…

You were a crass political opportunist.  You knew that if you got the newspapers on your side, you could dominate public opinion, and to hell with what the scientists or those other elitist commie-types might say.  Citizen Kane had your back, the doper hysteria fed into his own agenda, he had his "rosebud" and the undesirables had their green buds and you wrote that "Jazz grew up next door to crime," and we all know there's certain types we don't want living next door, like those Hollywood…

Wait, what?

The ball is small, the ball is large, the ball's path is already set out there in the misty air.  All I have to do is hurl this funky stitched projectile along its pre-ordained route, my muscles flexing and releasing, attuned to something larger than this stadium or this crowd or my teammates muted by ancient superstition and avoiding me like some melting thing.

Feel the stitches, the wild pitches, nerves singing hot with molten…

Given that none of us choose our parents, adopted kids are subjected to something of a double jeopardy-type situation.

Mom didn't let it slip that he'd been a smoker until I was old enough to legally do so myself.

The first time he took me to a football game, I cried because I thought the players were trying to kill each other.

When he worked for others, he worked hard; when he worked for himself, he worked even harder.

Although…

Judgment is character.  I'd have sat upon the federal bench if not for the conspiracies against my sponsors.  Pity the godless man.  Purge the man whose values are betrayed by his own actions.  My actions were were exhibitions of skill and daring, pitting myself against those who would lay down rules to restrain and retard, as patriots have ever pitted themselves against tyranny.  Pity the man who falls short of his potential.      

Mornings in the spring I walk the path down by the Inya River, crouching on the steep banks and watching the slushy brown water.  I have to keep the flocks from flying out of my skull, taking me with them.  

All those years on the road, the men who tore at the parts of me that could be torn.

Sometimes Igor and I slept in old train cars frozen on the tracks, using our guitar cases for pillows, talking of the faces at the basement shows, illegal gatherings, a…

Among our crew, he's known as Looming Large.  I don't get to see him as often as I'd like anymore, because he's got primary custody of his three boys.  And then of course there's all the kids he takes care of in his role as a pediatric nurse; in a world that had its values squared, he'd be a millionaire.  His values include skilled attention to those who are suffering, vintage dub and punk rock, and the sort of Italian zombie movies where rotting shamblers feast on their prey in slow motion…

The boy was trusted into my care.

Them that took him came into my own home in the dark of the night pointing their guns and their flashlights and saying I'd best hand him up, saying how it was a matter of respect.

If they kill me now for standing in an open courtroom and naming them for all to know, well by God there ain't nothing they could do to me that would be worse than what they already done.  Don't matter that I got to leave this place where I lived all…

She'd originally scheduled her flight to LA for Monday (she was supposed to appear as a panelist on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect) but she pushed it back a day because Tuesday was her husband's birthday and she wanted to be with him that morning.  

In her role as chief investigative counsel for the US House of Representatives, she'd dug tenaciously into the Clintons' past, running down American Spectator-fodder conspiracy theories like "Travelgate" and…

Debate surrounds the details: whether her vocals were done in a single take, or pieced together from multiple attempts; how much she was originally paid (likely around 30 quid, the going rate for studio musicians--on a Sunday); the amount of the eventual legal settlement.  None of which matters a damn bit when you hear that voice come gliding in over the humble piano chords.  The band told her that the song was about dying, but she made it about coming, about sex and soul and abandon.  The…

Ever since he quit smoking, he spends his breaktime at work flying a kite in the parking lot, a near-weightless construct of pastel nylon hovering on the least breeze, strung from the slimmest of tethers.  

His lover lay down to sleep beside him and she never woke up.  But Chuck keeps on rising, for her and for us.

When we were kids he was the older brother turning us on to the wicked jams: Sex Pistols and Talking Heads and Modern Lovers and Ed Sanders and…

Keep going, and try try try to remember that numbers are important: 40/15, 72 miles per day, 80% chance of relief from symptoms following an anterior temporal lobectomy.  Every step forward is a step away from the emptiness that is ever at her heels.  

If she can no longer recall the landscapes of places like Schley or Hurdle Hill, she can at least keep a tally of the miles she's covered, each representing a moment's elapse, a footfall closer to a finish line of her own…

Later this week I'll be launching a new 20-30 part series: People You May Know.  These are character studies of real-life figures, fictionalized through my perspective, and I'll include links to sites where you can find out more about these folks if your interest is piqued.  Some are historical, some have made a lasting impact on the world at large, and others are simply people I know from my life.  All of them have, in one way or another, prompted a rumination on how our…

Seemed like that Illinois town he was always writing about was my hometown.  I recognized it, the dandelion construct behind the bat-winged grandmothers and the malignant winds and the things stored in jars in dusty old sheds and the black water running down there in the cistern.  Long past midnight, I could hear the carnival staking up tents in the darkness on the edge of town.  More than the special place he held in his heart for Halloween, more than his extrapolations on Martian…