Monthly Archives October 2016

A vacation trip to the east coast last week brought forth a surprise. Despite my best (or worst?) intentions to mix in some work with the pleasure of my first experience of New England in the fall, it turned out that for the several days I spent on the rural Maine coast, I had no Internet access. Adding insult to injury, my cellphone service was down as well. Apparently, there are not enough people out there to warrant the digital infrastructure that would allow those far-flung inhabitants to keep fully on pace with the 21st century.

Now, I am someone with a profession that requires buddying up with both my computer and phone all day. And my primary avocation—readin’ & writin’—requires the same. So predictably enough, this disconnection in Maine was initially a cause for concern.

I think I remember uttering the words “Oh no…” when I first discovered, after several attempts, that my browser was simp...

Many years ago, I wrote an essay called “Locker Room Memories” that got picked up by a couple of small publications and anthologized in a book of essays by and about men. The essay wasn’t very good, in the way such things can be for a writer when coming across a piece from long ago. But the subject matter remains worthy and newly relevant today.

In it, I wrote about the experience of picking up a basketball again for some purely recreational play a decade or so after my playing career ended with my last college game. Rather than write about playing, though, I focused instead on the experience of walking into the locker room beforehand, with all that it represents in the life of an athlete.

Now, Donald Trump has gotten me thinking about locker rooms again. And this is what I want to tell him:

Man, you don’t know squat about locker rooms.

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Trump, as surely everyone anywhere near the orbit of thi...