So it goes...

Most people I know have a "best friend" from high school. Sometimes these friends go by-the-by after you graduate, but if that's the case, maybe they weren't a best friend in the first place. Graduation tends to move kids to the four winds, so they sometimes lose touch without even trying. County Stadium for a Brewers Game My friend Pat and I hung out a lot in high school. We'd played on the same middle school football team and were fairly compatible personality types, so just sort of gravitated toward each other in high school and later in college at the U of Minnesota. We had a lot of fun in our college years, both of us lacking focus on our academics in the name of pursuing the finer things in life.  We even managed to wreck a couple of his Volkswagen Beetles on spontaneous trips to St. Cloud. One caught fire, the other we tore up the front axle after driving through a road closed sign and then up an unannounced curb at a high rate of speed. If these sound exc

This year we have a series of weddings we are attending as a family. Weddings and funerals are one of the few times in our adult lives that we are expected to wear a suit. As a guy who is most comfortable in jeans and a Henley shirt, suits for me are an uncomfortable obligation. At the same time, I do like how I look in them when I finally get around to wearing one. Because the only suit I have is over 20 years old, it was time to upgrade. My son who will also be attending the wedding also needed a suit, so we decided to get it all done in a single visit to a local clothier this past weekend. Jos. A. Bank is a men's fine clothing shop in Brookfield and came with recommendations from a couple of people.  Now, realize I dislike any kind of shopping at all. Add to it that it would be in an upscale men's clothing shop and you'll understand that I wanted to get in and get out. We walked in and made our way to the suit section, sucessfully avoiding the two very busy salesmen wor

People may or may not know that from a writing standpoint, my current work in progress is a short story collection. It is my first heavy foray into fiction, after publishing four memoirs and a handful of poetry books. I’d dabbled in it over the years, writing some short stories just to change things up, but it was never a full-on pursuit like this is. Fact is, I took all of those stories and am working them into this collection. I have to say that it is exactly what I needed at this point in my writing. I’ve kind of run out of ideas for memoir at the moment, so figured I’d take on something different. I will probably return to it at some point but am enjoying the ride in the land of fiction for the moment. I won’t lie though, at times it is way harder than memoir/nonfiction. Unlike memoir, none of it is done from memory, it is entirely new creation. It isn’t as easy as trying to remember a situation or a story and getting it down. I want to do justice to the genre and am learning a