Essays
The Art of the Tampa Cuban
"It’s about tradition. Dedication to process. Adherence to the details. And as anyone who makes a good sandwich knows, details are everything.”
Our Faith in Horses
"They were charging straight for us—and the oak—and they weren’t slowing down. Chief had already bucked off Shelley more times than we could count. The horse was not right. At the last moment, he cut left then right to avoid the tree. Shelley went airborne."
Misty and Meat Pies
"‘Mom, Dad, please,’ said Misty, who had overheard her parents as she entered the house, then the kitchen. She smiled at me. I felt like a dirty young man. She was 19, a wisp of a girl, 5 feet tall and 90 pounds, with straight brown hair, bangs. My virgin detector went on high alert.”
‘Another One Bites the Dust’
"We loved it before Freddie uttered the first word. We loved it before it had been released. We somehow wrote it, though bassist John Deacon gets the credit. And Freddie knew how to sing the lyrics with a Broadway criminal’s innuendo:
“Ooooh … let’s go …”
Incident at the Hemingway House
From The Oxford American
"The heat had gotten to us. We hated that boy. He broke the rule that we all wanted to break but were too chicken to. We hated him because he stole our idea. The Hemingway-bearded tour guide turned to us on dry land and, hands open in a disbelieving pose, provided a clarification: 'That’s a real no-no.'"
Masterpiece: ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
“But ‘Teen Spirit’ is something like Dylan's ‘Blowin' in the Wind.’ Old folksters will tell you that what Dylan said in that song wasn't revolutionary to those in the know in 1963; he just managed to capture the right words and feelings floating around Greenwich Village and present it in a package the whole world could buy. ‘Teen Spirit,’ too, was one of those rare moments when a song was pulled from the air of a scene -- Seattle and its spreading ethos of youthful malaise and artistic meanderings -- and became greater than the sum of its parts.”
Florida’s Son
“Writers find the poets to guide them along their way. Thanks to my sister, and some persistent listening, Petty was my first, a romantic from the sticks, holding a pack of cigarettes, standing near a bonfire by a middle-of-the-state horse barn.”
Consider the Squirrel
"The child squirrel’s eyes were closed, its arms extended in her direction. Her arms, too, reached out, her front paws clasped in one last worrisome pose. Between mother and child, a wet stain the size of a half-dollar blotted the dark asphalt. Blood splattered the child squirrel’s nose, as if it had lost in a schoolyard fight.”
The Central Park Squirrel Census
“As a writer, I see the Squirrel Census not as a study or even a census of squirrels, but as an endeavor in the humanities. Not unlike Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, the two-week-long Central Park count was a public-space art project (and a fresh way for people to interact with one of the best-known parks in the world); it was a wholly original form of community building; it was a way to learn about city squirrels, their habits and behaviors, and their numbers (squirrels are remarkably overlooked in research studies). And most of all, it was—is—a story, a whole and complete narrative presented through multimedia platforms. It is about squirrels, yes, but it is also about the park, and the city, and life in general.”