I think we all dream about people who are gone or about our pasts. I do. When I dream about a person who has died, I'm dreaming about them. Even if the dream is fairly vivid and has that real feeling I'm observing them rather than there with them. With those and other vivid dreams I awaken and in a second or two it's clear that I dreamt the experience and when looking at it later there are often tells during the dream letting me know it's a dream. Sometimes I even declare something a dream while...

A man died yesterday. I'm not sure how to define what he was to me. He was a hockey player and one of the 5 or 6 mainstays of the St. Louis Blues when the team first came here in 1967. I don't think of athletes as heroes, and I'm not much attracted to celebrity of any sort. Still, Bob Plager's death saddens me for personal reasons I can't quite articulate.

He died in a car accident, but he was 78 and his death follows the deaths of two baseball players, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, who...

Because people mistake me for him all the ****ing time. Which is weird, because people mistake me for Idris Elba too, and Idris and Henry look nothing alike. Yet I can't walk down the street without ...........without exactly no one mistaking me for either of those men. And that means something. I'm not sure what it means, but it can't be anything good, can it? So if you've read this far, GTFO now while you can. There are things once seen you can't un-see, once known you can't un- know, and once...

What do I know
Of a fuzzy caterpillar inching across the walk?
Is his pace languid,
or is that haste in his round woolly world?
What do I know?
Is this form I see,
the lustrous tawny, the luxurious black
glistening plump in the autumn rays
all he has ever been,
or will be,
or may become?
This seems to matter.
This seems to be a big question, but
what do I know?

I strode past him
with...

Epiphanies happen at the oddest times. At work most mornings I open up a small, remote building that houses some vending machines. No one works there, but in a given day 40-50 people pass through. The tiled floors are dirty, smudged with old spills made by thirsty people who believed they could walk and drink at the same time. The liquid mated with dust and formed something nastier than the sum of it's parts. The other morning I walked around a couple of such spills and made a mental note to get...