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You’re a Loner If They Need You, If They Don’t You’re Just Alone (A Treatise on Loneliness)

              As a child, I never had a problem being alone.   In fact, I sought out alone time.   I loved people, but years before I knew what the word ‘introvert” meant, I knew I was an introvert.   I enjoyed being with my friends, and I had many of them, and I enjoyed being with my family in my house that was always somehow both boisterous and peaceful.   But I also enjoyed going out to the yard to play solo baseball, concocting fantastic scripts where I was the star second-baseman of my team, The Mississippi Pac-men (because I had a baseball jersey with an M on it and also a Pac-man shirt).   In the winter, it was football; I’d don my too-small Bears uniform and move through a season wholly independent of what was actually happening in the NFL.   And all year round, I’d play basketball at the hoop on Roosevelt Place, winning games with last second shots and helping my imaginary three-on-three...
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Spring

For years I have contemplated writing an essay about Spring – or, more precisely, an essay about what Spring means to me.   And for years I have resisted.   It has seemed too great a task.   It has felt beyond me.   For I realized to write about Spring is to get to the very essence of what made me become a writer in the first place, what made me want to travel in the first place…the very essence of what makes me me in the first place. Well, I’m still resisting, and it still may be beyond me.   But here goes.   Where I live, Chicago, you see Spring first.   Its harbingers are myriad manifestations of light. The first shine on our apartment wall in late February, refracted off the high rise across the street.   Then, a few weeks later, come the golden shafts of dazzling sun when it’s clear, the muted, dreamy pastel washes of blues and grays when it is not, the subtle, lingering haze at dawn and twilight, the way the moon shines cold and warm ...
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That’s a Whole Vibe! An Account of an Old-School Trip Out West

              I was finishing my Czech beer and TVP tacos at a table outside Escape Velocity Brewing, Lafayette, Indiana’s new and bustling – and only - vegan place, looking out over the summer clouds and adjacent empty strip mall, feeling, despite my impending road trip, the longest I was to undertake in more than eleven years, fairly calm.    On the table beside me were a Rand-McNally road atlas and  F-Woman,  an obscure novel by an obscure British writer called Warwick Collins.               Two girls, probably in their early twenties came out, happy and well-lubricated.    One of them looked at me.    “Are you  reading  while your drinking?    That’s a  whole  vibe!”                   “Um, yeah,” I said.    ...
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