The Clumsy Interloper

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  • Watergate Nostalgia

    Last night, I watched All the President’s Men for the first time in 20 years. Great script, performances, score, cinematography – no notes. Robert Redford’s haircut in that movie belongs in the Smithsonian between the Hope Diamond and the Apollo 11 capsule, but I digress. I was charmed by the relative quaintness of the scandal…

  • The Correspondent

    I recently read The Correspondent by Virginia Evans the way you read a book that seems to know something about you already—carefully and a little defensively. It’s a novel built out of letters, in which the protagonist, Sybil Van Antwerp, constructs a narrative not only for the targets of her missives but ultimately of herself.…

  • Back in the Pocket

    You swing open the door to a seldom visited storage room and peer past the darkened threshold. Instinctively both arms lurch forward like oscillating metronomes into the void, as if divining the light into existence. The pull string dangles innocently from a lone bulb affixed in the center darkness. In one swift jerk the room…

  • Little Brother Calls Game

    I wrote this nearly 19 years ago, on 1/17/07, on a now defunct blogspot about a Chicago Bears vs. Seattle Seahawks Division Round Playoff Game that I had recently attended with my Dad: “Now, I’ve been to roughly twenty Bears games in my life but never one in the playoffs. Let me tell you something,…

  • To Sleep, Mustache to Dream: ay, there’s the stub(ble)

    A few months ago I found myself at Firefly, a restaurant in Charlottesville known for their sweet potato tots and arcade games, on a late October evening with the girls. Eva has gymnastics every Tuesday at 6pm so we usually grab a quick restaurant nosh beforehand on those evenings. The dinner rush had yet to…

  • The Poignant after Touchdown

    It’s been 5 days since UVA beat VT to claim the Commonwealth Cup but I keep returning to that moment late in the third quarter. Chandler Morris is sprinting to the sideline on an option quarterback keeper while safety Isaiah Cash finds his pursuit angle inverted into a negative vector by a handbrake applied by…

  • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

    Last Saturday Carlos Hernandez of Wake Forest returned a punt 88 yards for a touchdown against the Virginia Cavaliers with 1:53 left in the first half. Previously UVA held a tenuous 6-0 lead, but now the scoreboard read 6-6 as Wake’s kicker Connor Calvert lined up for the PAT. As the kick sailed through the…

  • The Last Best Place

    The plane tilted a wing toward the sparsely arranged mountain town as we made our final decent. The modest street grid of downtown jutted out into an errant sprawl of greenery and beige slate outcroppings. Cresting wreaths of verdant mountain ranges closely flanked three sides of the town. As we banked through the craggy, ponderosa…

  • A 1989 At-Bat that Changed Everything

    From an early age, sports were the keystone by which all other facets of my personality formed around. My father, older brother and uncles huddled around the television at Thanksgiving while announcers spoke of esoteric concepts like the run-and-shoot offense and 46 defense. These terms echoed inside my 9-year-old skull as foreign tongues would, inscrutable…

  • Unfollowing Myself

    It’s been two months since my last entry on The Clumsy Interloper. The time between posts isn’t notable in the grand march of time, but I felt the absence of activity warranted some explanation. Creativity flared up after my deep-dish dream fizzled which led to a foray into the Artist’s Way. I dove from one…

  • Andor – A (Redemptive) Star Wars Story

    My parents went away on a proper vacation (read: without kids) in the summer of 1988 and my grandparents came to stay with me for two weeks. I was 6 years old and these new authority figures injected a new dynamic into my normally regimented routine. Much like the raptors in Jurassic Park, I took…

  • Blue to Red

    Saturday, September 15th, 2007 – I departed my ground floor studio apartment on Dakin and Freemont minutes after the sun rose.  A red hoodie, baggie dark blue jeans and a kelly green iPod nano set to shuffle in my pocket. On Sheffield Avenue the metallic groan of a rapidly approaching elevated train grew behind me.…

  • Failing Up

    It’s Easter morning and the neighborhood children are standing in a large, chalk drawn circle in the middle of my old cul-de-sac. The words “EGG HUNTERS IN HERE” are boldly arranged around its circumference by an artistic parent. Empty baskets spun by their handles occupy their tiny hands while their feet are bound inside the…

  • Comic Relief

    When I was a young boy, the Sunday comics section held a special place in my imagination. My parents would always set it neatly at my place at the breakfast table and while they read about world affairs, politics and other boring b&w adult things I read and re-read the “daily intelligentsia” as my Pepere…

  • Wait, is there crying in Hockey?

    Last night was my weekly Artist’s Date. I brewed some chamomile tea, lit a collection of dollar store candles, broke out a neglected paint-by-numbers canvas from deep within the closet and asked Alexa to play my favorite contemplative music. For two hours, with only my thoughts to narrate, I intently poked my brush right up…