The Clumsy Interloper

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  • Character Work #3: SF yuppie

    BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE CAFE (INTERIOR 9AM) He folded into a corner bench seat facing the corner of Montgomery and Pacific in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Using his black Tumi messenger bag as an armrest, he opened his slate grey Apple laptop and positioned his Black Cardamom Latte at optimal sipping distance. The gourmet coffee…

  • Character Work #2: Starbucks dad

    STARBUCKS (INT EARLY MORNING) The six-person green apron crew chitter and gossip through their early morning shift at the 5th Street Charlottesville Starbucks, stacking beverages on the takeout counter with compulsory precision. Sunbeams catch the east facing storefront windows and prism light against the neutral color palate of the interior corporate coffee aesthetic. There is a…

  • Character Work #1: GRIT guy

    Authors Note: This summer I plan to do a writing exercise called “character work” were every week I write about someone I witness in the wild and imbue some minor backstory while I practice my descriptions. Then I’ll feed it into AI for the title image. GRIT COFFEE PATIO (EXT DAY): He looked mid-forties with…

  • Unlikely in Charlottesville Today

    May 10th, 2026 (Mother’s Day) 9:45am: The girls and I descended upon my parents’ house to confer hugs, crafts and MarieBette bakery goods. Eva and Sybbie, despite their father’s edict to “eat normal” devoured their pain au chocolats, shall we say, “chocolat d’abord” which rendered their drawn smiles into brown, sticky crescent moons. A golf…

  • The Chicago Trip

    “Dad, look at her hair. It’s purple, I like it. I want to dye my hair that color.” “Dad, that guy behind you looks like Maui (from Moana).” “Dad, do you see his leg tattoos through the rips in his jeans? Is that a Devil?” We are taking the Blue Line into the city from…

  • Gaining S.T.E.A.M.

    On Tuesday Eva and Sybbie had their annual well-visits at Northridge Pediatrics. The girls spent the first 20 minutes crawling across the padded table while the nurse, dressed in pink and purple scrubs and glittering Crocs, asked a battery of questions of the parents. Every so often the girls would perk up from their game…

  • 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…