The Final Nine

Notes from today’s WALK... “A beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.” – John Steinbeck I shaved off my beard today. The reasons are not important. In the end, I merely traded this comment: “Geez! I cannot believe how much gray you have in your beard.” For this one: “Man! I didn’t realize how much your face has filled out.” And since my wife has a college friend of the female persuasion who once grew quite a face full of whiskers, I couldn’t really even enjoy the masculinity of the thing. In truth, a beard has only two real benefits. First, it means you don’t have to shave every day. Or even every week. This cannot be overestimated. The absurdity of dragging a razor blade over the second most sensitive skin on your body is immeasurable. Imagine if someone decided that corns and calluses should be addressed daily with a machete and somehow the rest of us had gone along with it for 200 years. Rem...

Every ten days, Ben walked to HK Pet Supply on Clement Street. The small shop, located between a mediocre Dim Sum restaurant and Tom Lee’s Cosmetic Dentistry, maintained an inventory of a store six times its size. Ben forced himself to buy only the smallest bags of food in defiance of Alicia’s absence. When she finally returned, he’d hand over the dog and, so help him God, not one pre-paid kernel of kibble to go with it. She emailed him once from an internet café in Van Vieng to say that she was doing well and, even though it was hard not to communicate, she was sure it was best for both of them.   I’m still not sure when I’ll be back, but I promise I’m being safe and I’m sure I don’t have any regrets . She hadn’t mentioned the dog. Ben stared at stacks of dog food piled on aluminum racks. He knew from experience that he would eventually recognize the brand. Asking for help did no good, since he couldn’t say what he was looking for and the family that owned HK Pet Supply s...

If you’re under 45 and over 35, you made mix tapes. It’s a fact. A shameful, groan-inducing fact. It’s also a marker of your meta-ration; something self-referentially meaningful that no one did before and will most surely (and mercifully) never do again. Yet, despite their regretability score, mix tapes have become a point of pride for my peer group. We swoon about them, remembering how seamlessly “Separate Ways” led into “Take On Me.” We long for that Native Tongues tape with the best tracks from “Three Feet High and Rising” and “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” and that one good song the Black Sheep had. And how you got Soft Cell and The Velvet Underground on the same 90 minute Maxell is a mystery. But you did it, damn it!  Somehow, though, mix tapes have become too well respected.  Pop culturists have written treatises on the energy and effort that went in to composing them. Suddenly, making a mix tape is to making an iTunes playlist as pumping w...