Eighteen Facts about Me
- I was the first in my class to wear glasses, in fourth grade. Like all such children, I now wear contact lenses.
- I have a well-attested high run of 81 balls at straight pool and have run over 50 many times.
- In 1993 I won a national fantasy league baseball contest. The prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to spring training, including attending a game with Bill James, who couldn’t stand me.
- I get spontaneous nosebleeds periodically, every couple months or so, and have since I was a child.
- I am bigoted against fat people. I’ve had one fat friend in my life, in third grade, and he was whiny, shiny, wheezy, sneezy, and, well, fat.
- I don’t write for a living but most of my good friends do.
- I can’t drive a car.
- In college I once forged a check to buy liquor, not because I was interested in the liquor, although I drank it, but to see if I could get away with forgery, which I did.
- Nearly everything I know about poetry, which is a fair amount, I learned from reading Yvor Winters.
- When people used to ask me, as a child, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “paleontologist.” At about twelve I realized this required a lot of graduate school so I switched to “premier intellectual of the Western World.”
- I once took a year off of work and spent it mostly reading Russian novels and reediting Emily Dickinson’s poems (the standard versions are lousy).
- I know Geddy Lee and Neil Peart of the legendary Canadian power trio Rush.
- In the more than twenty years I’ve lived in Manhattan I have never been mugged. I lived in Brooklyn for two years and was mugged three times.
- I can type 100 words a minute.
- I was once punched in the face, deservedly, by a colleague at work. So was my brother; it must run in the family.
- As a teenager I liked to swig vinegar straight from the bottle.
- I have never seen, and never intend to see, Star Wars or E.T.
- That’s enough.
Enough is enough, and more so even more.
editing Emily must be like paring close cut nails?
I still don’t drive either, at 41, but I think in both our cases it’s less a function of some underlying “issue” and more a simple function of living in a real city.
“I hate quotations. Tell what you think.” Emerson … Shakespeare. Wilde? Aaron Haspel? Last night’s Uber driver? That girl at the bar, back in college? Me, three minutes ago?
Actually, I love “Everything” and have bought several copies for my friends (both of them). Keep up the good work.
Thanks, I’ll try. Meanwhile, get more friends.
Perhaps it would be worth adding that there is now a competitor to “Bridge is a Conversation”.
The link is here:
https://bridgewinners.com/store/ebook/the-language-of-bridge/