Woman on Checkerboard

After emboldening myself I approach “Woman and Checkerboard” and say, “Ma’am, you appear rather morose this morning.” “Is that a surprise? While molten blue eyes pour out my sockets I’m sitting at a table threatened by a gloomy wall and ominous sky and sense Richard Diebenkorn’s going to remove me and other people from his…

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Conversation with Usain Bolt

An official I know got me a track team suit from Japan and the necessary credentials, and I sauntered below the Olympic stadium in Rio and onto the practice track where I spotted Usain Bolt as he worked on starts a day before the four-hundred-meter relay final. I jogged over and said, “We’ve already run…

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Ferdinand Marcos Writes to President Duterte

Dear President Rodrigo Duterte, I would like to at once thank you in writing, as I soon shall in person, for allowing my publicly-displayed and cosmetically-altered corpse to be removed from refrigerated and glass-encased exile and moved to its rightful place of honor, the Heroes’ Cemetery of our great Philippine nation, over which I benevolently…

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Simone Biles Opens Up

In an open-hearted but devious effort we have employed the regular media, mind readers, the National Security Agency, pharmacologists, and other intrusive individuals and entities to engage Simone Biles and determine what she’s really thinking. That’s none of our business, you might say. And to that I respond: why, then, are you reading this? I’ll…

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Michelle Carter Launches Gold

For years we’ve known that Michelle Carter inherited and refined a talent to put the shot into distant zones entered only by the elite. In fact, her future father, Michael Carter, as a prep in 1979, unleashed a rocket still unchallenged – 81-3 ½ with a 12-pound shot – and difficult to fathom, even by…

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Van Gogh In the Road

On an exotic summer Sunday I step into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and head not toward a vision but a sound. “It’s the light or, rather, the lack of light in The Outskirts of Paris that makes this dirt road and the man in it faceless and gray and in need of southern…

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Water Rights

“Help us, please,” says an erect white man shooting his rifle. “What should I do?” “Pick up a rifle and start firing.” “You and your partner have the only two.” “Then go get help.” “You deserve help from an Indian scout?” “Sure. My buddy and I’d be happy to just give the Indians the whole…

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