Jack Dobbs realized he was an idiot on the 29th of May, at 12:43pm while playing basketball. The color of the sky was blue, the sun was shining with yellow hues galore, and a woman nearby was singing to her baby. The grass at the green park beckoned to him, and it struck him, with some mild worry and constipation in his stomach, that he was dumb.
All of his life, Jack had felt smart: his teachers in high school read him Kant and praised his ability to decipher philosophy. His math teacher said he could solve a derivative at the speed of light.

I grip my fishing rod, stand on the edge of the railroad trestle and look at the water fifteen feet below. The wind and an incoming tide jerk the Umpqua River into choppy crests. I take a step forward, my chest tightens and I start to sway.
When my older brother Dave said I could tag along with him this morning, I couldn’t dig the worms fast enough. I pictured casting from the bank behind the sawmill, not walking out on the railroad trestle, a bridge with ties, tracks and no deck.

There was a time in my distant past when disco ruled the dance clubs and American radio airwaves. I was raised on rock ‘n roll and folk music.
Disco: this heavy-handed beat and sometimes simplistic (or without) lyrics defined my night life for a number of years. Even with an arguably impressive collection of 12-inch singles, music that played in New York City clubs nearly 50 years ago, now stands solely as a reminder of part of my early city history: an era dead and buried.