Chapter One Jack Armstrong awakened. The first rays of dawn’s light were filtering through the blinds, giving the room that new brightness, washing away the night’s dreams. He loved the moment. He’d lay there unmoving, only the eyes working, taking in the new day’s first minutes of light. The rest…

“I’ve been first and last, Look at how the time goes past. But I’m all alone at last, Rolling home to you.” -Neil Young, Old Man The call I thought I would always dread came on a brilliant, late January, Friday afternoon. I was about three months into a year-long…

A story come down from the hills, told by the town sage, in the dialect he would deliver it. There was a storm brewin’ up in the hills. The whole deal started when the town sheriff, Seth Jenkins, had his name come up in a fedral investigation into racketeerin’ and…

Some might think this is a strange existence — Living in different places and moving around, it seems. I never planned on going back to any of the old places. I’m not made to stay in one location — Not yet. Sure, I thought we’d be fully settled by now. …

Become a Renegade from the Current Cults In modern English, a cult is a social group, defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. This sense of the term is controversial, having divergent definitions both in popular culture…

The Welcome to the Machine Podcast — Episode 16 In early 2020, when it became increasingly clear that organized sports was going to have to pay attention to the Covid-19 outbreak, the first sport to be impacted was the NBA, when it suspended the 2020 season indefinitely on March 11…

(Episode 11: A High They Have to Have: A Retelling) In this episode, I update my original Sports Illustrated piece from 2015, in which I described what suffering a concussion in a football game is like and the day many years later when I finally faced the truth that I…

A listener of my podcast Welcome to the Machine recently posited an interesting question: “Why do you think it is that people in their thirties to sixties place so much emotional energy on the outcome of a game played by 18 to 22-year-old young men?” Once you’ve moved beyond this…

This dispatch is dedicated to John Underwood, who called it way back in 1979 before anyone else saw it coming. A few years ago, it was reported that veteran and highly-respected broadcaster Bob Costas would soon be leaving NBC after almost four decades with the network. Costas had filled almost…