About

Cyclist. Writer. Editor. I tweet @5minutecommute.

I’ve interviewed Iggy Pop. I also once smiled at Dick Gephardt in the St. Louis airport, and he waved back. Kurt Cobain and I were in a Seattle audience together at a 1993 Leonard Cohen concert. Janet Jackson once stopped into a bookstore where I was working behind the register. Johnny Bench sat back-to-back with me in adjacent booths at a Mexican restaurant in Cincinnati. Paul Simon and I shook hands and exchanged pleasantries in a nondescript conference room. I bumped into Jon Gruden in a stairwell at work. Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, has been in the back seat of my car. I introduced Dave Chappelle to my wife at a local bookstore. I introduced Gail Collins and Steve Doocy to audiences within 24 hours of each other. Marilyn Quayle brushed against me in the mid-80s as we passed simultaneously but in opposite directions through a doorway at the Kennedy Center. I had seats on a plane next to the starting five of the Washington Wizards back when they were the Washington Bullets and flew coach, chatting with Jeff Ruland and Ricky Sobers for most of the flight. I had no idea who they were. None of them remember me.

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Vanity Fair published a photo of mine as part of its coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

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My favorite book is Ulysses. In that book is Leopold Bloom’s heartbreaking lament: “Me. And me now.”

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Karen Walrond took a wonderful photo of me as part of her 1,000 faces project. I’m No. 62.

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In 2002, I gave up a half-hour commute by car, 90 minutes by bus or never by bike at a horrible job to take a better one that’s a five-minute drive from home. By bike, it’s seven minutes. I can walk it in about 25. I go one of the same two routes all of the time, seeing the same few blocks over and over. After awhile, you stop ignoring what you’re always passing on your way somewhere else and start seeing it. You become present to it, seeing the small rhythms and the hidden spaces. That’s where life is.

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My cousin Andy was an extra on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and met Sweet Dee. That is also a highlight of my life.

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In April 2012, I moved to Virginia to begin work as alumni magazine editor at the University of Richmond.