Last week I watched the New York Yankees demonstrate to the Minnesota Twins what it means to play the Bombers in the Bronx in October. It was like watching baseball-playing-human-things battle a platoon of automaton-cyborgs in pinstriped skin suits. From the first inning of the first game, the accuracy and...

Question: Should we be done with it and elect Mayor Daley's DNA as Mayor-Designate-For-Eternity, thus saving the city millions of dollars in election fees over the coming centuries while dipping into the Petri Dish and seating Daley after Daley after Daley, each a variation on the original with its boxer's...

I was once arrested by a very small Chicago police officer. Like several other ridiculous moments in my life, this occurred because I am a Cubs fan. Going to jail for something you believe in can be honorable, even noble. Going to jail because you're a committed fan of a...

There was a time not so long ago, before Craigslist (and the entire Internet), that the simplest way to find an apartment in Chicago was to walk the streets of a neighborhood scouting 'For Rent' signs. That's how I found my first place, so close to Wrigley Field that I...

Long and lean with a taut potbelly, he's a suntanned country-sophisticate with perfect white hair and a gold rope necklace bearing a gold anchor to match the one on his pinkie ring. He has a taste for things from the ocean either still squirming or deep-fried into submission, along with...

I was in the supermarket the other day buying toothpaste and, staring at the shelf, it suddenly became clear why Western civilization is not going to hell in a handbasket but rather in an ultra-lightweight dual-grip handbasket manually woven from organic polyfibers harvested in the virgin Peruvian rainforest by...

In the past month or so, since the Red Sox clinched their second World Series title in three years, I've been visited by a bothersome dream.

It's late at night and I awaken with a startling feeling that I'm supposed to be somewhere important. I climb from bed and...

If there's a lesson I intend to teach my 15-month-old son when he comes of age, it's that a gun is completely unnecessary when it comes to robbing a strip joint.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

What I really want to talk about is my fear...

My goal, unmet, was to write a piece on being the grandson of an immigrant, on what it meant to grow up with a combined sense of where you come from and where you are, and to wrap it all up in a big American flag and bring it...

Let me explain something to those who don't live in Chicago, Illinois, with its history and bureaucracy and politics and "largest population of Polish people outside of Warsaw, Poland."

On the first Monday in March of every year, Chicago school children are allowed to stay home and learn nothing...

Now that I'm a father, I've come to fully appreciate how annoying children really are.

Not my child, of course. The children of other people.

While it's true that my son is a preternaturally happy and grinning eight-month-old, that curls tumble in a cascade of black ringlets from his perfectly-shaped...

I don't mind being judged by people who don't know me.

What bites my ass is being judged by fatties in bad pants who don't know me.

This occurred on two occasions in particular and each time it went on for months preceding a seminal event in...

A New Father's Discovery: Finding My Me-Place

There are few things in life as gag-inducing as a "journey of discovery."

A year ago, after telling people that my wife was pregnant, for the first of many, many times to follow, someone recounted how having a child...

Fear is emotional crabgrass.

It takes root, it spreads its tentacles.

It creeps over rational thought and smothers cold hard fact.

Especially when it comes to hookers.

At seventeen-years-old my psyche was a weed-choked abandoned lot and it was because I was skinny and because I was horny but mainly...