please do not ask me why i feel absolutely compelled to post this picture of troy polamalu with his wife and child after the 2009 superbowl. it could be the child's steelers clothes or fierce expression. it could be the matching hairdos. it could just be polamalu's arm.


( Read more... )

 my family is still all atwitter about the steelers. two things from my mom ( Read more... )

i posted the yahoo sports thing because the writer kind of nails what has taken me years to understand.

The Steelers aren’t just a team for the people of Pittsburgh, they’re an identity... Polamalu admitted that this connection with the city was anything but new. It’s been that way for decades, a “fraternity” he called it. It goes the other way ( Read more... )

i have one regret about the time i spent in braddock. when the mayor took me on the "tour" of the town, we went inside one of the abandoned houses. whoever lived in this particular house left in a real hurry, and when they left,  they left everything. the contents of their life was all over the floor, and we walked on top of it. in one room, on the ( Read more... )

also, before i forget, yesterday i was talking to this funny man at Rivers of Steel, and he told me that part of homestead i drove though (is technically munhall for one) is where the mill middle management lived, so the houses were a stitch nicer to begin with. he also told me that part of the reason homestead doesn't look as bad as braddock is ( Read more... )

Guy, chasing after pregnant woman in the fruit section: It's not a boy? I swore you told me it was a boy! Honey! Come back!

--Whole Foods, Bowery

i don't know why, but that one really made me laugh. maybe because i am meeting amber for dinner later (she's pregnant).

back at my dad's i've had enough of jeans and t-shirts, e-nough. i'm wearing my ( Read more... )

today i drove to homestead to make sure i could get an appointment to visit the Rivers of Steel Archives. i'm not sure, but i can't recall ever hearing a good thing about homestead in my life. i guess, stupid me, i expected thugged-out ghetto life or something.  i have a distinct memory of my mother panicking when she got lost our way home from ( Read more... )

When I moved to New York and started writing there, I created a "New York" folder in My Documents. Though I didn't want to admit I ever left, when I got to Greensboro, so came a new folder titled "Greensboro." I now have a folder titled "Braddock." It contains one document of five lines.

the "us" the mayor referenced in that initial email is this whole tiny little community. 

i'm dying to walk around, but hesitant. at 7:30 it's still light out, but i feel too new to get into it, too where to start, too hungry for dinner. maybe i'm making excuses, but i feel like i need a night. a night to learn the house i'm in.  a night to look out the same window and wonder what all of this has to do with me. a night to look out the ( Read more... )