No. 237 - Poor Man’s Game Notes XIII: 2026 Pre-Season

I’m coming to you from the basement of the old Yale Club in Boston, on another adventure/boondoggle/what have you. I flew in from D.C. and will be headed to Austin in a few days, where I’ll trade my loafers for cowboy boots, and the twang of a slide guitar will slow everything down.

I’ve come to accept that I live a peripatetic life (fancy word for saying I’m a vagabond). I’ve spent the last year on both coasts and driven thousands of miles through Texas, from the stockyards of Fort Worth to galleries in Marfa. I even swung through a little town named Roosevelt, where our 26th president went to see a man lasso a rattlesnake.

I’ve come to learn this drifter life has a way of redefining the word home. When I’m in New York, I have bookstores where I’m at home. The scent of an old book does wonders. In San Francisco, I have my coffee shops and clubs that afford the same. It’s an odd life, for sure.

But home can’t be browsing bios on the fourth floor at Argosy. Or overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge with a cigar.

Home is where I go when I’m lonely, when everything a city has to offer isn’t enough. Home is where I find myself in a tent in Wyoming or a cheap motel in West Texas. When the black dog rubs his nose against my leg.

Home, for a guy like me, is a walk amongst the mansions in Savannah, an afternoon of fly fishing in Rabun County. It’s Jessica by the Allman Brothers on a spring drive through Tuxedo Park in my CJ with the doors off.

Home is beneath the majesty of those ancient trees on North Campus. It’s the feeling of an autumn breeze on Broad Street … the roar of our people in Sanford … the memories of college days when we were young, when no one planned beyond today, when all you had to worry about was getting a ticket to a show at the Georgia Theatre and if we’d figure out a way to beat Florida.

That’s home, and I’m ready to come back.

Give ’em hell, Kirby!

*Composed, Edited, and Published in Boston, MA at the old Yale Club on Beacon Hill

P.S. Special thanks to Lou Tamposi with Cow We Doin’ for letting me write at his spectacular place.