Heel Spurs: Top 10 San Antonio Players Who Make Great Heels and Villains

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The San Antonio Spurs have had a reputations of being a straight-laced, team-first squad for decades, to the point where many fans think they’re boring. This is thanks to the humble, nice-guy leadership of legends like David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Avery Johnson, and so on. The “buy into the system” expectations for this team are as clear as the black and white on their jerseys. But there’s silver in those jerseys too, a gray area for players who are harder to tame and buck at the heavy-hand placed on them by Pop and the front office (affectionally know by Spurs fans as PATFO). Now this list is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and like great heels in wrestling, these are the Spurs players who took a turn toward villainy, providing some drama (be it entertaining or franchise threatening) for a team that is unfairly treated as vanilla, as plain paper, as drama free. They’ve been anything but over the years, thanks to these thorny Spurs in our heels.

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Dead City Jazz coming soon to Epic Rites Press

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Epic Rites Press has selected my poetry collection Dead City Jazz for inclusion in their Punk Chapbook Series. This is the second season of their series, which includes 12 chapbooks released over the course of a year to subscribers for just $40, a little over $3 per book. This is an exceptional deal considering the subscription includes work from Ally Malinenko, William F. Taylor, Karina Bush, and many other talented writers, with more to be announced.

Dead City Jazz is a collection of San Antonio poems, of late night breakdowns and smoky bar crawls, of darkened streets and glowing cantina lights, of fading love and frightening lust, of death wishes and jukebox laughter. I'll see about getting my hands on signed copies, but I don't have full details yet on how the series works as far as that goes. But at the price listed for all of the chaps in the series, it really is a good deal to go all in. Many thanks to Wolfgang Carstens for accepting my work! More details coming soon.    

New Poetry in February - Pine Hills Review & San Pedro River Review

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Two new poems of mine are now walking around out in the world for all to see. My poem "East Cevallos Street" now appears in the San Pedro River Review, a massive edition focusing on the American Southwest. My poem takes place in San Antonio, TX, and brings a glimmering colorful nighttime cantina into view, where drinks are cheap and so are the prayers to a saintly boxcar train rumbling through the downtown streets heading into the night, into the west. Copies are available for purchase online.

My poem "How to Watch John Ashbery Read Poetry" now appears at Pine Hills Review, the online literary journal for St. Rose, a college in my hoemtown of Albany, NY. This one is about going to see John Ashbery read poetry in NYC, and how these little gatherings are always more uncomfortable than you'd think. 

There are a lot of other poems and stories set for release this year, a few appearing in large anthologies, a story set for release over at Drunk Monkeys, and a new poetry collection due later this year from Dark Heart Press. There's a lot going on, and I'll keep you posted as we get further down the road. Thanks for reading!

  

San Antonio Spurs, 2014 NBA Champs - Why #5 Matters

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Even though the San Antonio Spurs are the 2014 NBA champions, it is impossible to talk about this year’s run without first discussing last year’s heartbreaking loss. I live in New York, so I usually watch Spurs games alone adrift a sea of Knicks fans. When San Antonio came so close in Game 6 last year only to lose it in the last 25 seconds, and then to drop a Game 7 that felt like an inevitable loss—painful doesn’t begin to describe it. Sitting there alone, it was devastating. And for some very personal reasons…

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Why I Love the San Antonio Spurs

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I’m a San Antonio Spurs fan and I have been for life, even before I knew it. I spent a good deal of my childhood in San Antonio, Texas, both before and after my parents divorced when I was three-years old. I spent every summer there between the ages of 8 and 19, then a year of college, and later three years in my late 20s, with little trips in between. My father’s side of the family has lived in Texas for generations (and generations), so the roots go deep. My dad was a fan and so was my grandfather. It's in the family, in the blood. 

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