Writing Boots

Rubby is buffing off on me

I recently wrote in an e-mail: "Shit or get off the casket."

Writing Boots Word of the Week: marplot

One of my favorite words is marplot: an officious medler whose interference compromises the success of an undertaking. Or as I call him: a one-man bureaucracy.

The intellectual mistake I most frequently make ...

... is laughing at the naiveté, or lauding the nobility, of past generations of people who I know damn well were built just the same way I am.

They should call 'em marital arts

At the bottom of each side of every marital argument is the vexing question, "How could you have been married to me for this long and still be so fucking dumb?"

The Quotable Murr

Ron Santo didn't cook up a lot of food for thought in his life. But the gritty third-baseman's posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame has me thinking:

Your parents told you you could do anything that you set your mind to. One of the details they left out is how unbelievably long it's probably going to take.

If you've been around at all, you know ...

All e-mail treachery begins with the words, "Quick question."

The Quotable Murr

Whereas Spiro Agnew criticised "the nattering nabobs of negativism," I prefer to pillory the prattling pipsqueaks of positivism.

The Quotable Murr

Once the Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk was sitting at a sidewalk beer garden drinking beer and smoking a cigarette in all of his Ruthian obesity.

"And you call yourself an athlete!" sniffed a woman passing by.

"Lady, I'm not an athlete," Kruk came back, "I'm a baseball player."

In a similar mood, it occured to me the other day as I cursed the limitations of my own intellect:

I'm not a thinker, Goddamnit. I'm a writer.

The Quotable Murr ...

"If you were me, you'd be dead by now." —David Murray*

* Which calls to mind a remark by my old friend Ralph Gaillard, who said in a moment of workplace dismay: "If I was dead, right now I'd be spinning in my grave."

The Quotable Murr: On forgiveness

I forgive, but only on account of, I forget.