My essay “Impermanent Ink” appears in Hobart’s 2016 baseball issue.

In the summer of 1987, my father took me to my first minor league baseball game. At the time I only vaguely understood the hierarchy of professional baseball. It didn’t matter to me that most of the players I was going to see that night would never step on a Major League field – these guys were pros, and I was excited to watch them play.

I was seven years old. I had disproportionately large teeth and, potentially, a mullet (I know unequivocally that I had a truly horrific mullet during this era of my childhood, but the exact chronology is a little hazy). I was just learning to play baseball, blissfully unaware that I was already nearing the peak of my trajectory as a player. I topped out somewhere between the daily whiffle ball games in my backyard and little league, but I very quickly acquired the hallmarks of lifelong fandom. I collected baseball cards. I memorized stats. I watched my hometown team, the Seattle Mariners, consistently lose in the gloomy confines of the Kingdome. Continue here.

“Guardians” is now live over at Pithead Chapel.

“I’m so sick of this place.” We are standing sixty feet apart and our line of vision is blocked intermittently by passing shoppers, but I can see Prateek’s lips moving as he says this. The sound of his voice lags an imperceptible moment behind. “These people, these products,” he says. “The whole thing makes me want to off myself.”

This is our job: wear royal blue, store-issued polo shirts and pleated khaki pants while standing imposingly at opposite ends of the store entrance’s massive bank of sliding doors. Continue here.