The Endless Avoid

By Marc Porter Zasada

(An Urban Man Classic Post)

Here in L.A., we are all experts at avoiding people.  In fact, a lot of folks move here because they don’t really like people, and they can easily hole up in a small tract house with their big TV and cocoon-like car. If you telecommute, you don’t even have to see people in the office. Go to a midnight club, and you can get all sweaty without actually touching a single sweaty other.

Letters to America

A Short Story
by Marc S. Porter Zasada

Dear friends of the Urban Man: I rarely publish fiction, but I thought you might enjoy this story, which first appeared in The Antioch Review.

ONCE OUT INTO BIG CITIES and finding himself alone, the irrepressible Thomas Putnam took to writing letters home to his sister. From Chicago, high in a hotel room with the window open and the armies of the wounded moving below, he felt himself full of his youth and wrote: “Already it is summer here. On the streets, their cheeks puff out with wind, their eyes fill with light. Our nights are ten miles high and Arabian. The lamps are moons. One is surprisingly aware of trees, how deep they are, the way they hold themselves aloof.” And he sealed up the letter and dropped it in a mailbox the next day; from there it was delivered to Concord, Missouri. The year was 1957.

The Arrow of Logic

By Marc Porter Zasada

I don’t know about you, but I have never actually won a political argument. No one has ever said to me, “You know what? Now that you put it so clearly, I see I was wrong.” Not once. Not ever. Not when I marshal facts, not when I quote Jefferson, not by Socratic inquiry or blunt force of will.