Josh Wilker

This card is a miracle. Mundane, unsinkable life triumphs over blurred dissolution. A man, despite the befogged oblivion behind him, despite the intrusion of transient, haphazard artificiality in his airbrushed cap and uniform, hasn’t dissolved into the cartoony murk closing in all around him. He is here.

Darrel Chaney keeps coming back to me, even now, in a fractured world. And I keep coming back to Darrel Chaney. I first encountered him when I was eight years old. That’s when the world started showing its cracks to me.

This is me and some baseball cards. It looks like I’m saying “enough already” but with the not unhappy awareness that it will never be enough, that whatever I’m trying without much conviction to hold back in the cards is just going to overpower me. And it’s true, the cards will outlast me. Even my son was remarking as much the other day. “Are you going to give me your baseball cards when you die?” he said.