Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

  • My Initiation Into Fantasy Football

    It’s been more than two months since I’ve last written on this blog. A lot has happened. I’ve moved, twice. I’ve aged (by which I mean I celebrated my birthday). I’ve taught an 8-week composition course for incoming Freshman athletes (11 football players and 3 hockey players). And tonight, in about 30 minutes, I’m about…

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  • “Happy Geeks”: A Story by Steel Wagstaff, age 16

    This past week I started teaching an introductory college composition course for a group of incoming UW student athletes. It’s a small group, just 14 male students, and most of the group are football players. For their second writing assignment, I gave them an essay that I wrote was I was around 16 years old…

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  • Bill Bryson

    This is an odd choice, admittedly, for the Favorite Artists series I’ve started here on this blog. It’s not much of a series yet, to be honest, since I’ve only featured one other artist so far, documentary poet Mark Nowak. And Bill Bryson, while a cracking writer of popular non-fiction, isn’t exactly what many people…

  • Distressing Changes to Wisconsin’s Mining Laws Proposed

    From Monday through Thursday of this week, I toured the state as part of a “Place-Based Workshop” put on annually by The Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve been one of CHE’s Graduate Student Affiliates for a few years now, but this was the first CHE Place-Based Workshop that I’ve…

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  • On Completing My Last University Course, Perhaps Ever.

    On Completing My Last University Course, Perhaps Ever.

    On Sunday morning, I took the last final for the last university course that I am obligated to take for the rest of my life. I was enrolled in two courses this past semester and one was an introductory basketball class, so I wasn’t exactly nervous about the content of that final. The other was…

  • Eyewear (Rec Specs) and Professional Athletes

    Eyewear (Rec Specs) and Professional Athletes

    The weather has finally turned in Madison. It’s still fairly cool here, but the snow is long gone and the grass is back, and the ground is hard enough for running and cutting and all the other things you need to do to play soccer outdoors. Finally. This week has been the first time I’ve…

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  • On Patience and Non-attachment

    I have long believed, in theory, that patience and non-attachment were complimentary and essential virtues and that I would do well to cultivate both of them. In practice, both are difficult, elusive, and have not always felt desirable or worthy of recommendation to others, particularly to those who suffer injustice. I have been thinking about…

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  • Mark Nowak

    Mark Nowak

    So, among other things, I’m going to start on ongoing series of features on this blog, one of which will be posts about my favorite artists, called, appropriately enough, “My Favorite People Series.” This post is the first in what I hope will be a long line of posts about all kinds of people that I admire…

  • 10 Years Later: Quotations for a Friend

    10 Years Later: Quotations for a Friend

    When I was a freshman in college, my best friend was Mark Eliason. He and I went almost everywhere together, and so nearly imitated one another’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and stock phrases that we’d regularly have other people ask us if we were brothers. We usually lied and said yes. After our freshman year, each…

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  • More on Beck. Plus: Homeless Guys. And the Library.

    One thing I didn’t mention in my last post about Beck was that when I was young, one of the reasons that I especially liked Beck was that he seemed to be friends with a lot of homeless guys, or at least guys that looked the way that most of the homeless guys that I…

  • Beck & the Greatest Music Video of All Time

    Beck & the Greatest Music Video of All Time

    As a teenager, I was wild for Beck. It started with “Loser,” a song I liked so much when I was 12 that I bought the Mellow Gold album and started collecting everything else I could find by the musician. I think that the larger opinion of Beck at the time was that he’d probably…

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  • On Earth Day

    On Earth Day

    Today is the 41st annual Earth Day, one of my favorite days of the year. Today I want to tell part of the story of its origins, its importance, and why I treasure the values that underlie its celebration and observance. Earth Day is the child of former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson (see additional bios here…

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  • The Origins of 4:20

    I should state right at the outset that I’m not a pot-smoker. Never tried marijuana in any form, actually, nor does the drug have any real appeal for me. Nevertheless, it was frequently invoked as an inside joke between my best friend Jack and I all through high school. We made thousands of ganja references,…

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  • The Last Thing To Go

    The Last Thing To Go

    I play basketball on Wednesday nights. Pick-up games, at a church building in Madison, five on five, really nice courts. So it’s on my mind today. I’ve played basketball ever since I was a kid. I’ve always been into sports, and have always liked playing them more than watching them. Commercials don’t help–I abhor them,…

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  • To be a Carer

    To be a Carer

    I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the medical profession, and more broadly, about health. I’m not certain why, particularly since I haven’t been ill lately, and we tend usually to think of health and healers only when our body is not well, when we are in pain, when health eludes us. So I…

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  • Information Overload?

    Since I purchased my first laptop two years ago, one of my most common mental states has been distraction. Too often, I find myself immersed in virtual information scapes teeming with curious, interesting, alluring, tugging things. Frequently, I find myself skimming several interesting sources, my attention distributed so broadly that it fails to penetrate much…

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  • Dear reader:

    Dear reader:

    I must apologize, if for nothing else than for lacking the kind of grace and characteristic honesty possessed by Michel de Montaigne, whose prefatory remarks to his Essais are for me still the gold standard of an apologia for keeping a record like the one I hope this will soon become. Though I certainly lacking…

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About the Author

Hi, I’m Steel Wagstaff. I’m the product manager for Pressbooks, a Canadian company making open source book publishing software.

I live in Eugene, Oregon with my wife, Laurel Bastian, and our elementary-school aged son.

I love poetry, music, libraries, reading, playing pickup soccer, & eating vegetarian food.

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