Confessions of an Intentional Outcast by Paul Barile.

Writer, teacher and poet Paul Barile looks back at his life through 36 vignettes and a handful of poems.

“It was in a baseball park in Pittsburgh, PA on a cooling September evening that I finally figured out who and why I am. All of the clichés—all of the platitudes about legacy and other lofty concepts hovering just above pretentious—came crashing down on me sitting there on the steel bleachers. 

There was this kid in a Greg Polanco jersey #25. He wasn’t there when the game started. There were two young ladies wrapped in a plush gold comforter with the millennial Pittsburgh Pirates logo glaring back at me like a suspicious chaperone. 

I got up to try to find the baseball legend whom I had met and spoken with earlier in the evening. Manny Sanguillen and I shared words and some awkward pictures before the game started. I went back to his little food stand, but he was gone.”