Trump Causes More Shit

Last week, after visiting the dog park, I tried to walk home along the river. It was damn near impassable. The grass and the path were strewn with goose poop. Disgusting for me, and a health hazard for my dog. She loves to eat the stuff, and it's laden with bacteria and parasites. The last time she chowed down on it, she threw up all over my van. Yuck.

This was the last straw for me. The geese never shit on the river path. There are a few areas in Donaldson Park that are consistently covered in fecal matter (and they are easy enough to avoid) but this winter-- perhaps because we never got solid snow cover-- the entire park was littered with the stuff. Every sporting field, every paved path . . . from the grassy meadows to the muddy banks. Poop poop poop poop. The only spot in the park not covered with goose poop was the dog park. But I couldn't walk through the other sections of the park to get to the dog park. There was too much shit. So I had to take the street along the park and cut into the park on the trail just past the public works building and the diesel fuel tank. This route is not scenic at all. It's damn near tragic. I live next to Donaldson Park so I can walk around in Donaldson Park.

My New "Scenic Route" to the Dog Park

I generally managed to keep Lola from eating goose poop on my way back from the river, but it was not pleasant or relaxing. So I was pretty irate when I got home. I had been through a scatological minefield, and I was certainly suffering from PTSD: Post Traumatic Shit Disorder. I was fired up. But instead of my usual complaining into the void, I decided to do something: I would write an email to the powers that be. I cranked out a couple paragraphs of crackpot commentary to the county parks director. I was vivid. I was livid. I was graphic. I was gross. I mentioned bacteria and parasites. I recalled that there used to be a guy that would come in and scare the geese away. He would set off fireworks and place silhouettes of dogs in the fields. What happened to that guy? Donaldson Park needed that guy! My tone was polite but frustrated. What other tone is there when you're dealing with goose-shit?

Here's what I got back. I was very pleased with the prompt reply (and properly indignant about the causes of the excessive poop).

A Prompt Clarification on the Shit Storm

Mr. Pellicane,

Thank you for your message regarding Canada goose numbers at Donaldson Park.  The County currently contracts with the Wildlife Services Division of the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services for Canada goose management on all County properties.  This include harassment and egg treatments.  They cover over two dozen sites throughout the County.  With our proximity to water, open space and mild winters, controlling geese is always a challenge.

The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter.  Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year.  Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended.  Harassment during this time was minimal – only what our staff could get to.

We are certainly behind on behavior modification and it is apparent in many of our parks.  Our USDA tech is back on the job (for now, anyway) however, we are playing catch up across the County.  I have asked for increased visits to Donaldson Park over the next week and if there is not another shutdown, continued aggressive harassment for the next few.  This should hopefully help alleviate some of the pressure on Donaldson Park from the geese.

Thank you,

Rick Lear

Director

Office of Parks and Recreation

Department of Infrastructure Management

Let's Assign Some Blame!

Trump! This was Trump poop. Caused by his government shutdown. And even better, Rick Lear alluded to Trump's arch-nemesis. He didn't call it by name (perhaps, like the EPA, he's forbidden). But when he refers to the "mild winter," we all know what he's talking about. Climate change! So I had stepped in Donald Trump's shit, caused by something he refuses to believe in, the Chinese hoax. I couldn't have been happier. English teachers love irony.

The biggest problem we are having this year is with the somewhat milder winter.  Many geese that pushed southward last year, simply did not this year.  Additionally, with the federal government shutdown for 35 days in December and January, all contracts were suspended. 

Rick Lear

I was also happy because getting upset about Trump shit is fun. This is because Trump is temporary. His ideas are outdated. He's a throwback, a dinosaur, soon to be extinct. A last gasp. In fact, despite the bipartisan quagmire and the incorrigible stupidity and corruption of the Trump administration, I'm feeling pretty good about the world, goose poop and all. This is mainly because I'm nearly done with Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. It's also because my wife is doing a lot of Zumba and looking great (but that's besides the point).

Pinker uses an avalanche of charts and statistics to remind us that we are living in the best of times. And this is because of th enlightenment values mentioned in the title: science, reason, secular humanism, liberal democratic ideas. The world has never been less violent, more healthy, more prosperous, safer, and more liberal. Despite what the naysayers prophesy, more people have rights than ever before, less people are at war than ever before, knowledge is more accessible, and democracy is on the rise. While there are challenges, we keep coming up with solutions. And the two existential threats-- the things that worry Pinker the most-- the environment (including global warming) and nuclear war . . . both of these things are improving. Slowly, but they are definitely improving. As countries grow richer, they do a better job preserving the environment; they reforest and recycle and use less fossil fuels and look for alternate energy sources. And we are slowly whittling down the number of nuclear weapons on earth. That number may never reach zero, but it doesn't have to. As long as we accept and understand the challenges, there are solutions on the horizon.

The Robots Are NOT Coming

Pinker also dispels some of the ridiculous notions that cause folks unnecessary anxiety: artificial intelligence experts don't fear the singularity. AI is not going to rebel and replace us. It's too hard to make a semi-conductor. It's too hard to make anything. It takes teams and teams of people and many highly technical factories and lots of resources. And we humans control all that. We are the kings of meat-space. And most of this perceived conflict is online. This is also the reason we probably don't have to fear technological nightmare scenarios caused by lone wolf lunatics. It takes too many smart people to create technology that advanced. Your computer may get a virus (but nothing as serious as Y2K) but you need a team of specialists to make a nuclear bomb or a super-virus, and it's hard to assemble that many people down with destroying the human race.

This is why rational people don't fear Donald Trump. He's not the face of the 21st century, he's a wart that will soon dry up. And fall off. He's an old wart.

Pinker does acknowledge that Trump will have an effect-- especially if we let him-- on some of these precious enlightenment ideals that have served us so well. He's an impediment to "life and health" because of his anti-vaxxer rhetoric and his role in dismantling our healthcare system. He's a threat to worldwide wealth because of his idiotic zero-sum notions about trade. Countries that are tied together economically cooperate. They don't go to war. He's certainly not helping economic inequality, nor is he a boon to safety, on the job or otherwise. He hates regulations, which often spur progress and make business seek solutions to problems (such as car crashes, plane crashes, poisoning, tanker leaks, lead levels, mileage restrictions, etc). He's not particularly keen on democracy and seems to have a penchant for dictatorial strongmen. He's no fan of equal rights, and his speeches and Tweets often have an undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. And he's a liar liar pants on fire. So he's not an ambassador or advocate to the wonders of available and accurate knowledge.

The Glass Is Half Full? So Lame . . .

Optimism is not cool. Pinker is an utter nerd. It's more fun to obsess over Trump and predict the end of civility, the end of civilization. Trump is certainly a shitshow, and Michael Lewis does a nice job illustrating some of the consequences of his incomptetence. And he's an environmental disaster. But we are progressing despite him. You need proof? Listen to Adam Ruins Everything Episode 1, where Adam talks at length with the Los Angeles DOT Seleta Reynolds. Streetcars, bike lanes, public transport, walkable neighborhoods and plazas . . . in the car capital of the country. In LA? Sounds like a hippie's dream and a conservative's nightmare. But this progressive vision is happening, despite Trump, and with federal funding. There are difficulties, of course, but when you hear this dedicated and intelligent government employee explaining that the market won't solve these problems of morals and values, it's really heartening. She's also really funny.

Pinker is an atheistic utilitarian who may not have enough feelings about anything to move the stalwarts on the left or the right. He glosses over some pretty bad shit. But that's because he's looking at the numbers, not at the emotions. Not at identity politics or anything particularly political. He's in the same corner as President Obama, who wrote a miniature version of the Pinker book for Wired Magazine. It's an essay called "Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive." It's not nearly as fun as visions of rusted out towns full of drug-addled opiate addicts (not the whole story) and porous unwalled borders which allow terrorists, criminals and rapists to pour into our nation. Statistically supported optimism can't match Chinese bandits stealing our intellectual property, black people who don't know their proper place (let's make America Great Again! And Institutionally Racist!) and liberal socialists who want to empower the government so that it controls every aspect of our lives. The end of times. That's what gets the clicks.

But I'm siding with Rick Lear. He's going to be around long after Trump is gone, directing county parks and rec infrastructure, fighting the good fight against the geese. He'll suffer mild winters and government shutdowns, deal with cranky emails, and continue to make this country greater than it's ever been. I have faith that he's going to make my local park greater. He's going to get rid of those geese (and their shit).

I believe.

Pinker's incremental pragmaticism does have it's problems. Robert Gordon, in his comprehensive work The Rise and Fall of American Growth claims that we've captured all the technological "low hanging fruit" and that advances will be tiny and slow for a long time. And Charles C. Mann provides a much more balanced picture in his new book, The Wizard and Prophet. Pinker is a fan of Norman Borlaug, the agricultural engineer who founded the Green Revolution‌, but there are those scientists who don't believe technology will bail us out of every dilemma. We might need old-fashioned conservation to preserve our way of life. Mann uses ecologist William Vogt to represent this perspective. It's one worth noting.

Pinker is also not very romantic. There's no room for honor and zealotry and fanaticism and mysticism and martyrdom and certain types of selfless ascetic heroism in his philosophy. He's no Hamlet, who says to his buddy Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But Hamlet has seen a spirit, his father's spirit. The time is out of joint. Something is rotten. That's not so in Pinker's secular, statistical view of progress. Society will be less varied, but I have to admit, I don't really care. I won't miss the zealous fanatical whirling mystical martyrs one bit.

I'd much rather have a river blindness vaccine. And people are working on it.

Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty

My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year  The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:

there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .

Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .

When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country. 

Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.

John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:

Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.

he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .

on imagery

We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"

on the stupid geese in the park . . .

Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.

on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:

In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.

on the past and the future

And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)

Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.

a sports essay that made me cry

Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.

and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .

And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.

Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.

more on lawns . . .

more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.

Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!

There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”

and he writes about my favorite poem . . .

There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, 

And I dropped down, and down - 

And hit a World, at every plunge, And

Finished knowing - then -

and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:

“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons. 

and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .

Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

I gave John Green's new book five stars!

Three For Three at 3 AM

This past weekend, I was up at 3 AM three nights in a row. Each night was a different adventure. While it makes for good content, this is not a streak I want to continue.

3 am Adventure #1 -- Friday Night

Friday night, my son Alex was over on Busch Campus at Rutgers with his fellow members of the Highland Park Rocket Propulsion Lab. They got some kind of a grant and use the Rutgers facilities: the 3-D printer and the modeling software and the soldering equipment. These are really smart kids (who also play tennis-- that's how Alex met them). And something went wrong with Arduino mini (a piece of electronic equipment). The wires weren't grounded and they fried the circuit board.

So when Catherine and I got home from dinner with friends at 11 PM, Alex wasn't home yet. We texted and he said that they were trying to fix the circuit board and needed to stay later.

I reminded him that he had Model UN at 8 am at Franklin High School. He had to be up at 7 am. Then I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 2:30 am. Alex had not come in. I texted him. Things were not going well. He said they might not get done until 4 or 5 in the morning.

This was absurd. I told him he needed some sleep before his Model UN event and drove over to Busch Campus to find him. It wasn't easy. He had to run down the road to flag down the van. And-- though we didn't know it at the time-- we were near the spot where a Rutgers employee had been bitten by a coyote! Just one night previous (at 4 am).

I was so sleepy I missed the exit for Highland Park. Alex managed to get up and put on his coat and tie for Model UN the next morning. Impressive.

3 am Adventure #2 -- Saturday Night

Saturday afternoon, I attended the Rutgers/Ohio State game with my buddy Alec. We drank some beer before the game and then we drank some beer during the game. Then when I got home from the game I ate some of my wife's delicious Thai coconut curry chicken soup (and drank another beer). A little bit later I made a rash decision and decided to have ice cream, with a healthy dollop of whipped cream on top. This is not a combination of food my stomach can handle.

So this one was my fault. I was up at 3 am Saturday night with gas. I fell back to sleep, but couldn't really sleep late because of my son's Model UN event.

3 am Adventure 3# -- Sunday Night

Sunday afternoon, I took my son Alex to the Edison skate park. I brought the dog, so I could walk her while Alex skated. The adjacent fields were covered with goose poop and Lola ingested some. Yuck.

At three in the morning Sunday night (Monday morning?) we heard that distinctive retching sound of a vomiting dog. Lola was puking on the landing at the top of the stairs. Pretty minimal. Probably because of the goose poop. I got her outside and Catherine cleaned up the mess. We put down a towel in case she threw up again.

Thirty minutes later, she did just that. It was just a tiny bit, and she did it on the towel. I waited for a moment, to see if she was going to throw up more (since she was doing it on the towel). Catherine rushed by me, her thought being "get the dog outside." In her mad rush in the darkness, she flung her arm at my face. Her fingernail cut the inside of my nostril. Ouch! She drew blood!

Ian and Alex slept through all of this.

The next morning, I tried to find the spot where Lola defecated in the yard at 3 am. I hate leaving dog poop in the yard, because it always comes back to haunt you. I couldn't find the poop-- because I had stepped in it. I took off my clogs and left them outside.

Then, on the way back from walking her to the park, I tried to find the remainder of the poop and I stepped in it again. Luckily, we got some rain so it was easy to wipe my shoes clean on the wet grass.

During the school day, I learned that a cut inside your nostril really hurts. It hurts when you sniffle, it hurts when you rub your nose, and it especially hurts when you eat spicy food (like the leftover Thai coconut chicken soup that I had for lunch).

Anyway, I am hoping to end this streak tonight. Wish me luck.

Dogs vs. Geese

I hate the park by my house right now -- it's muddy and full of goose-shit -- and the only way to solve the problem (without resorting to violence . . . and I will admit that violent thoughts about these geese cross my mind all the time) is to allow dogs free roam of the park, as the only thing that these geese are afraid of are dogs . . . but this might lead to a park full of dog-shit, or even worse, a headline like this: Wild Dogs Kill Four in Mexico City Park . . . so maybe I should stop complaining and just deal with the goose-shit.

Phrases phrases phrases

My wife has a habit of slightly altering idioms so that they retain the meaning but contain a synonym or two in place of the typical words in the saying; for example, "drip in the bucket" instead of "drop in the bucket" . . . today, she described her shopping trip as a "crazy goose hunt" instead of a "wild goose chase"-- I quite like that one-- and last week, she called me to vent after undergoing a time-consuming, fruitless customer-service call and ensuing message from the furniture store that was very hard to understand-- she described this poorly recorded voicemail as "marbled" and I said, "you mean 'garbled'?" and she said, "marbled, totally unclear . . . and if you're going to correct my vocabulary I'm going to hang up!" so I wisely stopped pursuing the matter, but today-- after we laughed about her invention of crazy duck hunt, she told me what she meant was that the guy on the message "sounded like he had marbles in his mouth."

The Good Doctor and I Celebrate Another Birthday

My beard grows white, my skin grows loose,
the looming specter tightens his noose,
and if you deny him, he'll cook your goose . . .
let me remind you, it happened to Seuss.

Screw You 47.2

To continue with the weekly theme of aging and decay, you might want to listen to the newest episode of The Indicator. It's called "Peak Misery and the Happiness Curve," and-- according to Dartmouth Professor David Branchflower-- the peak of misery (or the nadir of darkness and despair) occurs at age 47.2. Your happy when you're young, and you become happy again as you get older-- but you won't be as happy as you were at 18 until you reach your 60s.

I've passed 47.2, and I'm feeling good about it (aside from the weather and the copious goose-shit in the park). My shoulder is serviceable, my knees don't hurt too much this week, and I'm still ambulatory and with some mental faculties.

I checked back to May of 2017-- when I was 47.2-- and I didn't notice much depression. The saddest post was about the death of Chris Cornell (and the consequent death of grunge). I checked to see if Cornell's suicide occurred when he was 47.2, but no such coincidence-- he was 52.

I did a word cloud of that fateful month's posts and there's nothing unusual. Soccer, Ian, Catherine, beer. And "China" and "Chinese." That's weird, but not depressing.



If you're somewhere in the vicinity of 47.2 years of age and looking for something nostalgic to listen to, this podcast tells the story of E.T. the video game and how it led to the demise of Atari and a slump in the entire home video game industry.  It's a compelling tale (and I never heard the story-- my family had Intellivision).

Dave vs. The Looming Specter of his Mortality

I was in a lousy mood last week. January really dragged-- lots of gray and damp weather. No joyful snowfall. The park is a muddy goose-shit filled swamp. The ticks haven't even gone dormant. And I was scheduled for an MRI on my shoulder on Friday. I expected bad news, as the doctor suspected a tear in either a rotator cuff injury or a labral tear. A rotator cuff injury would require serious PT and a labral tear would most likely need surgery.

My shoulder has been injured since the summer. I hurt it during a tennis match, screwing around with a topspin one-handed backhand. I can't get any juice on my serve (and I can't chuck a football with any velocity either). This shoulder injury (and my impending 50th birthday) have been really weighing on me. I'm not ready to hang up my racket yet. Beating my kids is too much fun-- and I've only got a few years left where I'll be able to do that (consistently). Or perhaps my run is over-- my shoulder burnt out-- and I won't get a chance to fade away.

I played indoor soccer well last Sunday, which should have bolstered my spirits-- but when I was crossing the ball, I caught the lip of a gym door with my toe-- and while I didn't hurt myself enough to stop playing, my ankle and knees were sore for days. I felt really old all week (until I drank too much Thursday night . . . oddly, Friday morning my knees were no longer sore).

I'm no dummy, so I started preparing for the worst a couple weeks ago. There's only one way to fight the looming specter of mortality: keep busy. My first project was to use my left hand as much as possible. Brushing my teeth, driving, pulling the wet laundry out of the washer, etc. I even started shooting darts left-handed-- which actually works fine unless I'm trying to hit the bullseye-- and I played tennis left-handed a couple times with my son Ian. My groundstrokes are pretty much the same-- I could always hit a decent lefty forehand and a lefty two-handed backhand is similar to a righty forehand-- but learning to serve lefthanded is a bitch. I went down to the park and practiced and I felt like a spaz. This article inspired me to keep at it. My left shoulder still has a lot of gas left in the tank, but I'll need a lot of mental fortitude to develop the fine motor skills necessary to play well lefty.

I've been preparing in several other ways for my impending midlife crisis. I don't want to resort to the typical shit: prostitutes, alcoholism, drag-racing, and dog-fighting, so I've implemented a preemptive strike on my mid-life crisis.

Project #1:

I've switched my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) from a PC to an iMac. I'm using Logic now instead of Cakewalk Sonar. I'm watching tutorial videos at the gym and learning a lot. I still don't know what I'm doing with Smart Tempo and Flex-Time, but I'm trying. Learning the new platform is keeping me off the streets and keeping my brain away from early onset dementia.

Project #2:

I'm reading some big books. I normally value quantity over quantity (aside form War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest). I'm barrelling through Uncle Tom's Cabin-- it's gripping-- and then I've got Tom Jones queued up on my Kindle.

In meatspace, I'm reading this absurd book.

This is mainly to irritate my fellow Philosophy teacher Stacey-- I've claimed that once I finish the book, she's not allowed to teach the class any long (unless she refers to me as The Philosophical Overlord). When I know Stacey's about to come into the office, I like to put my feet up, read something obtuse aloud, and brandish my new knowledge. A.C. Grayling is actually pretty entertaining-- for a philosopher-- although I skimmed the section on Empedocles.

Project #3:

Apparently, Google Play Music is going extinct. I've already been through this once with Rdio.

Remember Rdio?

No?

Serendipitously, my buddy Whitney just gave me a gift voucher for Spotify, so I've switched over. It's great, but I'm transferring playlists and massaging the algorithm-- so I'm spending a lot of time "hearting" songs and putting them on various playlists. I'm impressed with what Spotify spits out once you spend a little time on it. This project is not keeping me off the streets-- I use Spotify while I'm walking and driving-- so I'm working hard not to screw around with it while I'm driving and to look up once in a while when I'm crossing the street.

Project #4

So I was all depressed Thursday, because of the MRI on Friday. I drank too much and stayed out too late, and by the time I raced out of school and got to University Orthopedics, I was groggy and tired and hungry. They had a cooking show on in the waiting room. Guy Fieri ate various kinds of barbecued meats. By the time they called me, I was salivating.

They took me in, I put my valuables in a locker, and the guy told me the machine was a little loud. He handed me a pair of earphones. I lay on the sliding bed, my shoulder in the cup, and he slid me in. He gave me a little emergency switch and told me if I had any problem, to press it. I wondered why. Until I got in there.

I'm not sure if being tired and hungover was bane or blessing. The top of the cylinder was an inch or two from my nose. And the machine was LOUD. Not a little loud. SUPER-LOUD! Science-fiction loud. Weird grinding and banging and revving noises. And the music in the headphones was awful. Cheesy piano, occasionally interrupted by ads. Yuck. I didn't press the little button (or move at all) but I wanted to. Twenty-five minutes later, I was out and on my way to talk to the doctor.

While I waited, I could see the inside of my shoulder on the desktop. Looked fine to me.

Turns out I was right. Sort of. Fairly good news. No labral tear, no serious rotator cuff injury. Some arthritis, some bone cysts, and some swelling. Routine stuff. I didn't even need PT. I just had to do a bunch of exercises. And the doctor said I could play tennis! Right-handed! He said it might hurt a bit, and we could try a cortisone shot-- but I wasn't going to rupture anything. I would just be sore. If I really hurt it, I would know it.

This made me happy enough to get back to a project I've been putting on hold. I need a new tennis racket, an arm friendly one. If my right shoulder still hurts with the new racket, then I may still pursue playing left-handed. But I don't have to. I went to the gym today and did a bunch of shoulder exercises and I'm sore as hell. But I've eluded the looming specter another day.

I also think I need to make a doctor's appointment-- the appointment you make when you turn fifty-- and I think this is the appointment when the doctor will stick his finger up my ass.

Can't they just stick my ass in the MRI machine?

When in Rome, You Run Over the Geese

I was absolutely appalled by the behavior of a man in a construction pick-up vehicle last Friday evening; Catherine, the boys, and I were on our way to my brother-in-law's wedding in Hazlet, cruising down Route 516, when we came to a line of stopped vehicles -- and at the front was this white pick-up with an orange light on top of the cab . . . and in front of the pick-up was a small flock of Canada geese, taking their time crossing the road . . . and I should have mentioned earlier that the pick-up had New York plates, so I beeped at him, to indicate that he was now in New Jersey, and here in New Jersey we hate our plague of constantly defecating Canuck fowl, and we certainly don't stop traffic to let them wander in the road (and this guy stopped a good fifty yards from the geese, really giving them a wide berth, like they were some kind of endangered hummingbirds) and after I beeped, I tried to sneak past him in the shoulder, because I am familiar with the behavior of the Canada goose, and know that if you drive your car (or bike) straight at them, they get out of the way, but this guy in the pick-up -- this friend of all creatures great and small, turned and blocked the shoulder as well, so that I couldn't get by, and then, before things got really ugly, the geese vamoosed, and I'm thankful that they did because I was working myself into a righteous indignant rage that may have ended in fisticuffs, and I'm not sure my defense would have held water, that the reason I assaulted this guy was because he wouldn't run over some geese, and then he had the audacity to stop me from running over the aforementioned geese.

Yuck

I was excited to take Lola down to the park yesterday afternoon-- she loves to run around in the snow and it was unseasonably warm, but-- unfortunately-- the warmth brought the fucking geese back and they had managed to dig up some grass at the base of the sled hill, so they were camped out there, nibbling and shitting-- so that portion of the walk annoyed me: Lola ate some goose crap and I had to steer her around the poop field, around the bend and closer to the river . . . and then she was off leash and running around in the snow, having a blast (while I was walking backward in the deep snow, bulletproofing my knees) but then I noticed she had found something interesting in a plastic bag . . . and it was a rotisserie chicken and she was able to eat a wing before I got it out of her mouth . . . which made me wonder: who leaves a fucking rotisserie chicken in a bag by a bench in the snow in the park?

A Reason to Endure Static

I am a fan of FM radio -- despite the fact that I end up hearing a lot of sitar music (WRSU) and pleas from Alec Baldwin for money (NPR) and dissonant noise-jazz (WPRB) and classical flute (WQXR) and (even worse) Jethro Tull style flute (Q104.3) -- because once in a while you hear something so wonderful and unpredictable that it makes your day; Saturday morning on the way to the gym, I was listening to Newark's jazz station (WBGO) and I heard this tremendous couplet, in a song by Bobby Rush called "What's Good for the Goose" . . . in which a woman makes a calm ultimatum to her cheating husband: "Eye for eye, tit for tat/ if you give away your dog, I'll give away my cat."

Wow.

Katherine Boo's new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is astounding on three levels: 1) it is a phenomenal narrative of the people of Annawadi, a tiny slum between luxury hotels, near the Mumbai International Airport, on the shore of a vast sewage lake, you follow the stories of Asha the aspiring slumlord, who escaped the clutches of rural poverty; Manju, her beautiful daughter, who is attending college; Abdul, the garbage sorter, who is the main provider for his family; Fatima the One Leg, a promiscuous and angry woman who may have drowned her young daughter in a bucket, and who lit herself on fire in order to exact revenge on Abdul's family; Kalu, the entertaining thief; Sunil and Sonu and Zehrunista and Meena . . . and their stories are by turns bleak, tragic, comic, petty, and sometimes slightly hopeful 2) it is also a courtroom drama, and you follow the criminal cases of the burning and several murders through the byzantine labyrinth and corruption of the Mumbai courts 3) it is a phenomenal work of journalism, and as you are reading the engaging narrative, there is no way not to also think about how all this information was ascertained, and Katherine Boo details this in the afterword: four years of painstaking research, living in the Annawadi slum; many many assistants and translators to help her interview the subjects; and Boo's dogged petitioning of government agencies under the aegis of India's Right to Information act, so that she could peruse over three thousand official documents: police records, court orders, public health notices, political documents, etcetera . . . if you read this book, you will never forget it . . . but I warn you, it doesn't end like Slumdog Millionaire ( and it's a good one to read if you're angry because you've just taken a pay cut, which I think many folks have . . . due to the end of the Payroll Tax Holiday, and for teachers, an increase in health care and pension payments . . . and though Donaldson Park is full of goose-shit at this time of year, it's still a far cry from a "vast sewage lake," so I'll look on the bright side of things).

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger? We'll See . . .

I like to paddleboard on the Raritan River, mainly as a matter of convenience, as I live only a few hundred yards from a boat launch, and though I know the water isn't pristine, I prefer not to think about what's in the sauce, and instead I enjoy the views of the New Brunswick skyline, the Rutgers crew complex, and the rugged and forested cliffs directly across from the park (not to mention the large swath of open water as the river approaches the Donald and Morris Goodkind Bridges) but now that my children are also paddleboarding on the river . . . and falling into the river, as kids are wont to do, this report scares me a bit . . . apparently, the river is full of more than savage monsters, it also contains an unhealthy amount of mercury, benzene, arsenic, oil and gas drips, toxic fertilizer, and goose feces . . . a toxic brew, which-- best case scenario-- will turn my children into radioactive superheroes, or -- more likely -- it will do some weird and awful stuff to their innards, and because we don't have a control, a Family of Dave living next to a perfectly clean unpolluted river, we'll never know the exact effect recreating on the Raritan has on my kin.

A Wheelbarrow?

Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there was standing water full of goose-shit all along the near sideline-- but luckily there was a pile of sand near the goal . . . so all we needed was a way to carry the sand over to the puddles so we could fill them in; I asked my players what we could use to move the sand and one of them suggested "a wheel barrow," which I told him was a great way to move sand, but unfortunately, we didn't have a wheel barrow (and honestly, would I have even asked that question if I had a wheel barrow?) but then in a flash of coaching brilliance I realized I had enough orange practice cones to give every player two, and so we formed a cone brigade and filled the puddles fairly quickly, but apparently this wasn't the best way to warm up for the game because we gave up three goals in the first half (we were playing into a strong wind and trying to score on the muddy side of the field and they had a big fast kid with a mustache, but that's still no excuse for giving up three goals) and then we gave up a fourth goal early in the second half and I was getting ready to call it a day when we finally knocked one in . . . but 4-1 in soccer is still pretty much insurmountable (even with some wind) but then one of my players literally ran a ball into the goal with his chest and our kids realized that they could score and so we knocked in two more to tie it up, and had the ball on their goal line twice in the last minute, and you've never seen kids so happy about a tie.

Snow > Mud

I know an old lady is going to break her hip and flights are going to be delayed and the roads are going to be a nightmare, but that still doesn't curb my enthusiasm for loads of snow-- it's so much better than walking the dog through mud and goose crap-- I take him down to the river and he gets to bound around, off leash (because there's no one else at the park) and I get to stomp after him in my Sorel snow boots, and the dim winter sunlight reflects off the snow and the water, which makes me very happy, and it all reminds me of the final scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . . . I'm Jim Carrey and my dog is KateWinslet.

A Three Anecdote Week

Sometimes life has no narrative arc. Things don't connect. There is no theme. This was one of those weeks. Stuff certainly happened, but with no particular pattern. It was existential and absurd. Moving at times, but also fragmented and ridiculous.

The week began wonderfully. It snowed Sunday night into Monday and school was canceled. My nemesis-- the goose poop in Donaldson Park-- was covered by a thick blanket of the white stuff. So I bundled up and headed down the hill to the river with our dog Lola. She enjoyed the snow enormously. It was early enough that no other dogs were around, so she was off-leash, sprinting and bounding and bouncing through the snow. She's only a little over a year, and it didn't snow much this winter, so this was a real treat. We wandered to the far corner of the park, where someone had built a snowman. Lola had never seen a snowman before and she did NOT like it. She charged toward it, stopped twenty feet away, barked like mad, and then retreated.

She did this several times. She though the snowman was alive and possibly dangerous.

To assuage her anxiety, I walked over to the snowman and stood next to it.

"Look, Lola it's fine . . . it's not alive . . . it's a snowman!"

I patted the snowman's head, to show her it was inanimate. Lola took a couple tentative steps in our direction, so I continued the patting. But I patted a bit too hard (I was wearing gloves so it was hard to judge the force of my patting). The head fell off the snowman. Decapitated.

Lola yelped and ran like hell.

The next day it was back to the grind. I had to finish grading the college writing essays, enter grades into the computer for progress reports and start teaching The Crucible (which I hadn't read in years). My seniors were acting like seniors and my sophomores were acting like sophomores. The winter doldrums.

But then one of my students inspired me. She told a story I'm sure I'll repeat for the rest of my teaching days. This student is a super-swimmer. She got a full ride to Rutgers for swimming. Her day goes like this: she gets up at 4 AM and swims hundred and hundreds of laps, goes home, does her homework, and then she swims some more in the evening. 10,000 meters a day. I barely drive that much.

She brought her computer to my desk and showed me a preliminary thesis for her final paper. I told her it looked pretty good. She said she had thought of it that morning, at 5 AM, while she was swimming. I told her that it was awesome. Great use of her time. What else are you going to think about while you swim back and forth?

So she was swimming away, thinking about horizontal and vertical identity traits and how they connect to feedback loops and algorithms and the dynamic between natural and sexual selection, and then she had an idea. But she was worried she would forget about it. So she got out of the pool and went over to the whiteboard, where they write the times and workouts for the swimmers, and she started writing.

"You got out of the pool and starting writing your thesis?"

"I didn't want to forget my idea!"

"Did the coach and the other kids think you were insane?"

"Pretty much."

When practice was over, she took a picture of the whiteboard with her phone, thus preserving her idea. I was really impressed with her. I congratulated her on her dedication and resourcefulness. It was one of those moments when you feel great about being a teacher. You realize that some kids are actually thinking about stuff from class outside of class, getting smarter on their own time. And the image of her dripping wet in her racing suit, writing a complicated synthesis thesis on a whiteboard next to a pool full of elite swimmers doing laps, it's something out of Good Will Hunting or A Beautiful Mind. There's a mad scientist quality to it.

The next day, Wednesday, my phone started blowing up during class. Calls and texts. It was Phil-- the guy I coach with-- and he had bad news. One of our player's father had passed away from pancreatic cancer. Franco had been in remission for many many years, but the cancer returned and in a matter of weeks, it was all over. I coach his son on the middle school team and the travel team and so I had gotten to know the family a bit-- Franco was a real beloved figure in town. He was a major advocate for pancreatic cancer awareness, and after he survived the first bout, he went to seminary school. He then served as a chaplain at the Reformed Church up the street from my house.

They were having a vigil in his honor at his church that night, and I wanted to bring my younger son and a couple other soccer players from the team. I was getting organized to go pick them up when my older son Alex walked into the house. He had just returned from tennis practice, tired and scattered. I tried to explain the situation.

"You know Noah? From Ian's soccer team?"

"What? No . . . maybe? I don't know."

"Well, his dad passed away, Ian and I are going to the vigil. You're going to have to make yourself dinner. There's taco meat in the fridge. Okay? We're leaving and then I'm driving Ian and Ben to soccer practice. Mommy's at Zumba. Okay?"

Alex looked at me and said, "Today at practice, Chun Lee gave me this Mexican candy and I ate too much and it was really SALTY!"

"What? Alex, look at me. A man died! We are going to a vigil! I can't talk about Chun Lee's Mexican candy right now."

"Oh, okay . . . what?"

Back to Jersey . . . Blech

We had a phenomenal family vacation in Westminster, Vermont:

1) the storm that beat us back and made us postpone snowboarding became a cloud with a silver lining, as the crowds at Bromley emptied out on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and there was plenty of powder . . . if you stayed on the right side of the trail, where the wind piled the snow, it was almost like being out west-- my kids had a blast, after six years of snowboarding, it was the first time they ever got to experience decent conditions-- and they are getting brave, going into the woods, trying out jumps, and getting quite comfortable on the mountain;

2) I kicked ass at the board games-- we were in what was essentially a one-room cabin (with two bedrooms) so we had a lot of together time and played many rounds of Carcassonne-- and I won them all!-- and I also won at Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, games which I do not usually win . . . and that's the real purpose of this blog, to note these great victories, so I can refer to them many years hence when my kids try to revise history;

2.5) I learned that my snowboarding boots are a size and a half too big and that's why my heels were lifting and I felt out of control on my board the past two seasons . . . when I told the Bromley boot tech that I bought my boots in Jersey at my local ski shop, he said, "Would you buy a surfboard in the mountains?"

3) I brought back lots of great beer . . . local brews like Switchback and Conehead and Rock Art and Goodwater, and some Sixpoint Global Warmer, which I can never seem to find in Jersey, even though it's from Brooklyn;

4) we ate several times at the Moon Dog Cafe in Chester, and my wife and I wondered why we don't have any places like this around here;

5) there was loads of snow, and my kids and I built a fantastically dangerous sled run through the woods-- I rode the orange plastic toboggan down it and got airborne-- and it was just nice to hike around the property, which was hilly and heavily wooded;

6) my wife enjoyed watching the fireworks from our bedroom window, a farm across the way shot them off and they looked quite spectacular through the trees and arcing over the snow fields;

7) the cabin had Netflix, and aside from Saving Private Ryan, all we watched was episode after episode of 30 Rock . . . I love that show, and my kids love it too;

and then we hit Massachusetts, and the snow was gone, and then it started to rain, and when we finally pulled onto our road, I looked down into Donaldson Park and there was a huge flock of geese, in the mud, shitting everywhere . . . and unless it snows soon, that's going to be the scenery for the next two months-- mud, goose shit, and damp, cloudy weather.

We Are the Wild Ones

The thesis of Jon Mooallem's book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in North America is that preserving the "wildness" of many endangered species may well be impossible, now that human influence is  "bleeding into virtually all the available space," and he uses stories of the Lange's metalmark butterfly, the polar bear, and the whooping crane to show that there is a "fluidity to nature that's not easy to recognize or accept" and how climate change and human expansion is certain to eventually put these particular animals out of business -- but even though there is a certain futility in trying to save them, people do . . . and their actions, though ludicrous (tedious butterfly breeding and counting, airlifting starving polar bears, and dressing in whooping crane costumes and going on a year long epic journey in a caravan of trailers and ultra-light planes, in order to teach the cranes to migrate without having them become accustomed to humans) show an essential human goodness, but in the end, these very wild species may die out, and be replaced by synanthropes -- wild species that coexist with man with relative ease: rats, jellyfish, kudzu, roaches, starlings, raccoons, pigeons, etc, and while these species are likened to "ecological Applebee's and Walmart . . . spreading through nature and homogenizing it, while putting the more fragile mom-and-pops out of business," at least we will have some wildness near us (and judging by how some whooping cranes are adjusting to humanity -- eating seed from bird feeders and corn scraps from an ethanol plant -- they may end up like my least favorite bird, which was once endangered, and now defecates on every golf course in our country, the Canadian goose).