Back Up The Beehive (21 Years Later)

 

Twenty-one years ago, my wife and I honeymooned in Bar Harbor-- and we stayed in a cottage, which was a step-up from our usual peanut-butter and jelly/hotdog camping excursions to Acadia; things have changed since then-- we have two teenagers and the park is MUCH more crowded-- but our kids were game to get up early on a very hot day and we clambered back up the iron rungs and sheer cliff faces to the top of the Beehive Mountain, which overlooks the Sand Beach-- and then we hooked around, climbed Gorham Mountain, and took the Ocean Trail back to the beach, nearly a three hour trek in extreme Maine heat; it was hard to keep up with the kids but we did it, but it definitely wiped me out . . . we ended at the Sand Beach but the water was VERY cold-- Alex and I did the plunge but Catherine and Ian did not-- and then we drove back to Hancock and took long naps in the A/C . . . I'm so glad we're not camping in this heat (and things could be worse, it's even hotter in New Jersey).

More Vehicular Woes! And a Nice Lake Swim . . .

We made it up to Hancock, Maine without mishap-- stopping for Bissell Brothers beer and Salvage BBQ in Portland-- and while our rental is a bit cluttered, it's in an amazing location, near some tidal falls full of pools dotted with pink starfish-- yesterday, we took a ride out to the Schoodic Peninsula and there was a scenic pull-off in Sullivan and not only were the views of Mount Desert Island and Cadillac Mountain majestic, but there was also a grass tennis court just below the hilltop; this was too much stimulus for the driver (yours truly) and I turned a bit too late to park and hit the curb-- which turned out to be a very high and sharp curb made of granite-- so I popped the tire and bent the rim of our last remaining vehicle; luckily, Alex and I knew how to access the spare tire in the van (because he popped a different tire on a sewer grate a month ago and we learned that 2008 Toyota Sienna's have the most inaccessible spare tires in the auto world-- you need a five sided hex nut because of a weird recall, to lower it down from a wire from directly beneath the car-- even the Triple A guy didn't have one, so the car had to be towed, but after the first flat, I bought one on Ebay and put it in the glove box) and so while Catherine called Triple A, Alex and I tried to change the tire-- and it was hot, REALLY hot . . . and we finally got the tire loose from the bottom of the car, and it was really rusty (from being under the car) and it was very difficult to remove the tire from the wire-- the metal part that held it eventually just fell apart and then we tried jacking the car up, but forgot to put the parking brake on, so it titled over-- meanwhile, Catherine found out the wait for Triple A assistance was over and hour, so we pulled the car up a bit, got the jack in the right spot, put on the brake, and slowly and sweatily jacked the car up, pulled off the old tire and put on the donut-- and then we headed to Complete Tire Service in Ellsworth, where they could have gouged us or made us wait-- they were busy-- but they were so friendly and accomodating and got a new rim and new tire on the car in less than an our and charged us a total of $237-- could have been far worse-- and then we ate lobster rolls and seafood at Jordan's, headed back to our place, let the dog out, and then got back in the car and drove to the beach at Donnell Pond, a scenic sandy cove at the end of a large lake in the mountains (and later in the evening, Ian beat me twice in a row at cornhole, which I blamed on tired forearms from jacking the car up).

Too Much To Report

I can't even begin to describe this, other than to say that we're extremely lucky and everyone is doing fine; but we are having some transportation woes, as we had ANOTHER bike stolen-- and now we know the thief went into our backyard (we had convinced ourselves that Ian left the other bike in the front of the house, though he thought otherwise) and we had to file another police report and look very very stupid-- because we did NOTHING in the way of security after the first theft; so today was home security update day-- we installed some Ring cameras; replaced our ancient, burned-out motion sensor bulbs; put some actual LOCKS on the bike shed, etc. -- this was a long day on top of packing for vacation, but then we got a frantic call from our older son Alex, explaining that he crashed the car . . . but he was okay-- so we raced over to Piscataway, in the pouring rain, to see a disturbing sight-- our Honda CRV on it's side, in the woods-- but Alex was fine-- he spun out on the wet road, possibly hit the gas instead of the brake, careened over the curb, slid on some grass, ran into some small trees and the CRV tipped over, so he had to climb upwards and out the driver side door-- he was a bit bruised and burned from the airbags, but did not hit his head or hurt anything too bad-- but the car is totalled-- so we're down two bikes and a car right now-- but glad our son is healthy and alive-- and then there's the problem that he wasn't fully licensed because we lost his social security card and the DMV had no appointments during the pandemic . . . so this is going to be an interesting insurance matter (and he's going to get a couple of points on his license) but thank goodness he didn't hit anyone or have a passenger in the car.

Tennis

 Nothing much to report here, just a bunch of tennis (even my wife got out and hit!)

Summer!

Summer is here and it's already been fairly epic;

-- me, the boys, and my brother attended my cousin's father-in-law's massive 25$ a head random draw cornhole tourney and while my kids and brother-- all good players-- got knocked out early, my partner and I almost went the distance . . . my partner was decent but had an odd throw, especially since he was a young athletic 6-foot five-inch black dude-- you'd think he'd be muscling it in, but instead he gripped the beanbag delicately by pinching a tiny scrap of fabric at the corner and then flicking it up high-- sometimes it swooshed right into the hole, but it was also buffeted by the wind . . . we were beaten by my cousin Keith and his partner in the finals-- I held Keith's partner at bay but my "little" cousin Keith, who's now in his mid-thirties, came up big-- but still, my partner and I won 100$ each . . . Keith and his partner won 250$, quite a pot for chucking a beanbag;

-- I made all my appointments: dentist, physical, knee, and even got one out of the way-- the eye lady had a cancellation so I went and my eyes are fine . . . I'm also a new patient now, apparently I haven't been to the doctor since 2016

-- I finished mastering a song, called "Asymmetrical Warfare" and it sort of sounds like I want it to sound, but mixing and mastering music will always be a mystery to me;

-- Monday night, I did the 12:30 - 4:30 AM shift for our town's project graduation event, it was at the Woodbridge Community Center and I was impressed at how a mentalist guessed three times in a row what number I chose on a die (but perhaps the die was Bluetooth or something?) and I learned that if I play basketball at 2 AM then my knee really starts to hurt and I also learned that a school bus full of teenagers that have stayed up all night smells really really ripe at 4:30 AM . . . yuck).

The Guest List: You'd Kill to be On It

There were some fraternal hijinks at my wedding-- the boys "jammed' me into the Lawrencebrook for my blatant PDA with my new wife . . . in college, we would scoop offenders up and put their head in the toilet bowl to discourage any public displays of affection, so I was fine with getting dunked in the river (plus, I took a few folks in with me) but Lucy Foley's new thriller The Guest List takes these "boys-will-be-boys" rituals to the end of the bloody line . . . the book has some Liane Moriarty style reverse-chronological plotting, some well-drawn characters (and consequent perspectives) and a nod to the Murder on the Orient Express . . . everyone is a suspect . . . a fun read and you'll finish in a day or two: nine bogs out of ten.

Which America Do You Live In?

George Packer's new article "The Four Americas" adds some much-needed precision to the usual polarization analysis; he divides the left up into Smart America and Just America (which should be called Woke America) and he divides the right into Free America and Real America . . . 

Free America celebrates makers and the energy of the "unencumbered individual" but despises takers that are dependent on a "smothering government"

Smart America celebrates meritocracy, intelligence, credentials, and progress-- but the losers are the poorly educated;

Real America celebrates place, patriotism, and Christian tradition but is wary of elites and immigrants who want to contaminate the values of our country

and Just America demands confrontation with the problems that we have been burying or avoiding and wants marginalized groups to gain their rightful power . . .

and while you might ask yourself "Which America do I live in?" if you're like me, a denizen of Smart America, then you'll revise that question and instead ask: "In which America do I live?"

Father's Day?

Unlike Mother's Day-- which should probably receive an exclamatory flourish and be changed to Mother's Day!-- Father's Day would do better with an interrogative: Father's Day? . . . because while moms are certain about their relationship with their offspring, dads are never totally sure.

It's Over . . .

The weirdest and worst school year ever is behind us; the graduation ceremony turned out well-- we had a great mother/daughter speaking duo from the class president and the selected teacher-- and Liz was supposed to speak 18 years ago, but she went into labor with her daughter and Brady had to sub in for her, so it was very appropriate that they shared the stage yesterday-- but while the speakers were under a tent, the rest of us were baking in the hot sun on the turf-- pretty much the worst circle of hell for me, having to sit still on a plastic chair for hours in a bright hot place; also, I was receiving work from kids up to the moment I walked out to graduation, which did NOT make me happy at all-- it seems a lot of the virtual kids who got very distracted and did nothing during the semester suddenly wanted to turn in assignments-- yuck-- but now it's all over but the crying; the end of the year party was great (though I didn't win the cornhole tourney . . . my partner was Terry and we wona few games but then he had to leave . . . I didn't know that my normal partner, a cute young lady who teaches special ed in a different school, was coming to the party-- and apparently, she had emailed me to see if we were partnering up, but I didn't check my email . . . that's not my strong suit, it's too chaotic in there-- so then I was stuck partnerless so I picked up Chantal and we beat the reigning champs, only to lose to a drunken juggernaut . . . there's always next year . . . we hope).

Your Next Book Club Selection

Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires is his best book yet; it reminded me of the wonderful feeling I got in high school when I read a new Stephen King novel: you meet a cast of interesting fully-fleshed out modern characters and then terrible things happen to them . . . really fun and addictive.

Fightin' Zombies on Company Time

If you haven't fought some zombies in a big room while wearing an Oculus, you've got to give it a whirl-- no lag, exhausting, completely immersive, and fairly scary-- shit pops up all over the place and it's hard to shoot straight, so you end up fist-fighting swarms of undead, which fully surround you.

 

Best Exorcism Ever!

If you're looking for a tale of 80s high school nostalgia and demonic possession, couched in a wonderful-- but grossly graphic-- story of a life-long friendship, then check out My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix.

Mask Optional?

Masks are optional in my school now, but it seems like everyone is still wearing them-- staff and students alike, except me, the janitorial staff, and the security guards . . . I guess new habits die hard.

Things Feel Normal Again . . .

I didn't have to wear a mask today at school, I don't have to wear a mask in stores, Ian has people over for his birthday and Alex has some friends over and we were all sitting inside watching Nadal beat Djokovich- without masks-- and now all the kids are hanging out on our front lawn, playing cornhole and ping-pong, in a scene reminiscent of the last moment in Freaks and Geeks, when the different cliques are all getting along-- so a big shout out to those nameless smart folks who developed all these miraculous vaccines, as things feel normal again Nad they finished the night with a game of poker, five-dollar ante, which was REALLY reminiscent of that Freaks and Geeks scene).

Grady Hendrix = Weird Al?

Grady Hendrix may just be the Weird Al of graphic horror literature-- at his best, Hendrix is magical and satirical and very funny, with an exceptional eye for detail . . . but--like Weird Al-- he can be a bit gimmicky; We Sold Our Souls is a heavy metal horror story, and while it's a bit heavy on the fictitious metal lyrics of a prophetic unreleased album called Troglodyte, the plot is a magnificent mix of making-ends-meet America, conspiracy theories, metalheads, festival rock, soul-sucking demons, and the rock'n'roll biz . . .  six-hundred and thirteen pentagrams out of a possible six hundred and sixty-six.

I Hate the Heat

I really despise the heat of summer (and so does my son Ian and so does our dog) so it made me really happy to google "I hate the heat" and see lots of articles like this-- it made me feel less crazy.

Horrorstör!

Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix, is a winner; my son and I both read it in the span of five days . . . it's about a haunted IKEA-like store (called ORSK) and the book is, by turns, funny, satirical, gross, creepy, endearing, and aesthetically pleasing . . . I learned a lot about retail and a lot about the desultory effect of a 19th-century panopticon style workhouse prison on the souls of the penitents incarcerated within (the story takes the classic Poltergeist-trope . . . this house was built on an Indian burial ground? and enlarges it . . . this ORSK was built on the remnants of an old prison-house?)

Cold > Heat

We're having a heatwave here in Jersey, and while my wife had to work a full day in an elementary school with no A/C and no fans, I was able to teach virtually in the comfort of my home-- a pretty sweet decision by our admin-- but my son Alex was home and his class got canceled so we went out and played some basketball-- and it was very hot-- and then my son Ian-- who actually attends school-- came home and we went to the park and played some more basketball (and some seniors showed up and we played with them as well) and now I've ruined all my time spent in the A/C-- I'm overheated and miss the winter (and we are all VERY rusty at basketball, as we haven't played since last summer).

Keeping Up with the Brainses

Sarah Pinkser's new sci-fi novel We are Satellites has an A+ premise-; it's a detailed look at how one family deals with a new technology that's sweeping the nation: the Pilot, a brain implant that allows for functional multitasking . . . half the family gets the Pilot, but younger daughter Sophia has epilepsy, and so she is left behind, as is one of her moms; in the first half there are lots of what Umberto Eco calls "transitional walks" between chapters-- long stretches of time go by and you have to piece things together on the fly-- this is fun and fast-paced, then the book gets more chronological and bloated in the second half-- but it's still a thought-experiment worth reading as we tend to do this to ourselves all the time, especially in education: laptops, SAT tutoring, advanced placement classes, drugs to help you focus, etc . . . the richest students and best schools get these innovations first and make good use of them, making the divide between those that don't have these advantages larger and larger . . . and then these things are pushed on the less fortunate, often subsidized, but often not to great effect; quite a bit of the book is set in a high school, as one of the moms is a teacher-- and she doesn't get a Pilot and ends up teaching the students that have also been left behind . . . if you like the premise it's worth reading th novel, but you can skim a bit towards the end (unless you have a Pilot implant and can functionally multi-task).

Go Nets, Make Me Fatter

The length of televised American sporting events definitely contributes to our obesity . . . how do you make it all the way through 7:30 PM NBA game without snacking on a bunch of shit?

No End to the Shit

This morning when I was biking home (on my wife's bike because mine got stolen, probably because my younger son left it out in front of the house, unlocked) I saw my younger son working for our neighbor Gwen, doing some digging; he was wearing his brand new tennis shoes, so I told him to go home and put on his boots, as his tennis shoes were for tennis only and he was ruining the soles-- plus it's much better to have hard soles when you kick a shovel into the dirt; he took the bike home, I chatted with Gwen for a bit, and then he came running back and I was like "where's the bike?" but he had left it in the backyard, so I walked home and when I entered the house, it was full of shit-- Ian had tracked a bunch of dog shit into the house on his tennis shoe-- so I had to clean all that up, he ruined a carpet and scattered shit on the various floors, and he had left out the taco meat, the cheese, and the salsa-- total mess; so I cleaned the carpet and his tennis shoe and did my best to find all the shit and wipe that up as well; then I noticed there were several large flies in the house, and when I went upstairs I noticed (after chastising Ian for have three-- three!-- wet towels on his bedroom floor) that my older son not only had his window open but the screen as well-- I think this was so he could see the bird nest more clearly below his window, but he never closed it . . . there's no moral to this sentence, nor a resolution or ending, because this shit is just going to keep on happening, over and over and over.

Dave Has Some Reading to Do . . .

 

All the books in my queue appeared at the library today-- so I've got some serious reading to do . . . feel free to join my book club-- I'm hoping to finish four of the six before they need to be returned.

Hybrid . . . Ugh

I'm having a tough time selecting a hybrid bike (my bike got stolen) as I have to sift through a myriad of models and features and price points, and I'm also having a tough time with hybrid teaching-- I've gotten to the point (as have most teachers) where I genuinely loathe the virtual kids-- for various reasons, some founded and some unfounded: they don't turn their cameras on, they ghost, they lag, they restart their computers, it takes a million clicks to interact with them, there's no reason for them to be home anymore, they take forever to answer questions, they disappear, they don't give off any energy or body language . . . it's nice to have some kids in person, they're usually fun and energetic-- or at least annoying in the normal teenage ways-- but having kids in class makes it that much harder to care at all about the little student icons on the tiny laptop screen . . . it's time for this year (and hybrid instruction) to end.

I Get It, I'd Jump Too

We had some coastal flooding in Donaldson Park this weekend, and the surging brackish tide left some fish in the park, which expired and baked in the sun yesterday-- my dog and I stumbled on one of these gape-jawed horrific dried fish today on our walk and Lola, who was blithely sniffing along, nearly jumped out of her skin when she was suddenly confronted with a dead-fish face . . . which I totally understand.

Heart Attacks and Stolen Bikes

Over the course of this rainy Memorial Day Weekend, the boys and I watched the weirdest Seinfeld episode ever-- "The Heart Attack"-- I truly do not remember having seen it . . . Larry David makes a cameo in a B-movie, wearing a spacesuit and screaming the line "flaming globes of Sigmund!" and George turns eggplant purple after drinking some herbal tea, and-- much more unfortunate-- my venerable Cannondale mountain bike was stolen out of my backyard, from the bike shed . . . or that's what we think-- unless Ian left it in front of the house . . . but he's 110% sure that he put it back in the shed-- and we were home all weekend (except yesterday we went to a bbq) so it must have been stolen yesterday when we were out-- but we left the back door open so Lola could go in and out . . . it's truly weird, I can't imagine someone coming all the way into the backyard and finding the bike shed unless they knew about it-- totally weird-- but the police are on the case, so if you've got any leads, let me know.

Do You Live in Fantasyland?

 

We live in a country where beliefs like this are the norm; Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History, by Kurt Andersen, tackles the question of "why?" . . . why is America so prone to wild, unfounded belief-- whether it be in new religions and churches-- charismatic, fundamental, evangelical, financial, puritanical, tongue-speaking, Mormon, etc; conspiracy theories-- UFOs and anti-vaxxers and 9/11 deniers and repressed memories of child kidnappings and Satanic cults that never existed, New World Orders; and general New Age nonsense, commercialized Disneyfied claptrap, or more obscure role-playing Larping and Milsim madness . . . and while this may have been odd and interesting in the age of P.T. Barnum, now that our political sphere is controlled by religious fantasists, it's scary (at least for the rational secularists, like me) and though it may have been the left-wingers, the hippies and the intellectuals of the 60's that pushed us into this space-- the cultural relativists and the "you do you and I'll do me" folks . . . the right-wing really weaponized this solipsistic view of facts and perspective, while nice folks like Oprah and Dr. Oz softened the ground for the King of Fanmtasyland, Donald Trump . . . it's a sobering tour de force, Waco in one chapter, Celebration, Florida in the next, and while it's compelling, I'm afraid the people who enjoyed this book-- and kept thinking "wow, that's wild, I can't believe people actually believe in God that much, I can't believe they're totally sure about crystals and witches gun rights and UFOs and 9/11 conspiracy and the end of times and the return of Jesus and all that" are people like me, who have very little contact with the rest of this utterly insane nation, the true-believers, and part of me wants to keep it that way . . . I'm not sure about anything, I don't have any principles, anything I once believed has turned out to be wrong (such as: exercise is the key to losing weight . . . ha!) and I'm always awaiting a new opinion to evaluate and synthesize with the rest of my carefully cultivated logical and rational ideas, that dwell foggily and amorphously in my brain . . . perhaps it would be nice to live in Fantasyland, but I don't think I've got it in me.