Thinking is Dead

 

I am having an existential crisis today, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I feel kind of lousy-- I just tested positive for COVID-- and this diagnosis is amplifying the feeling that life is futile, we are all decaying flesh, and we have designed technology to replace what we once thought was unique about the human mind and spirit-- the inciting incident for this existential crisis happened this morning, when I went to school early to photocopy my Creative Writing mid-term prompt about the film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" so that the kids would have to handwrite the answer because I didn't want them looking up stuff on Google and ChatGPT but then I fed my prompt into DeepSeek, the new, free high-powered Chinese AI-- and the prompt is pretty basic, just something to get the kids writing about a really complicated and interesting film:

How does the film use unreliable narration to explore relationships, memory, and time?  What does the film ultimately say about our identity, our perspective, and the way we get along with people?

and, no surprise, DeepSeek gave an astute and organized and thorough answer to this prompt-- but an answer that sounded like AI-- parallel structure, abstract vocabulary, statements made with subtopics in groups of three-- but then I asked DeepSeek to summarize this answer in two sentences and use lots of profanity and it produced something that doesn't resemble AI at all:

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" uses its mind-fuckery of unreliable narration to show how relationships are a messy, chaotic clusterfuck of distorted memories and emotional bullshit. The film dives into the raw, fucked-up truth that love isn’t about perfect memories or clear-cut facts—it’s about the messy, irrational, and deeply human shit that keeps pulling people back together, no matter how hard they try to erase each other.

and this worries me, it means that there's no way to tell if the students are using AI-- now they can prompt it to sound much more human than previously-- and I think this means we have to rethink English/Language Arts class entirely-- it also depresses me that the skills I've spent my life developing can now be farmed out to a computer-- ideas that took my stupid brain hours of meditation and reflection can now be produced in a fraction of the time -- so I think we're going to have to have some difficult conversations about what learning and school is going to be like in the near future-- we could go the Luddite route-- the school is a gym for your brain route-- and do everything on paper and get rid of the computers . . . or we could turn kids into AI synthesizers, where they cull the best ideas from AI and develop them . . . or we could give up on teaching writing entirely and make English class more of a speaking and communicating class . . . but this stuff is evolving so quickly that it's breaking my brain-- it's also fun to ask DeepSeek "why is Jane's Addiction so fucking good?" and require it to use profanity in the answer-- I'm sure this Chinese AI broke a lot of copyright laws in its "training" but it really seems to know about everything (and how to swear realistically while telling you everything).

You Never Know What's Going to Offend Our AI Overlords

Holy shit . . . my wife and I are passing viruses between us-- the origin of which is most likely all the stupid children in our respective schools, coughing and blowing their noses and wiping snot on every surface-- and teaching is NOT a good job when you are sick, especially when it's a double mid-term day and you're going to spend five hours in a room with students and you have no voice . . . but at least I tapped into DeepSeek, the new deep-discount made in China AI that will list "five awful things about Donald Trump"-- unlike Google's Gemini, which avoids political discussion . . . but don't ask DeepSeek about what happened in 1989 at the Tiananmen Square demonstration, or you'll get stonewalled; although I did get DeepSeek to rattle off a bunch of general problems with China's one-party, undemocratic, censorship-prone, human rights violating government-- before it rescinded all the text and said, "Sorry that's beyond my current scope . . . let's talk about something else."

Heavyweight vs Lightweight (But They Are Both Kind of Orange)

The Rumble of the Federal Funding Freeze . . . in this corner, weighing in at 244 pounds, we have Donald Trump and in the opposing corner, weighing in at 1/4 pound, we have the U.S. Constitution-- and folks, this should be a chaotic, litigious, and slow-moving fight, with Trump delivering plenty of shots below the belt to our most venerated but embattled document.

It's Mainly Dark in Here, But I Can See the Light

This is the time of year when I feel like a mewling infant sliding down the birth canal, trying to emerge from the darkness of winter, slowly heading toward the light of spring-- and I will get there, but it's going to be painful (for all involved, including Mother Nature). 

Louis C.K. Kills

Last night, Louis C.K. performed at the Stress Factory and he lived up to the title of his show, which was called "Trying Out New Material"-- he had a notebook on his stool, which he glanced at between bits and he raced through so many routines it would be hard to summarize the performance-- he literally abandoned transitions and did an hour of one thing after another-- and while the content was generally incredibly inappropriate, I'll give a synopsis in broad swaths of some of the topics: 

how the sun and a vagina are similar (wonderful givers of life but don't look directly at them); what race of human he would choose to eat; a tour of the old folks "place" that houses his father; what the "worst" would be for him: being testicularly tortured and you truly don't know the information that the torturer wants; an analysis of the magazine Barely Legal and just how close reading that magazine is to pedophilia-- so close; how the worst thing a person could talk to you about is love, forgiveness, and your friend Jesus; taking AIDS test to get some good news; the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; in vitro fertilization and caviar; he revamped a Carlin bit about how newscasters will do an accent on the word Latino, but only that word, and a bunch of other stuff-- it was uproarious, the guy is a masterful in every aspect of stand-up-- the voices, timing, body language, and material-- and it was awesome to see him up close and personal.

HP Sees CK

Heading out (with a large contingent of my town and other various friends) to see Louis C.K. at The Stress Factory.

Fuck the TikTok Ban, Go Whole Hog and Revise Section 230

There has been much speculation about Mark Zuckerberg's recent "pivot" towards some Trumpy changes to Meta's content moderation policy and the removal of all fact-checking on his platforms-- and the constantly fluctuating state of TikTok has also got the social media world in an uproar, but I think it's time to do something more radical in this arena and rewrite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act sop that platforms are responsible and can be sued over what they "publish"-- as they ARE publishers with proprietary algorithms that determine what goes viral-- and it's certainly not always accurate or innocuous stuff . . . it's not until we acknowledge that everything on social media is suspect, often a conspiratorial abyss, frequently misinformation and/or propaganda, and promoted in ways to merely keep users scrolling, not to provide the highest quality content and that perhaps our society would be more civilized and social without social media in its current form.

Dave Fails at Revenge, But Succeeds at Civilized Society

Yesterday morning, I tried to exact my gentlemanly revenge for this foul deed-- when I got out of my car, I spotted the shoulder-length blonde hair of the culprit as she was walking along the front of the building towards the side door; walked briskly to the door so that I got there well ahead of her; opened the door, and waited; and then, as the culprit rounded the corner I noted that this was another nameless woman with shoulder length blond hair-- people are really bundled up because of the cold and it's hard to differentiate between thirty-somethings with should length blonde hair-- but this was definitely NOT the woman who didn't hold the door for me-- but despite not exacting my revenge, things turned out just fine: she thanked me for holding the door for her and we had a normal, civilized conversation about the weather as we walked to the office to sign in.

What's Scarier Than a Savage Pitbull? An Enormous Savage Pitbull

If you're looking for a dumb (but highly entertaining) read about a smart guy, check out Joe Ide's mystery novel IQ . . . it's about a young ghetto detective (a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown) with a tragic past who gets involved in a case featuring rappers, entourage members, bodyguards, gangs, guns, drugs, sordid women, LA shysters, and a very large pit bull . . . the plot is a purposeful nod to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Some Fine Day, Vengeance Will Be Mine

So yesterday I was hustling across the parking lot and into the school building-- and I was not wearing my jacket or gloves or anything because I leave that stuff in the car-- and it was cold, single digits, and I was maybe fifteen feet from the door and this teacher (I don't know her name but I'm going to find it out) was at that distance where any civilized person would hold the door, especially because we made eye contact and she could see I was moving with some determination and alacrity-- but she glanced at me and then she slithered in, she opened the door the minimum amount and squeezed through, leaving me literally in the cold-- now even if she didn't feel like holding the door, she could have given it a good shove, so it opened completely and I was close enough that I most likely would have been able to grab it before it shut-- but she didn't even do me that courtesy . . . unconscionable stuff . . . and so I have plotted my revenge (which is a dish best served cold, and it is butt-ass cold in New Jersey right now) and it will happen thusly: I will keep my eye out for this woman, and one day when I am ahead of her in the parking lot, I will walk briskly to the door-- so there is a great distance between us-- and then instead of NOT holding the door open, instead of slithering in-- which would be childish and predictable-- I will hold the door open-- I will hold the door open for an uncomfortably long time-- and while I stand there, chivalrously, waiting for her to walk all the way across the parking lot, I will make eye contact with her, and I will smile, and I will say "after you" and then let her pass through the door while I stand valiantly in the cold and then she will know that vengeance is mine and her fate is to be filled with shame and mortification.

A Very Special Episode of We Defy Augury

Despite having a stomach virus, yesterday I cranked out a very special episode of We Defy Augury . . . "A Transcendental Perspective on the L.A. Fires". . . my thoughts are (loosely) inspired by various articles on the L.A. Fires, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature" and Joan Didion's essay "The Santa Anas"

Special Guests: The Bicycle Man, Conrad Bain, Nellie Bowles, David Gelles and Austyn Gaffney, Leighton Woodhouse, The Rivieras, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Delta smelt, the gang from Full House, and the gang from WKRP in Cincinnati.

Trump

A few days ago, someone wrote the word "Trump" in the snow on my wife's car (and then the next day, I found the word "Trump" written on my driver's side window, in the water condensation) and I think this might be the work of a devious teenage mind, a youngster who knows that in our liberal town that's the most maddening thing you can write on someone's car window-- my wife said she'd have preferred if the culprit wrote, "suck my dick."

Dave Keeps Overdoing It (Physically and Literarily)

I woke up feeling much better this morning-- I definitely had some kind of stomach/body-ache/low fever viral bug yesterday-- in fact, I felt so good that I went and played indoor soccer-- and my knee felt better than it has in a while, I was actually playing serviceable balls with both feet-- but then after soccer, I started feeling shitty again, and I think I'm running a low fever-- and the sci-fi novel I'm reading is not helping: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis . . . the narrative switches between a time-traveling historian who was mistakenly sent back to the year The Black Death ravaged England, instead of an earlier, plague free year-- there was some "slippage"-- and 21st-century epidemic in Oxford, caused by a dormant, ancient virus unearthed from a medieval archaeological dig-- it's a compelling book but there are a great many descriptions of buboes and fevers and bodily fluids and sickness in general, not ideal.

Dave Probably Overdid It

I completed my old man three-sport-in-one-week triathlon last night-- my friend Ann and I defended the challenge court for 90 minutes at the Picklejar, before we got tired (and the dudes we were playing hit her with several wild drives, including one to the chin) and I generally felt pretty good on my knee, but then I had trouble sleeping-- I rarely do sports at night and it was hard to get comfortable-- and though I loosened my leg up at the gym and grocery shopping at Trader Joe's (which was insanely crowded because everyone is worried about the incoming snow but I put my earphones in and listened to some Chris Joss, this French multi-instrumentalist funk musician who has an incredible catalog of instrumental funk-tronica albums . . . I can't believe I just discovered this guy because he will now be the soundtrack of the majority of my life!) but now I feel lousy and I'm running a low fever and I'm wondering if I either overdid the sports this week or if I'm getting sick.

Friday Potpourri

Today felt marginally better than yesterday-- the sun was out and it warmed up to 40 degrees-- but we were still fairly chilly when we had an unexpected and rather lengthy fire evacuation because something started burning in a cooking class-- I was about to call it a fire "drill" but it wasn't a drill, it was an actual fire-- albeit a very small one-- which interrupted an important discussion in Creative Writing where I was informing my students that The Beatles were not fro the midwest, they were from England . . . seriously . . and I today also introduced my sophomores to the idea of a "very special episode"-- a concept from the 1980s and 90s where a normally humorous TV program tackles a delicate or controversial event with the appropriate gravity . . . the one I'll never forget is the WKRP in Cincinnati episode about the Who concert where 11 people got crushed to death . . . a total bummer . . . we had a very special episode of class today about the LA fires-- and it is to be continued next class!-- perfect . . . I'm going to try to make the lesson into a very special podcast because it would take too long to describe here and I've got no time to sit and write because I'm about to finish my week-long triathlon of old man sports on a bad knee-- I played indoor soccer on Sunday, morning basketball on Tuesday, and now I'm about to go play some indoor pickleball-- if my knee holds up, I'll be very pleased.

Cold and Gray Thursday

I took a mental health day yesterday and it turned out to be quite productive-- I cleaned two bathrooms, went to the gym with Ian-- he was actually able to play a little basketball on his reconstructed ankle-- and then Ian and I fixed a broken light pull switch in a ceiling fan, a two-man job if there ever was one (he flipped fuses in the basement until the fan stopped and then it took four hands to take the fan case apart; hold it the bottom part; strip the wires; remove the old pull string switch; replace and reconnect the new pull string switch; and then reassemble it) and we rewarded ourselves with a sushi lunch and then I took a nap-- later my wife and I watched episode two of Get Millie Black-- highly recommended-- but then reality loomed its ugly head . . . when you take off a Wednesday, you have to go to work the next day-- and it's not even Friday!-- and this morning was frigid and dark and bleak and I am really struggling to see the dim light of Spring Break, which is many months away-- so I started my class today with the movie clip to symbolize how I was feeling: Bill Murray giving a "Groundhog Day" weather outlook, "You want a prediction about the weather . . . I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life."

Our Team Only Had Nine Available Hands

Yesterday morning I made my triumphant return to 6:30 AM basketball, and while I was certainly limited in my movement because of my gimpy knee and unable to "help" on defense (which is my euphemism for fouling the fuck out of anyone who enters the paint in my vicinity) I was in fine shooting form (at least at the start of the session, my shot got progressively worse as my knee grew stiffer) and I drilled three long three-pointers in a row to lead our team to victory in the first game . . . and what a team it was-- I was limping around, Jeff has a strained calf-- and Frank, the old and venerated retired AD who is in his 70s and probably shouldn't be participating in the first place was coaxed into playing one game-- and I didn't notice until we began that Frank was wearing one glove, one green fluffy winter glove . . . and this is because he recently had surgery on his hand and needed to protect it-- needless to say, he did not shoot, dribble, or touch the ball-- but then he gracefully bowed out, undefeated, and we picked up Kyle, a fast, strong twenty-five-year-old athlete-- so all was good-- and then I learned that another player on the court was in his twenties and I was like: this is not fair, I think anyone in their twenties should have to be handicapped, like a jockey that's underweight, and wear a weighted vest. 

A Costco No-go

According to my neighbors Pernille and John, you never want to make the mistake that I made yesterday: you never want to go to the Edison Costco on a Monday (because the store is so crowded on Saturday and Sunday that, in a Yogi Berra-esque paradox, no one goes there on the weekend so they all go on Monday . . . also, I think some shoppers permanently reside in the store-- I surmised this by the way they amble about with their carts, like they've got absolutely nowhere to go).

Medieval Times, Good Times?

 

I just finished a new episode of We Defy Augury-- ten reasons Medieval Times were better times than you might have imagined . . . thoughts loosely inspired by Ian Mortimer's history book Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, Christopher Buehlman's fantasy novel Between Two Fires, and Connie Willis's science fiction novel The Doomsday Book; 

Special Guests: Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Janeane Garofalo, The Beastie Boys, George Carlin, Rick Moranis, MF Doom, the Monty Python Troupe, Kiefer Sutherland, 100 Gecs, Metallica, Arya and the Hound, Jimmy Walker, the Wu-Tang Clan, and medievalist professor Dorsey Armstrong.

The Knee Holds Up

I am pleased to announce that I played over an hour of indoor soccer this morning-- despite my wonky right knee-- and while I can't really drive a ball with my right foot, I was able to run, trap, and pass-- which is all you can ask for . . . but importantly, I got to see the soccer gang again-- I haven't played for a year-- and while there were a couple of new faces, it was mostly the same old guys . . . and we're just getting older.

Yet Another Reason I Hate Fucking Cars

Like most rational aesthetes, I find the Tesla Cybertruck to be a hideous and bulky eyesore, but it seems there is a way to level up the offensiveness of this sheet metal behemoth . . . and that is by adding an on-the-nose vanity license plate label which identifies what kind of car the license plate is adorning (in this instance, CYBR1) and this, of course, falls into the same category of objectionable taste as wearing a Weezer t-shirt to a Weezer concert-- you just don't do it (nor do you wear a Dungeons and Dragons t-shirt to a session of D&D, as I once pointed out to my older son) unless you write something witty, ironic, and meta . . . perhaps I could get a vanity plate for my Sportage that says "Kia Pet" or this Cybertruck owner could get a plate that reads "Pedo Boy" or "Compensating for my Tiny Penis."

 

Aspirational Actions

Instead of doing "Dry January," I am going to listen to more of Art Pepper's cool jazz and J Dilla's comprehensive catalog.

O! The Irony! The Hypocritical Unreliable Irony!

Today in Creative Class, we started our unit on first-person/unreliable narration, but I somehow got off-topic and while I was in the midst of describing the awful car accident my children and I witnessed on Tuesday and warning the students about the perils of walking, biking, and driving on Rutgers campus in New Brunswick and reminding them to really take their time going through intersections, even if the light is green-- right in the middle of diagramming all this on the whiteboard, a particular gym teacher poked her head into my classroom and she chastised me for something that happened yesterday . . . and I immediately knew how what she was about to say was going to fit the lesson-- because yesterday afternoon, when I was racing out of the school parking lot at the end of the day, I ran through the stop sign and cut her off-- and this happened several times previous because I'm a bit reckless when I'm trying to escape the school grounds-- so she censured me for my driving, I apologized profusely and I promised it would never happen again and then she left and I turned to the class and said, "You see my hypocrisy here? The unreliability in my narration? I'm warning you about being careful at intersections and meanwhile, I'm a hypocritical menace . . . we are all biased and unreliable narrators!" and then I was inclined to say "That's a wrap, you can all go home" but there was still 56 minutes left in the period, so I had to keep teaching but now I am truly going to take my time at intersections, I have learned my lesson twice in as many days.

There Are No Cheetos in Europe

You'll have to do your own research because I can't really make sense of all the available information, but on the newest episode of Derek Thompson's podcast Plain English Michael Cembalest (Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset Management) says that Europe allows 44 chemicals in its food while the U.S. allows over 700-- and he explains that's why it's not a great idea to invest in Europe-- too many regulations-- but that's why their food tastes so good . . . and if you attempt to confirm these numbers, you get all kinds of weird facts and figures-- Europe allows 300 food additives while the US allows over 3,000-- and there are readily available lists of various whiteners and fillers and dyes and preservatives and carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals the US allows as food ingredients, which Europe does not allow-- I don't really know what to make of all this information, but maybe I'll continue to invest in US companies, but seriously think about moving to Europe when I retire (if all the chemicals don't kill me first).

I Hate Fucking Cars

The boys and I were having a lovely Orthodox Christmas-- we went to the Y and played some basketball and then hit La Catrina for lunch, but on the drive home, when we got to the intersection of Hamilton Street and George Street-- where Hamilton turns into Johnson Drive-- the Zimmerli Museum was on our left-- we got a sober reminder of the ephemerality of life . . . the light was green and I was just about to enter the intersection when a medium-sized red car came FLYING down George Street (and this is a street with college dorms on it) and this red car smashed into the back of a white car that had just proceeded into the intersection-- the very car in front of us, and this spun the white car into the concrete wall in front of the Johnson and Johnson property (thank god no one was standing at this intersection waiting to cross, a spot that my son Alex walks through every day on his way to work) and the airbags went off inside the white car and I got out and (carefully) crossed the intersection to see if the people were all right and Alex and Ian called 911 but luckily there happened to be a couple cops nearby who immediately took control of the scene-- maybe they were already in pursuit of this vehicle? which would explain the high speed on this road?-- and because the white car got clipped in the rear of the car, not the driver side door, the two women in the car looked like they were in decent shape-- the passenger was fine and the driver looked stunned but she responded to my voice and the side airbag probably kept her from hitting her head-- meanwhile the red car that ran the light doing 40 or 50 mph on this 25 mph street was up ahead on the side of the road-- it hit another car and came to a halt and the the police checking that out-- and the weird thing is this wasn't a yellow light turning red situation, the red car had a solid red light-- so Alex surmised that perhaps the red car driver panicked and hit the gas instead of the brake-- something that occurs all too frequently and is often blamed on "sudden uncontrollable acceleration" but is actually caused by someone stomping on the wrong pedal . . . whatever the reason, this crash scared the shit out of the three of us and we all agreed to take it slow through every intersection, whether driving a car,  on foot, or riding a bike-- because of the existence of idiots and the half-assed manner in which our automotive based world is designed-- although honestly, this happened so fast and chaotically that it would have been difficult to avoid even if you were paying close attention nd driving defensively and all that and we were very lucky that we weren't in the intersection when this happened-- we were moments away-- and the last time I saw anything like this was over a decade ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Weird Energy on a Weird Monday/Friday

Strange things were afoot at EBHS today-- unlike most schools in the vicinity, we are off tomorrow for Orthodox Christmas (because we have a large number of Coptic Egyptian students) and so today felt like both a Monday and a Friday-- one day week!-- and to exacerbate the strangeness, we had a weird schedule because of an elective fair, which means I had to spend an inordinate amount of time with my 25-student sophomore honors class-- and while they are quite nice and academically diligent, they are also very energetic, chatty, clueless, and unlearned in the ways of mankind-- and I'm used to teaching seniors, who at least know how to pretend to be normal people-- and on top of all that, it snowed all day and so the students were flipping out about that (admin released the seniors early so they could slowly drive out of the parking lot-- for most of these kids, it's the first time they're driving in snow) but despite all this, we managed to finish Godzilla Minus One in Creative Writing class-- I cried-- and I even managed to grade a few essays through the tears-- which was the purpose of showing the film, I need to grade, but I always get sucked into the movie-- and now tonight is a mini-Saturday, so I'll enjoy the Rutgers/Wisconsin game and tomorrow is a mini-Sunday, so the plan is: head to the gym with the boys and then take them out to lunch . . . thank you Julian Calendar!

Giants vs. (Second String) Eagles

Difficult rooting conundrum today: The Giants played the Eagles and while I would like to start rooting for the Eagles, because of my South Jersey roots and Saquon Barkley, I don't think I have it in me to ever root for the Eagles over the Giants (but I do think I can muster some rooting strength for the Eagles in the playoffs since the Giants are eliminated) but then today's game because even more of a perplexing puzzle because in one sense, all Giants fans were rooting for the Giants to lose today so they could get a better draft choice-- but it was impossible to root for the Giants to lose to the Eagles, even the second string Eagles-- just because you can't turn that shit off . . . but I was still kind of psyched when Reed Blankenship grabbed Drew Lock's final toss and ended the game in the Eagles favor . . . there's always next year.

Dave Speculates on (Probably) the Dumbest Use of a Quantum Computer (It's All Probabilistic)

As far as I understand this recent quantum computing breakthrough-- which is not very far at all-- but from what I do grasp, the possible reason why the computer can do such complex computations so quickly, computations that would take a normal computer more than the life of the universe, is because the quantum computer is harnessing alternate realities and doing parallel computations in the multiverse-- so if I could get a hold of one of these computers, perhaps I could access the various sentences Alternate Daves are writing in various alternate universes and select the best of these alternate sentences and essentially subcontract my work out to the multiverse (which is quite different than relying on AI to write my sentences, which would be soulless and derivative . . . but harnessing the thinking power of infinite Alternate Daves, that's something much more on brand).

Some Things That Are Completely Different

If you're looking for some batshit crazy apocalyptic sci-fi, I highly recommend Robert Charles Wilson's novel Spin--  I won't even try to explain all the consequences of the "spin membrane" that is mysteriously placed around the earth (by a mysterious superior alien race that scientists refer to as The Hypotheticals) but the stars go out early in the book and then some very well-depicted political and psychological and scientific chaos ensues-- and the book really makes you think about time, as a concept-- the book is the first in a trilogy (but apparently the other two books are not as good, so I'm going to skip them) and if you've read or watched The Expanse series then you'll find some familiar themes-- and if you're looking for a batshit crazy surreal almost sci-fi movie, you might like I Saw the TV Glow, a mesmerizing story about two disaffected teens in the 90's who share an obsession with a strange supernatural TV show called The Pink Opaque . . . the fictional world of the show begins to bleed into the "reality" of the of Owen and Maddy's constrained suburban lives-- and Maddy's complete and utter acceptance of this alternate reality sends her on a quest to find her true identity and gender, a quest that Owen is reluctant to embark on or even comprehend-- it'sa film full of weird imagery, awkward moments, and fragmented horror.

It's Already Thursday!

While it was not fun to get up early and get dressed and make lunch and walk the dog in the dark and drive to school and make photocopies and finally start grading those synthesis essays, it was fun to see my friends and colleagues and chat about winter break-- and this was even more fun when one of my fellow English teachers reminded me that it is Thursday-- even though the day really had Monday-vibes . . . so this was more of a "soft opening" of the school and next week we'll really get down to business and learn something.

Dave Carries On Carrying On

Yesterday, on the last day of 2024, the usual themes unfolded-- I was sore from my second shingles vaccine but I went and played pickleball anyway-- wearing my knee brace of course and some KT tape on my Achilles tendon-- and I'm glad I went because even though I was a little sluggish, for one brief moment I was quick and coordinated, and I chased down a very wide ball and hit a crisp and perfect "around the pole" shot-- and then I took a much-needed nap, but still felt kind of lousy from the stupid shingles shot, but rallied enough to drink some mezcal at the neighborhood New Year's Party . . . so while I'd like to make some 2025 Resolutions here, things such as: I'm actually going to change my diet and lose weight; I'm actually going to start stretching every day and do all the recommended exercises to preserve my body and I'm going to give up alcohol during the week, at this point, realistically, these things are probably not going to happen so this year I'm just going to try to do the same shit I did in 2024, and continue to rinse and repeat until things really get Yeatsian and truly fall apart.