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Dave's Family Trip to the Four Corners Region: The Takeaway
After three weeks in the Southwest, and a fair bit of pertinent reading (four Tony Hillerman novels: The Wailing Wind, Listening Woman, Thief of Time, and Hunting Badger . . . these are ostensibly crime thrillers, but I also learned a bit about the Navajo nation, Navajo religion and practices, and high plains topography . . . I can't wait until "seep spring" or "box canyon" or "ceremonial Navajo sandpainting" comes up in conversation, because I know just enough about these things to be annoying . . . I also read about half of David Roberts' The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest . . . this is the sequel to In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest, a tome which is famous . . . or even infamous . . . with professional archaeologists and amateur pothunters alike because his tales of mountaineering, climbing, and intrepidness inspired others to hunt down the many off-the-grid ruins he described, and now many of these sites are heavily trafficked by hikers, and some have been vandalized, desecrated, and/or plundered . . . Roberts is a bit of a grouch, but his writing is vivid and fun, and his synopsis of the various academic debates on the origins and disappearance of the Anasazi-- now known as the Ancestral Pueblo-- is excellent) this is what I can tell you, and it certainly helped that our last stop was in Santa Fe, where we stayed in a historic adobe house right near the plaza . . . the owner, an older Spanish lady named Virginia, is related to Father Martinez-- the priest of the Taos parish that Willa Cather characterizes in her masterpiece Death Comes to the Archbishop . . . in the novel, Martinez challenges the Catholic faith's rule of celibacy, and he supposedly fathered many children in Taos . . . Virginia, whose family has lived in Santa Fe and Taos since 1598, described Martinez as the "villain" of the novel and was skeptical of Cather's speculation about him . . . this was news to me, rube that I am-- I never would have ascribed "villain" status to anyone in the book, which was more of a sequence of vignettes leading to the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi-- a romanesque marvel of golden sandstone-- which Father Lamy (Latour in the novel) spent his life yearning for, so that the church could have a proper house of worship in the untamed West (and, ironically-- and you can see a scene of this on the giant iron door-- it was the Pueblo revolt and the burning of the original church that cleared the ground for the new cathedral) . . . anyway, I've lost my way here, and that's appropriate for my final moral, but whether it's the exit that boasts both The World's Largest Golf Tee and The World's Largest Wind Chime, or the perfectly preserved ruins in Mesa Verde, or the many ruins in Canyon de Chelly, which the Navajo live amongst, or the various old adobe churches and buildings on the Santa Fe trail, or the ancient petroglyphs that are literally everywhere-- in the canyons, in the Petrified Forest, along the rivers, on the cliffs-- the Southwest offers greater opportunities than the Northeast to see how many people through the ages have said-- with art, architecture, buildings, weapons, war, pottery, and giant wind chimes: we were here . . . and the Southwest reminds you, with the vastness of the land and the evocative ruins, that you will not last, you will turn to dust as well . . . in the Northeast, sometimes we pave over history, sometimes we build over it, sometimes we grow beautiful green plants over our history, and sometimes the rains just wash our history into the rivers and oceans, but in the dry and arid Southwest, history is preserved, and it feels like a different country . . . because it is, because everywhere in our country is a different country, it's just that you can see it out there . . . and if you can get out there and see and feel this land, the ruins and the mountains, the desert and the high snows, if you can taste the fresh green and red chiles and navigate the weird winding streets of Santa Fe and Taos, which are reminiscent of Toledo, and walk through the plaza in the dry heat, you'll see what I mean, and never think about the United States the same way again.
Deacon King Kong: Read It!
Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:
“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese.
and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:
When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,”
At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.
At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine.
Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team.
and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:
you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses.
and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:
Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless.
and various kind of crime:
“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”
“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?”
“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.”
Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!”
“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now.
and superstition:
His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.”
“How you know Hettie done it?”
“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.”
“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.”
“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.”
“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”
“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.”
“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.”
“Step backward over a pole ten times.”
“Swallow three pebbles . . .”
They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them.
“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .”
“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.”
“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.”
“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .”
They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died.
and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:
He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.”
and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:
“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind.
the dark side of the drugs:
Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh.
and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:
"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.”
He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”
If You're Reading This You Are Probably WEIRD
In his new book, Jared Diamond explains that the human subjects studied in the vast majority of psychology experiments are WEIRD, and that may be skewing the results -- and you are probably WEIRD too . . . Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic . . . and if you are WEIRD, then you might learn a lot from The World Until Yesterday, and I highly recommend it: nine mongongo nuts out of ten.
A Very Nerdy Connection
Here's one for all the dorks out there: I was reading Jared Diamond's new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? . . . and not only that, but I was reading it on my new Kindle -- and so I made an electronic bookmark when I ran across this passage: "a traditional tactic without parallel in modern state warfare is the treacherous feast: documented among the Yanomamo and in New Guinea: inviting neighbors to a feast, then surprising and killing them after they have laid down their weapons and focused attention on eating and drinking" because it reminded me of the infamous Red Wedding in George R.R. Martin's third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series . . . and my internet research revealed that Martin's Red Wedding (not to be confused with Billy Idol's White Wedding) was inspired by an actual historical event -- the Black Dinner , a treacherous feast in Scotland in the year 1440 . . . indeed!
The Jungle is Low in Sodium
If you don't want to change your ways, then do NOT read the chapter on diet in Jared Diamond's new book The World Until Yesterday . . . like Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, it reveals some eye-opening dietary facts . . . except that Pollan points out the dangers of adopting a modern diet of corn 2 and corn syrup, and Diamond reveals the dangers of staple food laced with sodium and sugar, two ingredients that hunter-gatherers in the jungles of New Guinea do without -- and they have no incidence of stroke, diabetes, heart attack, coronary disease, and many of the other modern illness that plagues civilized man -- so I am going to try to eat less refined sugar and less sodium, which is difficult, because they both seem to be in everything -- but these are the only habits I am going to adopt from hunter/gathers, because while I agree with Wilfrid Oakley that "man may be captain of his fate, but he is also victim of his blood sugar" I don't think I am ready to abandon the elderly in the forest once they cannot move with the tribe, or commit infanticide if a child is born too close in age to the oldest child who is still on the teat, or adopt the treachery ideal of southwestern New Guinea, where it is even better to invite your enemy to share food and kill him than it is to kill him on the battlefield . . . "tuwi asonai makaerin!" (we have been fattening you with friendship for the slaughter!)
The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
Adam Alter's book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked doesn't offer up any big surprises-- it just slowly overwhelms you with the details until you have to agree-- many, many people have behavioral addictions centered around technology and digital connectedness; and the big problem is because addiction is not as character-based as you might think, and much more dependent on the environment-- and we can't escape the bottomless and ubiquitous environment of the internet-- we're going to need to be creative with solutions; while I try to put up the good fight-- I stay off social media-- aside from two blogs-- and I check my email once a day (I was astounded at how many times workers check their email on average . . . 36 times an hour?) but I've adopted some wearable tech-- a FitBit-- and this book helped me understand that one of those gadgets can lead you down some weird roads-- people get really obsessive about their step-counts and their runnign streaks-- so I'm trying to have some days, usually after tennis or running, where I try to keep my steps as LOW as possible-- really rest my feet and legs-- there's no reason to ALWAYS get 12,000 steps-- some days are for stretching or lifting or resting-- and while I'm not a gamer, I got fairly obsessed with low-stakes online poker at the start of the pandemic-- so I removed all those programs from the computer and gave that up-- it's not worth the time-- and now I'm playing a couple games of online chess each day (but only if my kids won't play) and this is a result of Netflix and "The Queen's Gambit" and I'm being very careful not to bingewatch shows-- you have to break the cycle of the cliffhanger by watching the first five minutes of the next episode and then stopping . . . and while these are first-world problems and it's the rare sort who develops a full-blown life-threatenign World of Warcraft addiction, I am hooked on the NYT Mini Crossword-- it's the crack of crosswords and there's no way I'll ever give it up . . . anyway, Alter points our that we've become far too goal oriented, there's too many ways ot keep score, and we've got to be constantly vigilant about this stuff eating up our time-- and the only way to replace one habit is to find another, when the cue happens and you usually play Candy Crush, you've got to have something else-- a ten minute yoga video or something . . . but enough of this: online chess is calling me (I'm also annoyed that my job is now on a screen, so that when I get done with my job, i have little motivation to record music or write my blog-- because it's just more screens . . . but I've set up my physical loop pedal and analog amplifier again, so that I can get back on the guitar and do some layers of sound, without getting back on a screen . . . again, first world problems but that doesn't mean you can't solve them).
The Specter of Walt Disney Raises Awkward Dave from the Grave
In the past decade, I've tamed Awkward Dave to some degree, but he still occasionally rears his ugly, awkward head; one of these times is when adults-- grown-ass adults-- proclaim their love of Disney World; this boggles my mind and-- unfortunately for my awkwardness-- we've got a bunch of these people in our school (and there are several in the English department!) and some of them visit Disney every year-- it's like a religious pilgrimage-- and some of them visit Disney World and they don't have children . . . and while I understand taking your kids there once so they don't feel alienated and neglected-- although my wife and I refused to go and swore we would never take our kids until finally my parents actually dragged us all there and footed the entire bill . . . I had a lot of problems with the experience, but I'm an extra-high-maintenance pain-in-the-ass . . . but that's not what this sentence is about, it's about the awkward fugue-like state I enter when adults mention their love of Disney World . . . I start saying crazy, insulting, and awful things right to their faces, and these are people I work with and see every day; here are some examples of things I start spouting to perfectly nice co-workers:
-- I rant and rave about how lame it is to share a bunch of antiseptic engineered memories with the rest of the Philistines in the park;
-- I explain how happy I was when an alligator ate a small child at the Disney Grand Floridian Resort and Spa because it injected some reality into the fantasy;
-- I told someone they were totally fucked in the head because she was touting the merits of the Epcot food and wine festival . . . I told her for that amount of money you could go to Italy and have real food and wine!
-- I like to call out people who claim they are feminists yet worship the princess culture;
so I've decided this can't go on . . . if people want to spend their hard-earned money on Disney vacations, so be it . . . I need to be more tolerant; also, I don't think they can help it-- I wish I could claim to have noticed this myself, but it was Chantal who pointed out that all the devout Disney worshippers are practicing Catholics . . . so maybe there's some tie-in between actually practicing religion and loving Disney-- and we all know you can't control whether you have that "belief" character trait . . . I don't have a lick of it and I think it saves me a lot of trouble (in fact, I just read a great little piece in The Atlantic about how politics has replaced religion in America . . . and Disney is better than politics, I suppose).
This Court is Supreme
I am reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court because I'm a sucker for any book that promises to unveil a secret world . . . then I will know about the secret world and you won't (unless you read the book of course, but you probably won't, because you're lazy and maybe that's not even the title of the book and maybe it's not even about the Supreme Court)-- and also because it covers a period of time when I couldn't have cared less about the news-- my twenties, when all I cared about was me . . . and what bar I was going to-- so now I'm catching up with Clarence Thomas dissents and Clinton politics and Sandra Day O'Connor's lean to the left, AND I'm also learning cool facts: the gym on the top floor of the Supreme Court Building, where the clerks and interns (and Clarence Thomas, until he hurt his knee) often play hoops, is known as the "highest court in the land."
My Children Need to Visit New Guinea
Jared Diamond, in his new book The World Until Yesterday, claims that among New Guinean hunter gatherers, the Andaman Islanders, and the Piraha Indians of Brazil, children of nine or ten years old often leave their families to journey to other villages and live with foster parents, cousins, or other various allo-parents -- these children are autonomous, entrepreneurial and adventurous . . . meanwhile, my kids can barely tie their own shoes.
Go East Young Man
Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World resets the default narrative of world history, with Western Europe as the main character, and instead places the Mediterranean Sea at the center of the story; he argues that the most significant dynamic force in the last two thousand years has been the trade routes that connect the East and the West; this web of interconnected cities, ports, and trading hubs allowed for the flow of goods, services, ideas, religions, conflict, disease, technology, and tactics . . . his book combats what Edward Said termed "orientalism," the presumption that the Middle East and beyond is inscrutable and exotic, a place that lies outside of time, space, progress, and Western logic; the book is comprehensive, starting with the spread of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism along the Silk Roads (before 600 A.D.) and ending with the West's modern political misadventures in Iran Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the economic rise of China, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan . . . over here in the West, we've got to strap ourselves in for a new world order, with the East becoming more significant than ever-- both economically and politically-- the British Ministry of Defense sums it up tidily: the period of time until 2040 "will be a time of transition" with challenges such as "the reality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in power from West to East."
Go East Young Man
Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World resets the default narrative of world history, with Western Europe as the main character, and instead places the Mediterranean Sea at the center of the story; he argues that the most significant dynamic force in the last two thousand years has been the trade routes that connect the East and the West; this web of interconnected cities, ports, and trading hubs allowed for the flow of goods, services, ideas, religions, conflict, disease, technology, and tactics . . . his book combats what Edward Said termed "orientalism," the presumption that the Middle East and beyond is inscrutable and exotic, a place that lies outside of time, space, progress, and Western logic; the book is comprehensive, starting with the spread of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism along the Silk Roads (before 600 A.D.) and ending with the West's modern political misadventures in Iran Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the economic rise of China, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan . . . over here in the West, we've got to strap ourselves in for a new world order, with the East becoming more significant than ever-- both economically and politically-- the British Ministry of Defense sums it up tidily: the period of time until 2040 "will be a time of transition" with challenges such as "the reality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in power from West to East."
Didja Know #3 (Brought To You By Charles C. Mann)
Honeybees are from England . . . there were none in America until someone traveling to Jamestown brought some over . . . and before this European plants, vegetables, and trees couldn't thrive, but the European honeybee will pollinate anything, so this "English fly" is what really allowed outside plant species to take off int eh New World . . . and I am sure everyone knows some plant or creature that was part of the Columbian exchange . . . chile peppers and pineapples and sweet potatoes and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate all came from the New World, and the llamas were quickly replaced by European horses, goats, cows, and pigs . . . the idea of the nomadic Navaho Indian did not exist until the Spanish brought them horses, which made it easy to raid villages on the plains, before that they lived in cities and had to walk.
The Biggest Game in the Wildest Town
Though it didn't help my poker game, I really enjoyed Al Alvarez's classic portrait of the 1981 World Series of Poker: The Biggest Game in Town. I recommend it to everyone, whether you play poker or not. It's beautifully written, and it hearkens back to the end of a simpler, wilder time. A time when being a gambler meant loving the action more than knowing game theory.
The mix of cards and golf and high-stakes gambling reminds me a bit of the Jordan documentary, "The Last Dance."
It’s the downside of a gambler that ruins him, not his upside. When you’re playing well, you can be as good as anybody, but how you handle yourself under pressure when you’re playing badly is the character test that separates the men from the boys.
Funny and true.
Perhaps the Freudians are right, after all, when they talk of gambling as sublimation. In the words of another addict, “Sex is good, but poker lasts longer.”
As to why I enjoy poker, Alvarez nails it on the head. I'm playing for small amounts of money, but I love the competition.
This accords with Jack Binion’s theory that the top poker players are not only “mental athletes” but also former athletes, who turn to gambling when they no longer have the physical ability or the inclination for sport. “It’s a question of excitement,” Binion said. “Gambling is a manufactured thrill—you intensify the anticipation of an event by putting money on it.
I've been playing some low stakes poker during the pandemic, and while I'm not proficient yet, I do know a little. This comes from reading a bunch of books, my favorite way of learning. I read Gus Hansen's swashbuckling account of his 2007 Aussie Millions victory Every Hand Revealed and Phil Gordon's informative Little Green Book and a couple strategy books by "Action" Dan Harrington and some mathematical stuff by David Sklansky and Ed Miller.
While these instructional books are competently written, they are pretty boring (aside from Gus Hansen's book . . . his tone borders on adorable; he uses lots of exclamation points).
While the purpose of most poker books is to convince you that with a little bit of math and a little bit of strategy, you can hold your own at the table, The Biggest Game in Town takes you to another planet. A planet where you don't belong at all, where the action is astronomical, even in 1981 dollars. The money amounts sound huge by today's standards. These guys were nuts.
We are in Vegas, an odd and insular place:
J. B. Priestley once remarked that in the Southwest you are more aware of geology than of history. The land is too big, too old, too parched, too obdurate; the only alternative to submission is defiance . . .
The book focuses on what is known as "the Cadillac of Poker," Texas Hold'em.
Crandall Addington, a supremely elegant Texan, who regularly sets the sartorial standard for the tournament, and has said, “Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back at you.”
The mix of cards and golf and high-stakes gambling reminds me a bit of the Jordan documentary, "The Last Dance."
James "Slim" Bouler would fit right into this world.
Yet some of the gamblers here, who are worth nothing compared with those people, will bet a hundred thousand without blinking. Most of them are average golfers—they shoot in the middle eighties—but at the end of a match they regularly settle up for fifty or a hundred thousand dollars. Even the golf pros don’t play for that kind of money, and if they did they probably wouldn’t be able to hold a putter. If a golf pro who shot seventy played a gambler who shot eighty-two and gave him the right handicap, he would lose all the time. The pressure would be too much for him; for the gambler, it is a stimulus.”
This is the attitude you need to be a great gambler:
This is the attitude you need to be a great gambler:
"If I had too much respect for the money I couldn’t play properly. Chips are like a bag of beans; they have a relative value and are worthless until the game is over. That is the only attitude you can have in high-stakes poker."
This is how you keep score:
This is how you keep score:
"Money is just the yardstick by which you measure your success. In Monopoly, you try to win all the cash by the end of the game. It’s the same in poker: you treat chips like play money and don’t think about it until it’s all over.”
The book is full of adages like this:
“The way I feel about those pieces of green paper is, you can’t take them with you and they may not have much value in five years’ time, but right now I can take them and trade them in for pleasure, or to bring pleasure to other people. If they had wanted you to hold on to money, they’d have made it with handles on.”
Sorry that I'm not attributing quotations, but you get the idea. The old-time poker guys like Alvarez, who is a British poet-- something foreign and innocuous. They love bending his ear about poker strategy and philosophy.
The book is full of adages like this:
“The way I feel about those pieces of green paper is, you can’t take them with you and they may not have much value in five years’ time, but right now I can take them and trade them in for pleasure, or to bring pleasure to other people. If they had wanted you to hold on to money, they’d have made it with handles on.”
Sorry that I'm not attributing quotations, but you get the idea. The old-time poker guys like Alvarez, who is a British poet-- something foreign and innocuous. They love bending his ear about poker strategy and philosophy.
It’s the downside of a gambler that ruins him, not his upside. When you’re playing well, you can be as good as anybody, but how you handle yourself under pressure when you’re playing badly is the character test that separates the men from the boys.
Funny and true.
Perhaps the Freudians are right, after all, when they talk of gambling as sublimation. In the words of another addict, “Sex is good, but poker lasts longer.”
As to why I enjoy poker, Alvarez nails it on the head. I'm playing for small amounts of money, but I love the competition.
For many of the top professionals, poker has become a substitute for sport—something that they turn to when their physical edge has gone, but that demands the same concentration, skill, and endurance and provides a channel for all their bottled-up competitiveness. “Discipline and stamina are what poker is all about, especially when you’re competing with top players in games that go on a long time,” said Brunson.
My knees are only going to last so long, but hopefully, my mind and my nerves will last a bit longer.
My knees are only going to last so long, but hopefully, my mind and my nerves will last a bit longer.
This accords with Jack Binion’s theory that the top poker players are not only “mental athletes” but also former athletes, who turn to gambling when they no longer have the physical ability or the inclination for sport. “It’s a question of excitement,” Binion said. “Gambling is a manufactured thrill—you intensify the anticipation of an event by putting money on it.
Sentence of Dave: Two Paragraph Edition
Franklin Foer begins his essay collection of selections from the New Republic (Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America) with a piece from 1914-- World War I had just begun-- by Rebecca West (who wrote the massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue and history of the Balkans) and while she's ostensibly speaking about literary criticism, there's a lot more going on and I certainly agree that "the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before" to grapple with what's happening in our country and our planet . . . I feel like I have been stumbling across bad news everywhere I turn-- I don't really follow the news day-to-day, but when I catch up, it's all bad-- I hadn't heard about Trump's stubborn refusal to lower the flag to half mast for John McCain until after it happened and it just mad me embarrassed and sad, and then I listened to "The Measure of a Tragedy" about Venezuela's economic implosion-- inflation has been so rampant that working a day at minimum wage (which is the median salary for the country) can buy you 900 calories (in the US, working a day at minimum wage can buy you over 100,000 calories) and so Venezuelans have lost, on average, 24 pounds and there is a mass migration of Syrian proportions out of the country, and then I listened to the new episode of The Weeds, about how we've lowered all our immigration numbers-- despite what's happening (and I'm still angry and sad about what happened to my cleaning lady and her husband, who are being sent back to Nicaragua despite the fact that they've had work-permits since 2006 and have kids in the school system and parents and sisters who are citizens-- they are a hard-working couple and a boon to the economy, but the government is over a decade behind on dealing with citizenship applications) and then there's all the environmental stuff-- permanent ice in Greenland is gone, Trump is pushing coal despite carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, we could have curbed global warming back when George H.W. Bush was president-- he was a proponent and wanted the world to cooperate-- but then things got political and the lobbyists won out (listen to this episode of The Daily to learn about this lost moment in time) and --like with smoking-- we plunged into a corporate fueled era of darkness and denial . . . but like with smoking, there is hope that the science will eventually prevail, just not any time soon . . . anyway, here are the first two paragraphs of "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," her words are far more powerful than mine:
And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.
Analysis of The Ur Post (Dedicated to My Beloved Wife)
Eleven years ago, I started writing a blog called Sentence of Dave. The premise was simple: rain or shine, I would write one sentence per day. The sentence might be short and sweet or it might run on and on. And while I didn't initially recognize the pun in the title, I soon realized that I had committed myself to a weird sort of imprisonment of chronology and structure. I generally embraced and enjoyed my self-imposed sentence-writing experiment (and I was always inspired by my fans, commenters, and critics).
Recently, however, writing the sentence became onerous, another chore. And I felt limited and rushed. So I'm trying something new. I'm going to take it slow and write some longer posts. I'm going to revise, ruminate, and procrastinate. Move at my own pace. Stall. Use periods. Park the bus.
The first post I wrote over at Sentence of Dave was dedicated to my loving wife. Here it is, in its entirety:
For good luck, I am once again dedicating this first post at Park the Bus to my wife. She is a wonderful woman: beautiful, loyal, smart, funny, and adventurous. I am lucky to have her. Unfortunately, she is also reckless and irresponsible, something of a menace. I need this longer format to truly explain what I mean.
To all appearances, my wife seems to be a diligent and dedicated elementary school teacher and mother. She helps run the community garden. She's a great cook with a green thumb. She eats healthy, works out, dresses sharp, and donates her time to charitable causes. But she's also the kind of person who will leave you a car with an empty gas tank. Below the line. No fuel at all. Not because she doesn't care about you-- I think most people would agree that she's a caring person. She will leave you the car on empty because she drives it around on empty. She's too busy running important errands for our family and the gardening club and her students and the elderly to stop for gas. And if you switch cars with her, and nearly run out of gas on the way to work ( while you are sitting in traffic because of construction) and call her-- your tone a little perturbed-- and give her a piece of your mind, and later on, text her some information, some completely innocuous and objective information about the consequences of using an internal combustion engine with very little gas in the tank, information about burnt out fuel pumps and kicking up sediment, then, oddly, you're the one who's going to be in trouble.
I'm a high school English teacher and my students-- despite the fact that they don't always read the assigned texts-- are often wise beyond their years in the ways of relationships. They vehemently advised me against sending those texts about sediment and fuel pumps to my wife. They told me it wasn't worth it. I explained to them that our Honda CRV was the second most expensive item our family-owned (a distant second behind our house) and it was my responsibility to inform my wife about these sorts of things. Because she was reckless. Not that she was alone in this manner of recklessness . . . I did an informal poll and though my evidence is anecdotal, I'm fairly sure that the world is equally divided into two kinds of people: sane folks who gas up when their tank gets down to 1/4 full and lunatics who drive around on fumes until their anxiety finally gets the better of them . . . or they actually run out of gas.
I could go on and on. My wife fills her coffee up far beyond what is normal or necessary. She walks around the kitchen with a meniscus of steaming hot liquid sloshing above the rim of the mug. Drinking coffee is supposed to be relaxing, a morning treat. A warm and tasty pick-me-up. Not an invitation for second-degree burns.
She does something similar (but less dangerous) with the dog's water bowl: she fills it up until the water is hovering above the brim and then cavalierly carries it across the room. She fills up the recycling bin in our kitchen so far above the rim that it's impossible to pull out the garbage/recycling drawer. For many years, she put large knives in the sink amongst all the dirty dishes (because she likes a clean counter). I actually broke her of this habit (but it took some bloodshed). Why does she do these things? Because she's got an incorrigibly reckless soul.
A quick mathematical aside: the relationship between a person's sanity and the amount of coffee they pour into their cup is the same as the relationship between a person's insanity and the amount of gas they have in their tank. I know formulas can be off-putting, but I think these equations are fairly simple and common-sensical.
Running on fumes? Mathematically, you are 1% sane. Coffee cup filled to the absolute maximum? You are 100% insane.
The camera on the roof of the car; the empty gas tank; the overly full coffee cup, the overly full dog bowl, and the overly full recycling bin: these should all be entered as background evidence. What I really want to discuss is something that happened a few days ago. I was about to start teaching class, when my phone buzzed. There was a text from my wife and an accompanying photo. The text explained that our dog Lola had chewed up a bunch of papers that she had in her school bag. Student papers. Graded student papers. Essentially, the teacher's dog had eaten the students' homework. Damn close to Alfred Harmsmith's dream headline: "man bites dog."
I informed my class of the bad news . . . which was especially bad for me because I am in charge of training our new dog and if she behaves badly then the responsibility is mine. This is not particularly fair-- I'm no dog whisperer-- but my wife does take on a lot of responsibility in the house, so I can't complain. If Lola screws up, I'm to bear the brunt of it. And my wife is still partial to our old dog, Sirius, who shuffled off this mortal coil last March. So there was no winning this one. Lola had screwed the pooch, and I was to take the heat for it.
The first text message my wife sent me about the paper-eating incident was light: she recognized and enjoyed the whole "our dog ate the students' homework!" aspect of the scene. But then she instructed me that if I left the house when everyone was still sleeping, as I did on Wednesday, then I should bring the dog back upstairs and close the gate so she couldn't roam the house and chew on things. She made it clear who was culpable for the chewing. Me.
The final reckless thing I'd like to discuss about my wonderful and loving wife is that she does not zip her bags. She does not zip her purse. She does not zip her school bag. She doesn't zip her laptop case. She doesn't believe in zipping. She likes the convenience of easy entry. (Insert filthy joke here).
I'm constantly zipping my wife's purse shut. Sometimes because it's hanging by a thread on a hook with seven other jackets. Or it's teetering over the center console in the car. She should have zipped her school bag shut. We have a young Rhodesian/lab rescue in the house, and she likes to chew things. When I noticed the unzipped bag in the photo, I asked my class if I should bring this to my wife's attention. This wasn't my fault! This could have been prevented! If she had taken precautions, if she had zipped her bag shut, if she had utilized Whitcomb L. Judson's marvelously pragmatic invention, then the dog wouldn't have chewed up her papers. I presented this argument. My students' answer was still a resounding "NO!" I should NOT text her about the unzipped bag.
I explained to them about the purse and the gas tank and the recycling bin and the coffee. They didn't care. It's not worth it, they informed me. Even my sophomores understood this. They were so adamant that I sort of followed their advice.
I am proud that I did not text my wife about the unzipped bag. I patiently waited to bring it up until later in the afternoon. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and once we had imbibed a bit, I pounced, the same way our dog Lola pounces on her rubber bone when you toss it across the room. It was a much better method than texting. My students were right. You can't text about something as delicate as this (I learned that during the whole gas tank incident). But I wasn't going to completely ignore the situation. I knew it wouldn't change anything, but my voice had to be heard. It's the same reason I sat down and wrote this long-winded post. It feels good to take notes, organize your thoughts, and get it all out. People need to know. My wife needed to know. And I will give her credit: she took it like a champ. She may have called me a few choice names, but then she was over it. We went out to the bar, saw our friends, and I had a story to tell.
I'd like to thank my wife Catherine for the inspiration and the material . . . your irrational behavior makes me love you all the more.
Recently, however, writing the sentence became onerous, another chore. And I felt limited and rushed. So I'm trying something new. I'm going to take it slow and write some longer posts. I'm going to revise, ruminate, and procrastinate. Move at my own pace. Stall. Use periods. Park the bus.
The first post I wrote over at Sentence of Dave was dedicated to my loving wife. Here it is, in its entirety:
I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car.
For good luck, I am once again dedicating this first post at Park the Bus to my wife. She is a wonderful woman: beautiful, loyal, smart, funny, and adventurous. I am lucky to have her. Unfortunately, she is also reckless and irresponsible, something of a menace. I need this longer format to truly explain what I mean.
To all appearances, my wife seems to be a diligent and dedicated elementary school teacher and mother. She helps run the community garden. She's a great cook with a green thumb. She eats healthy, works out, dresses sharp, and donates her time to charitable causes. But she's also the kind of person who will leave you a car with an empty gas tank. Below the line. No fuel at all. Not because she doesn't care about you-- I think most people would agree that she's a caring person. She will leave you the car on empty because she drives it around on empty. She's too busy running important errands for our family and the gardening club and her students and the elderly to stop for gas. And if you switch cars with her, and nearly run out of gas on the way to work ( while you are sitting in traffic because of construction) and call her-- your tone a little perturbed-- and give her a piece of your mind, and later on, text her some information, some completely innocuous and objective information about the consequences of using an internal combustion engine with very little gas in the tank, information about burnt out fuel pumps and kicking up sediment, then, oddly, you're the one who's going to be in trouble.
I'm a high school English teacher and my students-- despite the fact that they don't always read the assigned texts-- are often wise beyond their years in the ways of relationships. They vehemently advised me against sending those texts about sediment and fuel pumps to my wife. They told me it wasn't worth it. I explained to them that our Honda CRV was the second most expensive item our family-owned (a distant second behind our house) and it was my responsibility to inform my wife about these sorts of things. Because she was reckless. Not that she was alone in this manner of recklessness . . . I did an informal poll and though my evidence is anecdotal, I'm fairly sure that the world is equally divided into two kinds of people: sane folks who gas up when their tank gets down to 1/4 full and lunatics who drive around on fumes until their anxiety finally gets the better of them . . . or they actually run out of gas.
I could go on and on. My wife fills her coffee up far beyond what is normal or necessary. She walks around the kitchen with a meniscus of steaming hot liquid sloshing above the rim of the mug. Drinking coffee is supposed to be relaxing, a morning treat. A warm and tasty pick-me-up. Not an invitation for second-degree burns.
She does something similar (but less dangerous) with the dog's water bowl: she fills it up until the water is hovering above the brim and then cavalierly carries it across the room. She fills up the recycling bin in our kitchen so far above the rim that it's impossible to pull out the garbage/recycling drawer. For many years, she put large knives in the sink amongst all the dirty dishes (because she likes a clean counter). I actually broke her of this habit (but it took some bloodshed). Why does she do these things? Because she's got an incorrigibly reckless soul.
A quick mathematical aside: the relationship between a person's sanity and the amount of coffee they pour into their cup is the same as the relationship between a person's insanity and the amount of gas they have in their tank. I know formulas can be off-putting, but I think these equations are fairly simple and common-sensical.
the percentage you are sane = amount of gas in tank/full tank of gas
the percentage you are insane = amount coffee in cup/full cup of coffee
Running on fumes? Mathematically, you are 1% sane. Coffee cup filled to the absolute maximum? You are 100% insane.
The camera on the roof of the car; the empty gas tank; the overly full coffee cup, the overly full dog bowl, and the overly full recycling bin: these should all be entered as background evidence. What I really want to discuss is something that happened a few days ago. I was about to start teaching class, when my phone buzzed. There was a text from my wife and an accompanying photo. The text explained that our dog Lola had chewed up a bunch of papers that she had in her school bag. Student papers. Graded student papers. Essentially, the teacher's dog had eaten the students' homework. Damn close to Alfred Harmsmith's dream headline: "man bites dog."
I informed my class of the bad news . . . which was especially bad for me because I am in charge of training our new dog and if she behaves badly then the responsibility is mine. This is not particularly fair-- I'm no dog whisperer-- but my wife does take on a lot of responsibility in the house, so I can't complain. If Lola screws up, I'm to bear the brunt of it. And my wife is still partial to our old dog, Sirius, who shuffled off this mortal coil last March. So there was no winning this one. Lola had screwed the pooch, and I was to take the heat for it.
The first text message my wife sent me about the paper-eating incident was light: she recognized and enjoyed the whole "our dog ate the students' homework!" aspect of the scene. But then she instructed me that if I left the house when everyone was still sleeping, as I did on Wednesday, then I should bring the dog back upstairs and close the gate so she couldn't roam the house and chew on things. She made it clear who was culpable for the chewing. Me.
The final reckless thing I'd like to discuss about my wonderful and loving wife is that she does not zip her bags. She does not zip her purse. She does not zip her school bag. She doesn't zip her laptop case. She doesn't believe in zipping. She likes the convenience of easy entry. (Insert filthy joke here).
I'm constantly zipping my wife's purse shut. Sometimes because it's hanging by a thread on a hook with seven other jackets. Or it's teetering over the center console in the car. She should have zipped her school bag shut. We have a young Rhodesian/lab rescue in the house, and she likes to chew things. When I noticed the unzipped bag in the photo, I asked my class if I should bring this to my wife's attention. This wasn't my fault! This could have been prevented! If she had taken precautions, if she had zipped her bag shut, if she had utilized Whitcomb L. Judson's marvelously pragmatic invention, then the dog wouldn't have chewed up her papers. I presented this argument. My students' answer was still a resounding "NO!" I should NOT text her about the unzipped bag.
I explained to them about the purse and the gas tank and the recycling bin and the coffee. They didn't care. It's not worth it, they informed me. Even my sophomores understood this. They were so adamant that I sort of followed their advice.
I am proud that I did not text my wife about the unzipped bag. I patiently waited to bring it up until later in the afternoon. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and once we had imbibed a bit, I pounced, the same way our dog Lola pounces on her rubber bone when you toss it across the room. It was a much better method than texting. My students were right. You can't text about something as delicate as this (I learned that during the whole gas tank incident). But I wasn't going to completely ignore the situation. I knew it wouldn't change anything, but my voice had to be heard. It's the same reason I sat down and wrote this long-winded post. It feels good to take notes, organize your thoughts, and get it all out. People need to know. My wife needed to know. And I will give her credit: she took it like a champ. She may have called me a few choice names, but then she was over it. We went out to the bar, saw our friends, and I had a story to tell.
I'd like to thank my wife Catherine for the inspiration and the material . . . your irrational behavior makes me love you all the more.
I've Had It With All You Damned Liberals (Conservatives)
I’ve had it. All you damned liberals (conservatives) need to curtail this partisan bickering.
Stop consuming NPR podcasts (conspiracy theories) and seek out some unbiased information. If you keep listening to Ira Glass (Alex Jones) then you’re going to end up a hot yoga enthusiast (right-wing militia-member) or worse.
The New York Times (FOX News) will convince you that Donald Trump (Nancy Pelosi) is Hitler (Satan). How can you be empathetic (patriotic) towards other Americans in that frame of mind?
The liberal media (right-wing talk radio empire) always accentuates the downside. It’s not healthy (bacon). Try to see the silver lining. Politicians like Bernie Sanders (Mitch McConnell) just want to free you from the burden of personal responsibility (financial and environmental regulations).
If you truly cared about American Exceptionalism (This Tract of Land We Stole From the Native Americans) then you would understand that we now tragically live in a system that privileges a culture of victimhood (wealthy white people).
You should want this to change (stay the same).
It would be nice to discuss these things with folks on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but unfortunately the vast majority of our citizens no longer value the First Amendment (civilized discourse) and so we can’t hold a reasonable debate without resorting to microaggressions (censorship).
Since we can’t hold a cooperative dialogue, people resort to extreme measures. This will never work. You can’t desecrate The American Flag (Gwyneth Paltrow’s modern lifestyle brand Goop) just to own (pwn) the rednecks and NASCAR fans (snowflakes and libtards).
Remember, your economic choices also feed into this. We can’t keep eating this much meat. It’s not sustainable. You need to go vegan (hunting). And we have to be realistic. You can’t buy all your produce from Wal-Mart (local farm markets). There’s got to be a balance.
Most importantly, we’ve got to live-and-let-live (contact trace). How can we be so concerned with Civil War statues (transgender bathroom issues) when the rest of the world is in dire need of mosquito netting (World Bank free-market policy incentives). These countries are stealing our precious intellectual property (dying from river blindness).
The horror.
You sit at home, anxious over the Honduran migrant caravan (Russian meddling in the election) and nothing comes of it. It all fades away. Like Charlton Heston (Robert Redford).
The same goes for COVID. Stop worrying! Soon enough, we’ll have herd immunity (a death count over a million). If we could all just work together and wear masks (open bars and gyms) then we’d be able to move on to the next challenge . . .
Developing a plan to combat global warming (illegal immigrants).
The important thing is that we use the tenets of science (Christian morality) to make our decisions.
There are some things beyond our control. The proliferation of guns (gay marriage) isn’t going away. The genie is out of the bottle. You just have to hope your children don’t end up massacred in a school shooting (LGBTTQQIAAP).
We can’t reproduce (dwell on) the past. What’s done is done. This nation was once great (built by slaves) and we need to make it great again (reduce income inequality). Until that wonderful (rapturous) day comes, the best thing to do is chillax (go on a journey of self-reflection). Loosen up (check your privilege).
Throw your coonhound (Golden-doodle) into the back of your Dodge Ram pick-up (Subaru Outback) and head to the nearest BLM land (dog park). Stop on the way and grab some Chick-fil-A (Mamoun’s falafel). Don’t forget the extra mayo (tahini sauce).
When you finish drinking your Coke (bottled water) go ahead and toss it out the window (recycle it). Not that it matters anyway.
Once you arrive at your nearest city park (loosely regulated state land) enjoy the calls of the starlings (drone of the ATVs). Find a bench (deer blind) and pull out your NYT Sunday crossword (recurve compound crossbow). Grab a bolt (pen) from your quiver (manpurse) and kill it.
Breath in the fresh air. Forget about all the unborn children (elephant tusks) being aborted (poached) at this very moment. Think happy thoughts. This polarization can’t continue. We’re all God’s creatures (common ancestors of apelike hominids).
We need to learn to get along, as we’re going to share the same space for a long time — unless gerrymandering (the boogaloo) separates us permanently. Until then, enough of this. It’s counter-productive (essential to obstructing interlopers into our corrupt two-party system).
Full disclosure, I’m an A.I. bot developed by Russian meddlers (an agent of the deep state).
Stop consuming NPR podcasts (conspiracy theories) and seek out some unbiased information. If you keep listening to Ira Glass (Alex Jones) then you’re going to end up a hot yoga enthusiast (right-wing militia-member) or worse.
The New York Times (FOX News) will convince you that Donald Trump (Nancy Pelosi) is Hitler (Satan). How can you be empathetic (patriotic) towards other Americans in that frame of mind?
The liberal media (right-wing talk radio empire) always accentuates the downside. It’s not healthy (bacon). Try to see the silver lining. Politicians like Bernie Sanders (Mitch McConnell) just want to free you from the burden of personal responsibility (financial and environmental regulations).
If you truly cared about American Exceptionalism (This Tract of Land We Stole From the Native Americans) then you would understand that we now tragically live in a system that privileges a culture of victimhood (wealthy white people).
You should want this to change (stay the same).
It would be nice to discuss these things with folks on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but unfortunately the vast majority of our citizens no longer value the First Amendment (civilized discourse) and so we can’t hold a reasonable debate without resorting to microaggressions (censorship).
Since we can’t hold a cooperative dialogue, people resort to extreme measures. This will never work. You can’t desecrate The American Flag (Gwyneth Paltrow’s modern lifestyle brand Goop) just to own (pwn) the rednecks and NASCAR fans (snowflakes and libtards).
Remember, your economic choices also feed into this. We can’t keep eating this much meat. It’s not sustainable. You need to go vegan (hunting). And we have to be realistic. You can’t buy all your produce from Wal-Mart (local farm markets). There’s got to be a balance.
Most importantly, we’ve got to live-and-let-live (contact trace). How can we be so concerned with Civil War statues (transgender bathroom issues) when the rest of the world is in dire need of mosquito netting (World Bank free-market policy incentives). These countries are stealing our precious intellectual property (dying from river blindness).
The horror.
You sit at home, anxious over the Honduran migrant caravan (Russian meddling in the election) and nothing comes of it. It all fades away. Like Charlton Heston (Robert Redford).
The same goes for COVID. Stop worrying! Soon enough, we’ll have herd immunity (a death count over a million). If we could all just work together and wear masks (open bars and gyms) then we’d be able to move on to the next challenge . . .
Developing a plan to combat global warming (illegal immigrants).
The important thing is that we use the tenets of science (Christian morality) to make our decisions.
There are some things beyond our control. The proliferation of guns (gay marriage) isn’t going away. The genie is out of the bottle. You just have to hope your children don’t end up massacred in a school shooting (LGBTTQQIAAP).
We can’t reproduce (dwell on) the past. What’s done is done. This nation was once great (built by slaves) and we need to make it great again (reduce income inequality). Until that wonderful (rapturous) day comes, the best thing to do is chillax (go on a journey of self-reflection). Loosen up (check your privilege).
Throw your coonhound (Golden-doodle) into the back of your Dodge Ram pick-up (Subaru Outback) and head to the nearest BLM land (dog park). Stop on the way and grab some Chick-fil-A (Mamoun’s falafel). Don’t forget the extra mayo (tahini sauce).
When you finish drinking your Coke (bottled water) go ahead and toss it out the window (recycle it). Not that it matters anyway.
Once you arrive at your nearest city park (loosely regulated state land) enjoy the calls of the starlings (drone of the ATVs). Find a bench (deer blind) and pull out your NYT Sunday crossword (recurve compound crossbow). Grab a bolt (pen) from your quiver (manpurse) and kill it.
Breath in the fresh air. Forget about all the unborn children (elephant tusks) being aborted (poached) at this very moment. Think happy thoughts. This polarization can’t continue. We’re all God’s creatures (common ancestors of apelike hominids).
We need to learn to get along, as we’re going to share the same space for a long time — unless gerrymandering (the boogaloo) separates us permanently. Until then, enough of this. It’s counter-productive (essential to obstructing interlopers into our corrupt two-party system).
Full disclosure, I’m an A.I. bot developed by Russian meddlers (an agent of the deep state).
He Said "Less"
These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff, Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.
Ian Writes an Ode to Our Dog
My son Ian had to write a "bio" poem for school-- and at first I thought this meant a "biology" poem-- but he told me that didn't make sense . . . although there is a great poem about biology called "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes," and this is a very short poem so I will insert the entire thing inside this sentence:
Adam/ Had'em
but for this assignment, "Bio" is short for "biography" and Ian chose to write a "bio poem" about our dog Sirius-- and not only is it fabulous (it even contains a pun, of which he is very proud) but it's also exactly one sentence long-- and so I can append it to this rambling run-on:
Sirius the dog
Ingenious,
Talented,
Waggish,
Wishes to have a juicy, chewy, tasty steak waiting for him,
Dreaming to have an elongated beautiful tail that he’s missed since he was abandoned,
Who will never ever run away and if he does he’ll always come back,
Who wants to always help the world around him,
Who wonders if he will ever get some shuteye on the couch with permission,
Who fears flowing water and being abandoned again,
Who likes falling snow, people, and tons and tons of food,
Who believes he can do anything and everything he desires,
Who sees us as a family that cherishes him,
Who adores me, Mom, Dad, Alex, and everyone, except
the evil poodle that lives down the street,
Who plans to live with our family until the world comes to an end,
Sirius, Sirius Black: the bunny dog with a stub for a tail.
Swedish Mysteries
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo inspired me to read another Swedish detective story-- this one, called Sidetracked, by the world famous Henning Mankell, pits melancholy sleuth Kurt Wallander against a serial killer that murders his carefully chosen victims with an axe-- this sounds over the top, but the tone is more like The Wire, slow and careful . . . it took three hundred pages until someone fired a gun; my favorite mundane detail about Wallander is that he doesn't really like soccer, but he tries his best to find interest in the World Cup just to get along with his colleagues, but really he can't understand how people could be worried about such frivolity when there is evil lurking in his once provincial town: fourteen mopeds out of fifteen.
Refrigeration and Sanitation are Winners
If you want to appreciate modern life-- and I'm talking about modern life, not our post-modern lives on the internet-- then you can either read Robert J. Gordon's fantastic and comprehensive book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War or you could go without a refrigerator for three weeks.
I've done both. I prefer the Gordon book.
These are the big five:
1) electricity
2) urban sanitation
3) chemicals and pharmaceuticals
4) modern travel (the internal combustion engine and plane travel)
5) modern communication
We just got our new fridge yesterday, and it's amazing. Big, cold inside, and easy to shut tightly. It makes ice and preserves food. We got a Frigidaire because that's what Steve the Appliance Doctor recommended. Our old fridge had a bottom drawer freezer and he said those are the kiss-of-death for the compressor. It easy to leave them cracked open, and then the compressor has to work really hard to push the cold air up to the fridge.
Of course, this was a first-world problem, as we had a small refrigerator/freezer in the basement. But you had to descend a flight of stairs, and really bend down to get to the tiny vegetable drawers. And no ice.
Refrigeration and air-conditioning are miracles that allow you to enjoy all the internet can provide. Without them, you couldn't be inside your house in the summer. Grid electricity and urban sanitation are particularly nice when its 95 degrees and you are holed up because of a pandemic.
We've also been living without an upstairs show-- contractors are replacing the bathroom tiles. We had a leak. So we've all been using the shower in the basement . . . we'll appreciate all our urban sanitation once we get that back.
These technological advances have allowed for humans to enjoy incredible population density and incredible ease of global movement. Population density creates the most vibrant and creative places in the world: cities. The freedom to travel allows us to move from city to city, like little gods of the planet.
The cost of this density and ability to travel is the pandemic.
So it looks like we're going to need a technological solution to COVID-19. If you don't think so . . . if you've got delusions of naturally reaching herd immunity, stop watching random people on YouTube and listen to Short Wave: Why Herd Immunity Won't Save Us . . . it's a credible and vetted science podcast that explains what we know about COVID, herd immunity, and Sweden's experiment.
In other news, I can't wait until the contractors are done. It's hard for me to read, nap, blog and otherwise be lazy when people are working so hard in my house (I did work pretty hard at soccer practice this morning, coaching in the heat with a mask on, but that was only for three hours).
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