At the start of Monday's department meeting, I had a moment of conversational triumph that made me quite happy-- it doesn't rival this anecdote, but it's still one of the rare times when I said the right thing at the right time-- all the English teachers were assembling in Stacey's room for the meeting and it was HOT in there and she didn't have any windows open nor did she have her AC on (which I understand, the thing sounds like a jet engine) so I climbed up on the radiator and started opening windows-- which is awkward and dangerous but it's the only way to get the upper windows open-- and while I was clambering around up there, I was also complaining loudly-- and everyone else was complaining about me, complaining that I was complaining too much, that I was causing a ruckus, that I was going to kill myself or knock over a bunch of Stacey's school stuff that was stacked on the radiator . . . and then Krystina walked into the room, waving her hands around her flushed face, complaining about how hot it was and nobody yelled at her-- they empathized with her and treated her kindly (this is typical behavior in my department, the other day when I played some King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard for Stacey and Cunningham while we were driving to Wawa, they yelled at me the whole ride for "inflicting" this awful music on their ears but when I told them that Matt liked King Gizzard-- Matt is a very nice and intelligent middle-aged lawyer/finance guy who went to Princeton and is now taking up teaching-- they were like: "oh, it's probably music for smart people and we didn't get it") and then, after seeing how hot and bothered Kyrstina was, I had an epiphany, which I loudly delivered from my lofty perch to the room full of teachers and my boss, "Let's remember what our new principal said on the first day of school: Maslow before Bloom!" and everyone was shamed into silence because they remembered this moment from the opening meeting and it's true: you can't focus and learn anything when you're sweating, sticky and uncomfortable, Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes before Bloom's taxonomy of intellectual thought.
Today during first period, while I was showing a movie clip-- so it was dark-- a young lady in a denim jacket entered my room, but just barely entered-- and she asked if she could talk to one of my students-- and my student got up and the two of them talked in the hall-- I figured it was something about homework or a computer charger or something-- and then the student came back into the room, but the young lady continued to lurk and then said something else, so I shushed her . . . Thomas Haden Church was explaining The Scarlet Letter to his class in Easy A-- crucial for our assignment about the evolution of mate choice and gender norms and the ever-changing aesthetics of attraction-- and then the young lady in the denim jacket said, "I just need Tanvi to go to room 1618 . . . I'm a school aide . . . I work here" and I was like: "I'm so sorry I shushed you-- you look so young, you look just like a student!" and she said, "I'll take that as a compliment" and then she left and my class laughed at my rudeness and embarrassment and I said to them: "Notice how I used gender norms and aesthetics to get out of that awful situation-- you can't go wrong telling a woman she looks young" and we all learned some valuable lessons.
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).
In December, SNL aired a sketch about the band Weezer. Some folks are sitting down to what looks to be a lovely holiday dinner party, but then the music algorithm randomly spits out Weezer's cover of "Africa." The quintessential Weezer debate ensues. Leslie Jones and Matt Damon get into it, vehemently. If you're a Weezer fan of a certain age, then you've tread this ground before. And if you're not, then the debate probably didn't make much sense. The rest of the dinner party can't understand why Damon and Jones are getting so hot and bothered. The best line in the sketch might be when Heidi Gardner asks: “Is this a thing people care about?”
The Atlantic promptly posted an article called "The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse." The author, David Sims, completely mischaracterizes the piece. He tries to glean a general, modern lesson from the particulars, and he bungles it. His big takeaway is this:
If you know Weezer’s back catalog intimately, every silly reference made in the sketch lands, but if you don’t, it’s still effective. Because above all, this is a sketch about the way some people discuss almost anything these days—with feigned politeness immediately escalating to personal cruelty. Though part of the joke was that this Weezer disagreement was playing out at a dinner party, I was immediately reminded of so much online discourse, where part of the point is coming up with the most extreme reaction possible.
No offense Mr. Sims, but you can burn in hell. And drink my hot blood. This sketch isn't about how people argue online. It's not about "feigned politeness escalating into personal cruelty." The emotions here are totally valid, because Damon and Jones are arguing about something much more profound than Weezer. Deep stuff. They know it. I know it. And my buddy Kevin knows it. We've been having this identical argument since 2005. Since long before online discourse. Pre-Twitter. The Age of Myspace.
Is This a Thing People Care About? Yes!
Kevin and I have been having this very same debate since Weezer released their fifth album, Make Believe. The one with "Beverly Hills." Yuck. "Beverly Hills," which features on-the-nose lyrics, an awkward faux hip-hop delivery, and a talkbox solo. I pronounced the album terrible. I swore I would never listen to the band again. Kevin kind of liked it. He didn't love it, but he also didn't consider it the end of times for Weezer. He was more forgiving than me, but I had my reasons. I knew better. I had been burned before.
And so the debate began. A debate much bigger than Kevin and me, a debate much bigger than the cheesy crap that Weezer started to produce, a debate much bigger than all of our meager and insignificant lives (whether we have a 90210 zip or not). People will be having this debate far into the future. Kevin and I might download our consciousness into the singularity and continue this debate until the sun burns out (which you will see would be highly appropriate). Intelligent carbon-based life-forms on other planets are having this debate right now. It's a discussion about the permanence of character and identity. It's discussion about the possession of an eternal and everlasting soul. Where lies your essence?
In this debate, I always play the role of Leslie Jones. To infinity and beyond. And Kevin will eternally be Matt Damon. It's a post-modern musical version of Sartre's "No Exit."
Here's a quick synopsis of the two positions. They are, of course, allegorical.
Matt Damon takes the stance that Weezer is "doing some cool things right now." He's looking forward to the release of The Black Album. Leslie Jones does not agree. She believes the band "hasn't had a good album since Pinkerton . . . in '96." She believes that all "real" Weezer fans know this. The two of them get deep into the band's discography. Matt Damon presents himself as open to the band's new music. He listens to all of it. He's "ride or die." Cecily Strong says, "For Weezer?" She doesn't get it. She doesn't know what they're really talking about (but she shouldn't feel bad . . . neither does David Sims, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic)
Damon labels Leslie Jones "a purist" because Jones only truly respects Weezer's first two albums (Blue and Pinkerton). Like me, she will deign to "go all the way up to The Green Album" (which is Weezer's third album). The rest of their material is "corny." I agree.
Matt Damon tells her to grow up. Stop living in the past. Jones calls Damon a "grown ass man" and chastises him that he should know better. He should be able to recognize good art and bad art. Things get pretty heated and both Jones and Damon behave badly, but this is not about online discourse and the lack of civility in conversation. This is about something bigger. Something that excuses bad behavior. Something scary and frustrating and philosophical. Also, I can't begin to explain how accurately this reflects the argument Kevin and I have been having since 2005, since Make Believe. It's almost like the sketch writers have been listening on on us.
A Magical Moment of Consensus
Things don't end well-- Damon storms out-- but there is a magical moment just before Damon leaves when Jones and Damon's sentiments align. Damon yells, "Can we all just agree that Weezer is the best band of all time?"
Everyone else at the dinner party yells "No!" aside from Jones, who says: "Yes!"
Watch and see (go two minutes and 53 seconds in).
This is why they are so passionate. They both truly, sincerely loved Weezer. Damon still does. Jones is conflicted. She qualifies her statement: "And then they became the worst band of all time." Damon still loves Weezer, while Jones loves what Weezer once was.
But aren't they the same thing?
Possibly. But probably not. We're talking about one of the stickiest philosophical dilemmas. A dilemma that involves consciousness, identity, art, and creativity. A dilemma that smacks of the infamous Ship of Theseus, but with something more malleable. You.
Are you your past self? What kind of relationship do you have with your past self? Is your brain the same brain you had in the past? Is your body the same body you had in your past?
This is why you have to excuse all the anger and arguing in the skit. Jones is reckoning with the fact that we have no soul, that we have no essence. There is no true identity. The old Rivers is gone. Damon is hanging on, but some part of him must realize that this is disturbing reality is true. Jones has simultaneously lost her faith in Weezer and in the divinity of the human soul.
Supposedly, most of our cells renew themselves every 7 to 10 years, but not the neurons in our cerebral cortex. We're stuck with them for life (and this is why we can get dementia). Other brain cells regenerate. But-- more importantly-- every time we remember something, that memory changes. Every time we recall something, we revise that thing. So in the biggest sense, our brains are not the same as they once were. Our memories do not accurately connect us to our past, they are creations of our present self. Yikes. The old Rivers Cuomo has been replaced, cell-by-cell, revised memory by revised memory. He's a living version of the Ship of Theseus. We are looking at a Doppelganger, a facsimile. Jones is not fooled. Damon is (or perhaps he doesn't want to grapple with this reality).
Is Weezer still Weezer? They've had a few line-up changes, including the loss of bassist Matt Sharp and the addition of guitarist Scott Shriner. But they are mainly the brainchild of Rivers Cuomo. Leslie Jones claims to know Rivers Cuomo "better than he knows himself." And she knows that he is no longer the Rivers Cuomo that produced Pinkerton and The Blue Album. She truly believes that Make Believe is make-believe. It's not genuine Weezer. I agree with her. Matt Damon is not so sure. He thinks Rivers is still Rivers. He's "into the new stuff." He encourages Jones to grow up and listen to some of it. He tells her that "she doesn't understand what Rivers is going through right now." He believes Rivers will suffer the ordeal, endure the crucible, and emerge hardened, annealed and even better than before.
What happens to our identity and our ideas over time? Do we have any sincere connection to our past selves? My guess is not much. I think we are always in flux. I am nothing like my twenty-two year old self. That guy was an asshole. He was also quite fast. But our athletic ability inevitably declines (except for Tom Brady, who -- according to my sources-- drinks a protein shake each morning laced with the blood and stem-cells of precocious toddlers).
While we physically decay, there's a case to be made that we should be getting better at things like music and drawing and writing and art (until we get dementia). Our artistic and cerebral skills should improve over time. But this doesn't always seem to be the case. Where is the Weezer that Leslie Jones once loved? And why hasn't the band improved with time, like a fine wine? Should she have the childlike faith that Matt Damon has? Faith that the past Weezer will return triumphant? Or is her skepticism more grounded in reality. I side with Jones. For whatever reason, Rivers is no longer (and will never be) his past self.
Jones and Damon are arguing over the existence and essence of the human soul. Is it eternal and unchangeable? Unable to be destroyed? And does it still reside within Rivers Cuomo . . . or did it evaporate when he moved to Beverly Hills? Was the soul of Rivers Cuomo make-believe all along?
Miles Davis said, "the key to creativity is a bad memory." I understand what he means. You have to keep changing, you can't get too attached to the past. Otherwise, you'll simply repeat it, in less and less sincere forms. You'll plagiarize yourself. You'll lose your soul. You'll sell your soul. I tried to find that quotation online-- to make sure Miles Davis said it-- and I had some trouble. I've been saying it to my Creative Writing classes for twenty years, but all I could find was this odd web page about painter Paul Solnes. So who said it? Perhaps Miles Davis. Perhaps not. But whether he said it or not, he lived it. Miles Davis constantly reinvented himself. The key to creativity might be to embrace the fact that we have no true essence, and we've got to keep moving on.
In 2012, David Remnick wrote an article about Bruce Springsteen, called "We Are Alive." Bruce had just turned sixty-two and Remnick marveled at his ability to produce new and relevant material. Bruce keeps figuring out how to remake himself. But the best thing in the article was what Remnick said about The Rolling Stones. I love The Rolling Stones. I love entire albums by The Rolling Stones. Some Girls and Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. So many good songs on those albums. Remnick said that The Rolling Stones are now merely a high-end Rolling Stones tribute act, though they contain the same humans that were in the actual and legendary band. This may be the perfect example of the Ship of Theseus dilemma as an identity conundrum:
But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. (David Remnick)
Most of The Rolling Stones are still alive, the same guys who wrote "Sway" and "Rocks Off" and "Dead Flowers" and "Gimme Shelter." Brian Jones died in 1969, just after he was booted from the band. Mick Jones didn't play with them for a long while, but other than that, they are intact. And all they can do is perform their old songs. Why? Why can't they occasionally write an amazing song? Why aren't they who they once were? It's frustrating and disturbing.
Remnick does raise the point that perhaps the Stones are mailing it in. They only get together for the money. This makes sense. he's probably right. But you'd think they would still want to write a few great songs when they do get together. Perhaps that is impossible without self-reflection, progress, and process. While Bruce Springsteen keeps evolving, the Stones became "curators" of their past.
Weezer is another story. Rivers Cuomo is working his ass off. He's got plenty of process. He's trying his damnedest to evolve. Listen to Song Exploder 70: Weezer for the details on how he wrote "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory." Understanding all the work he put in makes me almost like the song. Almost. But it's still not "Surf Wax America." It's still ersatz.
Cuomo has spreadsheets of lyrics broken down by syllables and accents and prosody. Everything's tagged and searchable. He can "search for lyrics with five syllables and an accent." He's got Spotify playlists of cool old songs; he collects these songs and ruminates on them and finally dismantles them, unravels the chords progressions and the melodies so that he can transform the bits and pieces into something Weezer. He sings his guitar solos first. He eavesdrops and writes stream-of-consciousness journals and has been using the methods in Julia Cameron's classic book on creativity: The Artist's Way.
So why can't he knock it out of the park? Why can't he make another BlueAlbum?
I think I have one possible answer.
Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the New Yorker in 2012 entitled "Groupthink." In it, he skewers the "brainstorming myth," the idea that spewing out a bunch of ideas is a valid path to creativity. There's something wrong with the "no wrong answers" approach. While it's fun to push for quantity over quality, and it feels positive to encourage freewheeling associations and censor all criticism, these methods don't produce good results. There's been plenty of research on this subject, and apparently working in a more critical environment is a better way to produce good ideas. There needs to be some constructive feedback and debate. Dissent is important; Charlan Nemeth discusses this in "Freakonomics Episode 368: Where Do Good Ideas Come From?"
The Lehrer article summarizes a research experiment designed by Brian Uzzi that explains a critical element in the creative environment necessary for achievement. Uzzi uses the idea of a "Q reading"-- which is basically how long and how well members of a team know each other-- to assess success.
Uzzi focused his study on Broadway musicals, which he calls a "model of group creativity." He studied the Q reading of Broadway musical teams from 1945 to 1989 and he discovered something exceptional. Broadway actors, producers, choreographers, lyricists, and stage managers tend to work together over and over. Broadway musicals are expensive. There's less risk if you know the members of your team. What Uzzi found was that teams with very low Q readings-- teams of artists that didn't know each other at all-- those teams were destined to fail. Q readings in the middle, teams comprised of a variety of relationships-- some old, some new, some in between . . . when the team was acquainted, these plays did the best. And when the Q reading was very high, when the team had worked together many times, then the chance of success went down again.
Total strangers don't work well together. People who have known each other so long that they can't criticize each other without taking umbrage and offense, they don't work well together either. In that middle ground, however, when people are professionally acquainted but not overly familiar, those teams succeeded.
The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” (John Lehrer)
I think this often holds true for bands. Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life is a comprehensive and vivid depiction of post-punk Q readings. A band's first album is usually made after many months of touring and practice, so the band has gotten to know each other quite well (usually because they've been living in a van). But they're not so well acquainted that they can't surprise each other. First albums are often good because the band is in that sweet spot of the Q reading. They know their band mates well enough to debate and dissent, they can recognize the good ideas and toss out bad ones. As time passes, it's often all downhill. The Rolling Stones are no longer professionals in a working band. They are long-time friends. Once things get too comfortable (unless there's a major change, such as Johnny Cash working with Rick Rubin) then it's just going to be more of the same.
Why Is There No Sequel to The Big Lebowski?
Perhaps this is why the Coen Brothers can't make another Big Lebowski. It's why Pavement couldn't make another "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain." Once in a while, an artist creates something new and unusual and awesome deep in their career. Willie Nelson made Spirit and Teatroin the late '90's. Who knows what got into him? Maybe it was the weed. Radiohead does their best to break new ground with each new album, but most people still prefer The Bends and OK Computer. And these exceptions are the rare counter-examples that prove the norm.
This truism, that artists often peak somewhere in mid-career, seems to hold true for individuals as well, perhaps because every individual artist is ensconced in a nest of relationships and stimuli. Every human is part of a team. And when that network gets old and hackneyed, then things get stale. It's why Liane Moriarty's middle books (Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret) are so damned good, and why her latest (Truly Madly Guilty) just seems to just be checking the "Liane Moriarity" boxes. It seems derivative. It's why Thomas Pynchon can't do it again.
It's tough to be your past self. It's even tougher to beat your past self, to out-compete that person. Especially when your audience is no longer their past self. They are older and smarter and more experienced. As Heraclitus said, "You never step in the same river twice."
Ride or Die For Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
My buddy Kevin is something of a completist. He reads all the Michael Pollan books. He listens to all of the Weezer and Radiohead albums. He collects things. He still plays Strat-O-matic baseball (and Strat-O-Matic hockey . . . Strat-O-Matic hockey?) He buys the physical cards every year for his Strat-O-Matic sports, even though he doesn't roll dice any longer. Even though the game is now computerized. He's ride or die for Strat-O-Matic.
Kevin feels the same way about Weezer and Michael Pollan. He's a fan of the artist. I'm a fan of the art. Once I don't like the art, I defect. I love Life's Rich Pageant and Murmur, not the band R.E.M. It's because I learned my lesson early on. More on this later. I hate R.E.M.'s Out of Time, even though it was made by the same humans that made Reckoning. "Losing My Religion" is the worst. The fact that Michael Stipe wrote "Talk About the Passion" and also wrote "Losing My Religion" has made me lose my religion, made me lose my belief in an eternal soul.
Strat-O-Matic Hockey?
I'm the opposite of a completist. I only want to listen to the best things. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, but I might never read another Michael Pollan book again. That was his high point. I'd rather listen to first-rate jazz than second rate Weezer. I'm a grown-ass man! I'm logical about it. Old R.E.M. is slightly better than old Weezer, and new R.E.M. is slightly better than new Weezer, but I'm not going to spend my time listening to new R.E.M. because it's slightly better than new Weezer. Instead I'll listen to first rate something else. I'll move on. In this case the newer stuff-- whether it's Weezer or R.E.M.-- is ersatz.
Kevin is loyal and faithful and believes that his favorite artists are still his favorite artists. They can do it again. I'm not so sure. I think we're a constantly changing-- our cells, our memories, our routines, our thought patterns-- and we are surrounded by a constantly changing collection of people. It's really hard to replicate a particular time and place. This may also point to the impossibility of loving a Weezer album again. I am a different person. I'm not in my twenties. I'm not childless and open to the infinite possibilities of the universe and both overly-confident and slightly scared of what that means. Pinkerton really nailed that feeling. But now I'm a grown-ass man. Perhaps that kind of music could never speak to me the way it did back then.
When my wife and I lived and taught in Syria, I played a lot of music with my friend Matt. We both loved Pinkerton and so we learned a bunch of those songs. They were hard to play and sing. Weird chord progressions and some high notes. Weezer was still rolling along. The Green Album had just come out and it was short but good. Catchy and driving. We were young and without children, living in a foreign country, and when we played "The Sweater Song," everybody sang along. It's a time in my life that's impossible to replicate, and it would be silly to think that it's even possible to do so. Matt and I were on exactly the same page, musically. We were in a "strange and distant land," a weird holiday of sorts. Weezer was our common ground.
When Weezer's time was over, I had no problem abandoning them. I may have learned to defect so readily because of what happened when I was a teenager. I had a comically traumatic experience with my favorite band: The Cult. The Cult were the masters of creative transformation. The real version of Spinal Tap. They began as The Southern Death Cult, a goth/post-punk band in the spirit of Bauhaus. Then lead singer Ian Astbury teamed up with his artistic soulmate, Theater of Hate guitarist Billy Duffy and they stripped their name down to The Cult. In 1984, they put out the Dreamtime, a weirdly awesome brew of apocalyptic Wild West riffs, Native American chants, and tribal rhythms. A year later they released the cerebral-sounding college rock classicLove: an impeccably produced collection of droning, ethereal guitars and wailing reverb-laden vocals. The album with '80's anthem "She Sells Sanctuary." I totally dug that album, but the The Cult's next move separated them from the other alternative post-punk bands of the time. They hired Zodiac Mindwarp's Kid Chaos on bass, teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, and made Electric, a raw, stripped down freight train of a record. It was 1987. I was 17 years old, and the album spoke to me and my friends. We felt wild and violent and unhinged, and so did this album. We loved it.
I was ride or die for The Cult
This was one of the reasons I couldn't talk to girls. I really wanted to ask them whether they preferred the celestial sound of Love or the crisp overdriven guitars of Electric. The production values of Steve Brown or Rick Rubin. I wanted to know their opinion. It was a litmus test. Kind of like The Weezer debate. But this was not a thing most people cared about. Certainly not most girls. The only people that cared were my high school buddies, who liked The Cult as much as me. And we loved Electric. We loved moshing at the shows, we loved when Ian Astbury-- drunk-- clambered to the top of the speaker cabinet at the Felt Forum and couldn't get down. It was Spinal Tap embodied. Billy Duffy kept on soloing on his giant White Falcon Gretsch hollow-body guitar, hanging it over the crowd so you could touch it while he played, soloing and soloing until the roadies got Astbury down.
Then I went to college, and my freshman year The Cult released Sonic Temple. It was 1989. They got yet another drummer-- Mickey Curry-- and a new big-time producer: Bob Rock (who has produced acts such as Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, the Offspring, and David Lee Roth). I heard a couple singles from the new album on the radio and MTV-- "Fire Woman" and "Sun King"-- and while they sounded a bit over-produced, they still rang true, they still passed as genuine Cult songs (if a bit cheesier than the old stuff). I heard Astbury in an interview and he said he wanted to make "sonic landscapes," like the Fleetwood Mac song "The Chain." That sounded fine to me. "Sun King" certainly did that.
I bought the album on CD, though I didn't own a CD player yet. I could see the writing on the wall for cassettes (but I couldn't fathom that vinyl would make a comeback). My buddy Whitney and I went into a friend's room who had a CD player. Whitney knew I was a diehard Cult fan. He listened with me and watched me nearly shit my pants when I heard the corny strings at the start of "Edie (Ciao Baby)" and the goofy organ at the start of "Sweet Soul Sister" and the abominable a capella chorus at the start of "Wake Up Time For Freedom." I was disappointed. But I hadn't yet become a defector. I blamed Bob Rock. I enjoyed what I could from the album-- mainly "Sun King" and "Fire Woman"-- and waited patiently for the next one. I was young and dumb and optimistic.
Before Ceremony came out, in 1991, I made the absurd decision to have the logo from the Electric album tattooed on my ankle. I was ride or die for Electric. I liked it that much. And I had faith that The Cult would return triumphant.
Then I listened to Ceremony, and it broke me. I realized that these were not the same dudes that made Dreamtime, Love, and Electric. Nor was I the same person. I realized that, in fact, people weren't people at all; they were conglomerations of memories and molecules in a particular matrix of time and relationships. There was no continuity to anything. Ceremony was so fucking bad. It was derivative. It consisted of mashed-up versions of every lousy Cult song, squashed together, with cheesy super-slick production. Self-plagiarism of the worst kind. I defected. I learned my lesson. I eventually covered my Cult tattoo with another absurd tattoo (grist for another post).
By 1991, R.E.M. was dead to me as well. While I could tolerate a few songs from their 1987 effort Green, it was the same routine and timeline as Sonic Temple and Ceremony. "Stand" was "Wake Up Time For Freedom" awful, but "Pop Song 89" and "Orange Crush" were fun. But Out of Time, that whole album seemed ersatz to me. Not genuine R.E.M. I heard "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People" over and over on the radio. I was angry. I realized you couldn't go back to Rockville. What the fuck? What had happened to the artists I loved?
And then I got over it. I moved on. I discovered new stuff: Cake and Wilco and Ween and Beck and Underworld and Crystal Method and Tribe Called Quest. I got into jazz: Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and Charlie Parker and Jimmy Mcgriff and Jimmy Smith. I went back to old familiar stuff and realized I liked it more than I thought: The Rolling Stones and The Talking Heads and The Cure. I got into hip-hop beyond The Beastie Boys. I learned to find new art-- or art that was new to me-- instead of relying on my old favorites. Why bother being loyal when the cards are so stacked against success? Rivers Cuomo sang it on Pinkerton:
Why bother? It's gonna hurt me.
It's gonna kill when you desert me.
This happened to me twice before
Won't happen to me anymore.
Weezer
I'm no longer angry. I learned not to be offended when an artist I liked produced something shitty. That artist is no longer the artist they once were. It's not a betrayal. You're different, they're different, everything is different. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince got it exactly right when he renamed himself. I'm happy that people can come together at all, in any time or place, and create something of significance. It's really hard. And it can't last. Everyone has to be in the right space. There's some real vitriol out there about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer, but I'm just glad they made the Blue Album and Pinkerton (and the Green Album is decent, I just gave it another listen). You can't expect much more.
I was lucky enough to move in lock-step with The Cult and some other bands-- including Weezer-- for a few years, for a few albums. But what are the chances for that to continue? For you and the artist you love to evolve in the same way, so that you enjoy everything they make? Slim to none. It's just not feasible, for a variety of reasons. I was fourteen when The Cult made Dreamtime, and investigating punk-rock and goth and underground music. It was a perfect fit. A year later I had picked up the electric guitar and the droning riffs on Love were intriguing. Every budding guitarist in the '80's who liked alternative music learned the opening to "Rain" and "She Sell Sanctuary." And when I was seventeen and full of testosterone, The Cult put out Electric. Perfectly appropriate for me and my buddies. These albums are touchstones of time as much as they are of sound. They moved in parallel with my aesthetic sensibilities. That was a happy accident.
Our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us.
There's a fantastic artifact from The Cult discography symbolic of this theme: that our identity depends as much on who surrounds us as it does with what is within us. The Cult recorded an earlier version of the songs that eventually became the hard-driving Electric. These tracks are called The Manor Sessions. They were produced by Steve Brown, the same guy who produced Love. If you like The Cult, then these are fascinating tracks.
It's the songs from Electric but they sound like B-sides from Love. The band decided these recordings didn't reflect their new direction. They enlisted Rick Rubin and made the "real" version of Electric. And it was all about the production. If The Cult had stuck with Steve Brown and made another album that sounded like Love, I would have liked it. I like The Manor Sessions. I would have liked The Cult, the same amount that I liked Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden and The Cure and Danzig. A lot. But I wouldn't have gotten a Cult tattoo. That Electric album that spoke to my me and my friends in a very special way when we were high school seniors, when we were drinking beer, driving around, doing vandalism-- that album almost didn't exist. You can actually hear what it could have been. If this had been the case, we would have driven slower and done less vandalism. Maybe we would have been more cerebral and sensitive. We certainly would have been different. It makes me realize a piece of art is so dependent on the circumstances. It's a product space and time and relationships. It's a miracle that it ever works at all, that a bunch of sounds could mean so much. And it's greedy to think that it can be repeated, especially by the same humans at another time, in another place, when everything is different. Weezer is never going to make another Blue Album, and that's okay.
I'm doing something annoying and pretentious right now, but it fits perfectly with this philosophy. My family is taking a trip to Costa Rica this summer, so I started brushing up on my Spanish. This led me to search for some great Latin American alternative albums. I stumbled on some fantastic stuff. Cafe Tacuba's highly regarded Re. Los Amigos Invisibles' funk album The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera. Soda Stereo's alternative classic Sueño stereo. And Jessico Megamix byBabasónicos (a band regarded as the Argentinian version of Beck).
Listening to this music is like stumbling on buried treasure. These are the best albums by these bands. You can tell they are in the Goldilocks Zone for Q reading and creativity. It's a real treat. And I'm learning some interesting Spanish idioms (such as Cómanse a besos esta noche. . . you can eat kisses tonight?)
So no more ride or die for me. I'd rather listen to some nearly incomprehensible first rate Latin American music than second rate stuff from my favorite bands. I've embraced the Miles Davis philosophy. I have a shitty memory, and it keeps me moving. I'm not going to wait for lightning to strike twice when I can search for a fulgurite.
I'd like to apologize to David Sims for "escalating to personal cruelty." I don't actually want him to burn in hell . . . but I do want him to read this and understand the true significance of the SNL Weezer sketch, and the true significance of the Weezer debate. It's about the continuity of our identity, and the truth might be disturbing. There might not be any continuity of our character. Our soul might be an illusion. There's an up side to this. Change is not only possible, it is inevitable. I'm in a better place now. I've dredged up lots of memories, and my brain has revised them. I've listened to a bunch of old music and it's made me nostalgic. I'm nothing like the guy who started writing this post. That guy was a little disappointed with Weezer. That guy was angry at David Sims. That was my past self. But nearly six thousand words later, this new guy, this new Dave, he knows better.
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.
Aunt Belle's Two Roads
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
We're Talking About Practice
Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.
I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
Advice for the President
The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.
I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Victorian Spoilers Ahead!
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.
Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew
The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:
At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Just the Fiction, Ma'am
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
Glitch in the Matrix?
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment: Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died. Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Tuesday night just before soccer practice began, Carl-- our visitor from the Bronx (through the Fresh Air Fund)-- fell and skinned his knee, so my wife came and picked him up and brought him home and administered some first aid, and then thirty minutes later, Ian got stepped on, and-- unfortunately-- it was right on the toenail he had half-ripped earlier in the day when he stubbed his toe (because he was wearing slides on concrete) and so my wife had to come back to soccer practice and take him home, so when I was leaving practice at 8:30 PM, I was responsible for no children and decided to jump in a pick-up game with some former players and some other young men-- which I would never had done normally-- and a few minutes into the game, I caught a hard shot on the tip of my outstretched toe, but my ankle was loose and awkward and the ball turned my ankle a weird direction and now it's all swollen and sprained and this never would have happened if both the boys didn't get hurt . . . dammit.
Fourth period today, I was far afield, covering an honors physics class in J Hall; the class was full of 11th graders and I teach mainly seniors, but I recognized a couple of younger siblings-- and then one younger sibling recognized me: a tall African-American kid said that I taught his older brother Callan and we talked about him for a moment and then I got the students working on their assignment (something to do with the speed of sound and the speed of light and car antennas) and I noticed that the other African-American kid in the class not only looked like the tall kid that said I taught his brother, but he also looked like the older brother Callan . . . but I didn't say anything because I didn't want to fall into the stereotypical "they all look alike" trope . . . so I kept my mouth shut about the resemblance, but then towards the end of the period I realized that I hadn't taken attendance yet, so I read the roster aloud and checked off who was present and it turned out the that the two African-American kids in the class were identical twins . . . so not only did they look like the older black kid that I taught, but they looked exactly like each other.
This is embarrassing and it's taken over a week to process, but since I'm sorting out the situation this morning, I might as well summarize what happened:
last Friday, the day before we went to Sea Isle City, Catherine sent me to the store to buy a few last minute items for our vacation . . . she sent me to the store . . . I do all of my shopping with Amazon Prime now, so even planning for this was an adventure-- I needed peanut butter, granola, spandex underwear for the kids, and a small cooler for beer and snacks-- and so I made a detailed list of these items, with notes, and I figured I would go to a grocery store and a sporting goods store, but my wife said no, I could get all these things at the local Target;
I drove to Milltown, parked the car in the giant parking lot, and went into the store, a brightly lit vast cavernous space full of all kinds of new items (if you haven't been to a store in a while, I would describe it as a living version of Amazon, but all jumbled up) and the first thing I'd like to say is that I did a fantastic job shopping-- I selected an appropriate sized cooler (and there are a lot of coolers to choose from, I felt like Navin in The Jerk with his extraordinary thermos) and I found some multi-colored spandex underwear for the kids, to prevent chafing from the sand and surf, and I chose two different kinds of granola (there are a lot of different varieties of granola, each one healthier than the next, and the packaging is very enticing) and I got the right kind of peanut butter (Skippy Natural, No Need to Stir) and while I had certainly relied on my notes-- there's a lot of extraneous stuff in stores to distract you-- I had done it, mission accomplished, and now all I needed to do was check out;
I went over to the line area, which is pretty chaotic at Target, you have a number of slots to choose from and each slot has a near cashier and a far cashier, and I didn't know the etiquette, if you could just jump to a far cashier, but I did it anyway and the lady greeted me, she was middle-aged and portly and had some kind of foreign accent (Slovakian?) and she asked me if I wanted 5% off my purchase and I said "Sure" and she said all I needed was a Red Card-- which I assumed was one of those little doohickeys you keep on your keychain and they scan it with your items and you get a discount, I have one for our local grocery store-- and then I was immersed in answering a number of questions on the credit card charging screen, and they were fairly detailed questions-- the little screen wanted to know how much I earned annually and my address and my social security number-- which seemed kind of crazy, just to get a little discount card, but the cashier-lady with the accent kept distracting me, so I couldn't process how weird and detailed these questions were . . . ske kept asking me questions about my purchases, she was really interested in where I got the spandex underwear, as she wanted some for someone in her life (her husband? I don't know, I have a hard time doing two things at once, and it was traumatic enough to be in a store) and I kept telling her that I found the underwear in the boys department, and then I pointed towards the blue hanging sign that said "Boys" and she wanted to know if they had these in the men's department, and I told her I didn't know, and then I finally finished answering all the questions on the screen and fended off all her questions about the kids spandex underwear and then she she said, happily, "You've been approved!" and she informed me that I had just signed up for a brand new Target credit card and I told her that I didn't want a Target credit card, that I had just come to the store for four things, not FIVE things . . . a Target credit card was not on the list and she looked at me, perplexed, and I asked if I could cancel it and she said she didn't know how to do that, and I told her not to use this card on the purchase, that I didn't want to save the 5% and then I got on my high horse and told her she should be more clear about the fact that this Red Card was a credit card-- I was stern, but too confounded to really let her have it, although I was quite pissed off and felt I should have;
then I drove home to tell my wife the news, and I knew she wasn't going to be happy and she wasn't . . . she was like: I send you to the store for a few things and you come back with a new credit card, I don't want to worry about that!-- and then when I told this story at the beach, to my cousins and family, my mother pointed out that Target did a great job employing folks with special needs as cashiers, and I realized that this woman didn't have a Slovakian accent, she had a learning disability or a speech impediment, and she had preyed on me and probably gotten some kind of bonus because she signed up a customer for a credit card, and so though I'm annoyed that I've got to call Target in a few minutes and cancel this thing (it just came in the mail) at least I know in my heart that I helped out someone that needed a helping hand (inadvertently . . . and I did chastise her a bit) and I will never go inside a store again (except for looting, when this whole consumerist nightmare fall apart).
I'm probably constructing an illogical metaphor here-- perhaps Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are more like Sonny and Cher or Sam and Dave-- but my "representativeness" heuristic immediately latched on to Simon and Garfunkel because of the lopsided nature of the duo; the odd thing about Tversky and Kahneman's symbiotic academic relationship is that both members spent some time in the spotlight . . . both members got a turn at being Paul Simon; at the start of their astoundingly fruitful collaborations, everyone doted on Tversky and no one knew Kahneman's name, and now --ironically and tragically, because of Tversky's death from cancer in 1996-- Kahneman is the famous one (I highly recommend his book Thinking Fast and Slow) and Tversky is forgotten; if you love Moneyball and The Blind Side, then at least read the first chapter of this book-- Lewis addresses the fact that Richard Thaler, another behavioral economist, had one criticism about Moneyball: it didn't address why professional baseball overvalued sluggers . . . and Thaler suggested that for the answers, all you had to do was look back to a wacky duo of Israeli psychologists and their experiments and papers . . . the first chapter of The Undoing Project tells the story of Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, and how he tries to overcome the irrationality of the human mind-- loss aversion and the influence of narratives and regret over decision making-- and while there is plenty of psychology and descriptions of experimentation in the rest of the book, it's also heavily concerned with the weird, wonderful, sometimes strained and awkward relationship between these two geniuses.
The streets and sidewalks in Highland Park were very icy this morning-- I almost fell while walking the dog-- and on my way to work, as I was about to turn off Third Avenue onto Benner, I saw an oldish woman walking at a rapid clip up the street; she was wearing a yellow and orange crossing guard vest and earmuffs and I could immediately sense that there was no way she was going to stop walking to let me turn-- she was looking straight ahead, resolutely, and there was the air of great determination about her, though-- oddly-- her gait was a bit gimpy, perhaps the result of a stroke or a bad hip or the start of some degenerative disease, so though she was moving quickly, it was in a herky-jerky manner, and the street she was about to cross was covered with an inch or two of ice; I watched in horror-- knowing it was coming-- as halfway across the street she wiped out, hit the ice hard, and rolled over . . . it was a terrible fall, made more so because of her palsied stride and so I opened my window to ask her if she was okay (and so did the lady in the car opposite me, on Benner) but before we could get her attention, she was back on her feet, chugging along-- I'm not sure if she had to be somewhere in a hurry, or she was an actual crossing guard getting an early start to the day, or if she just wore the vest for visibility and safety-- but whatever the case, she took that awkward fall like a champ and deserves to be memorialized here on Sentence of Dave for her effort, unflagging focus and perseverance . . . I hope when I'm that age I can take a fall like that.
I had an incredibly "realistic" dream last night that I ran for governor (absurd) and actually won the election (ridiculous) and then, when I went over to the statehouse to start my term, I learned that the salary was abysmally low (which is patently untrue, New Jersey governors are paid the fourth highest salary in the country-- 175,000 dollars) and so I told them that I couldn't afford to do it; it was embarrassing and awkward-- and everyone was really pissed off at me for wasting their time-- and, as a compromise, they made me do the job for a month while they found someone else, and that really annoyed me because I had to drive to Trenton every day, which ruined my summer vacation (also silly, as the next gubernatorial election in New Jersey will take place on November 7th).
Last weekend, we took a road trip to my brother-in-law's new place just outside of Harrisburg, and I wasn't terribly excited about making the trip: the weather was beautiful and I didn't want to spend two and half hours in the car-- and we were driving up Saturday, staying the night, and then driving back Sunday-- and I am loath to admit that I was treating these five hours in the car as an ordeal and my poisonous attitude was driving my wife crazy-- and while I admit my behavior was childish and immature, it was a very long drive-- and then, to add salt to the wound-- we couldn't find a spot to get lunch; fans of Awkward Dave know that I don't operate well in social situations when I'm hungry (I don't operate well in social situations to begin with, but add hunger and things get really ugly) and by the time we finally found a cheesesteak place, waited thirty minutes for them to complete our order, and finished the drive to Eddie and Lisa's place, I was grouchy and ravenous and so when we arrived, I immediately sat down and dug into my cheesesteak, which my brother-in-law completely understood because he knows me, but then Catherine's Aunt approached me-- she was visiting as well-- and I guess she was expecting some kind of formal greeting-- a hug or a kiss or something-- and I vaguely understood this expectation because of the way she was standing there, looming over me, and I started to wipe my hands off, but they were all covered in ketchup and melted cheese, and so I made an executive decision, greeted her verbally and kept eating . . . and then a few minutes later, when I was outside,I noticed that her little dog had escaped the house-- and it was my son's fault-- so I yelled (in a panic) to my son "go tell the owner her dog is loose!" and Catherine's Aunt heard this and apparently she was already offended that I didn't give her a hug when I was eating the cheesesteak, and then was doubly offended that I called her "the owner" instead of her name . . . but things were happening rapidly and I was hungry and tired and nervous that the little dog would get run over by a car, and so things were awkward between us for the rest of the day and she brought it up later in the evening, when everyone had drank a fair bit, and wanted to "clear the air" and we had to hug and then she had the nerve to criticize my hug-- I guess it wasn't emotional enough-- but my brother-in-law reminded her that I "wasn't much of a hugger" and I don't think either of us learned anything from the incident, so in that sense it was very much like a Seinfeld episode.
This sitcom idea is inspired by a comment written by Clarence about my rave review of our new Shark NV500 Rotator vacuum . . . he speculated that 1990 Dave would be dismayed, disappointed and disgusted by the domesticity of 2015 Dave, and he's right, of course: 1990 Dave was a rude, insolent, slightly deranged illogical slob who spurned all responsibility and civility . . . and this is the premise for an amazing sitcom: 1990 Dave travels through a time warp into the future and he has nowhere to stay and no viable skills, so 2015 Dave has to take him in . . . it's a messy, funny, and ultimately endearing show, because 2015 Dave can't kill 1990 Dave-- and 2015 Dave's wife and kids have to put up with 1990 Dave and prevent 1990 Dave from harming himself, because he's destined to eventually stumble into another time warp and return to his own timeline in the past, where he will meet his wife and fulfill his destiny to become a fairly responsible, occasionally awkward, sort of civilized parent and citizen (who occasionally volunteers to vacuum the house . . . and to add another layer to the show, 2015 Dave's wife is strangely attracted to 1990 Dave, though he annoys the shit out of her with his puerile behavior, but she just can't help herself because he is a much better looking version of Dave than 2015 Dave).
Once again, it's time for me to arbitrarily choose my favorite posts of the year; I hope you enjoy them and perhaps 2015 will provide more excellent material for me to condense (or refuse to condense) into sentence form . . . so without further fanfare, here are some of the best sentences ever written . . . by me . . . in 2014:
Last year, when the Wawa checkout guy asked me how big my coffee thermos was, I said "20 ounces, I think" and since then I've always paid the twenty ounce price for my refill, but the other day-- when I forgot my plastic coffee thermos in my classroom-- I bought a sixteen ounce coffee in a disposable cup and when I returned to school I poured the sixteen ounces of coffee into my plastic mug, so that it would stay warm longer, and I found out-- to my chagrin-- that my plastic coffee cup only holds 16 ounces: the paper cup to plastic mug transfer filled my plastic mug to the brim (it's obviously larger because it's insulated, so I am an idiot) but I am too embarrassed to tell the folks at Wawa that my cup only holds sixteen ounces, and so they are still ringing me up for twenty ounces . . . but I did catch a break on Friday, because there was a new checkout girl, and when she asked me what size my mug was, I told her "sixteen ounces" and so I guess I'll just have to wait until the entire staff turns over before I consistently pay the proper price for my mug.
This time, Dave didn't make the situation awkward, someone else did, and I'll keep it vague to protect all parties involved, but I was coaching my junior varsity team to victory the other day (a big deal, since we didn't win a game last season) when the mother of a certain player decided she needed an extended and serious conference with me about her son during the game-- and while those of us who play sports respect the imaginary boundary around the coach and players, even when the game is taking place in a public area, this mom had no problem walking right through that invisible barrier . . . and because of this I thought the matter was pressing-- a heart condition or an allergy or a death in the family-- but she essentially wanted to tell me to tell her son to get his act together or he would no longer be allowed to play on the team-- which I immediately understood, and told her I would communicate this to her son, but then she wouldn't give up on the story and when I suggested that we could talk after the game, she said that wasn't possible, because she had an exam to study for and then she kept right on talking, while I was trying to sub players in and out, check a kid for a concussion, and change tactics because of a gale force wind-- and though she wasn't exactly heckling me, I still felt like Seinfeld in the episode where Kramer's girlfriend heckles him at the comedy club, and so Jerry goes to her office and heckles her while she's trying to get some work done, but -- in a sense this was my fault, because I should have dealt with her quickly and abruptly, but I'm not very good in awkward situations of conflict, so I finally just turned my back on her and didn't look in her direction for several minutes, and when I finally looked back over, she was gone.
While the primary purpose of this blog is to dwell on my awkwardness and nerdiness, once in a great while a positive light shines on me, and I'm not even going to bother to humblebrag about these things-- they both happened at the end of the school year and they need to be recorded for posterity:
1) the seniors voted me "favorite teacher," which is an honor I had never achieved previously-- and it strikes me as rather odd that I won it this year, as I felt this was the grouchiest year of my life, but maybe my irate rants about too much coaching, too many students, and my two mischievous and often troublesome children won their hearts;
2) while my friend and fellow English teach Liz was signing a student yearbook, she noticed another entry . . . and this one was signed "Mrs. Pellicane," and it wasn't my wife who did the signing, so apparently some student-- who remains anonymous simply because she didn't sign her name-- not only has a crush on me, but has also moved right past the ugly and embarrassing "teen mistress" stage and just gone ahead and assumed the persona of my wife . . . weird but quite flattering (little does this girl know what it's actually like to be married to me, it's not all funny stories and book reviews . . . you also have to deal with the flatulence, the sloth, and my inability to follow simple instructions and find anything in the kitchen.
I'll never be a great man (for many reasons) but mainly because I need too much sleep (case in point: last week there was a half day for the students and so I had some free time to spend in my classroom, and a great man would have finished Amanda Gefter's Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, A Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing and the Beginning of Everything, a fascinating book about the most metaphysical questions in physics, but instead I fell asleep at work in a plastic chair, head leaning against the file cabinet, feet resting on a desk . . . a position so uncomfortable that when I awoke, twenty minutes later, both my legs were asleep, from my glutes to my toes, and I didn't realize the extent that they were asleep until I had walked twenty yards down the hall, to the water fountain -- I'm always thirsty after a nap-- and that's when the pins and needles struck, and so I had to stagger back down the hallway to my room (on surveillance camera) and almost made it without being seen, but just before I opened my door a teacher rounded the corner and gave me a funny look (well deserved, since I was careening from one side of the hall to the other) and so, as I collapsed through my classroom door, I yelled to her, "both my legs are asleep!" so she wouldn't think I was drunk (an actual possibility, since we were able to leave the school for lunch because it was a half day).
Internet quizzes have become incredibly popular, both as a "data mining tool" and a method of humble-bragging on social media, so I've jumped on the bandwagon and created a quiz of my own to promote the illustrious Sentence of Dave brand; answer the following question and you'll find out exactly what kind of sentence you are . . . to begin, simply choose the phrase that best describes your character:
1) charming and slightly manipulative risk-taker;
2) neurotic worry wart;
3) aimless and lazy couch potato;
if you chose #1 then you are an incomplete loose periodic sentence with several gerunds and a subjunctive clause . . .
if you chose #2 then you are a run-on with several appositives, a sequence of anaphora, and a smattering of ellipses . . .
and if you chose #3 then you are an awkward fragment with inversions, synecdoche, and a mixed metaphor . . .
please pass this along to your friends so they can determine "the facts about their syntax" and achieve internet fun and enlightenment like you did!
Nothing upsets me more at school then when a student disrespects one of the hall aides, especially if the victim of the disrespect is an elderly lady, and so when I saw a student refuse to show the aide at the front door an ID (IDs are required to enter the building) and then walked away from her, I told her I would take care of it and I turned to follow the kid -- and as I turned, I caught him giving the aide the classic two-handed-double f-- you bird, and so I confronted the kid -- and he refused to show me his ID, and attempted to walk away -- and so I blocked his path and things got into that weird gray area where you've lost your temper with a student but you know you're probably not legally allowed to tackle him (but maybe you are?) and so you wonder how you're going to detain him (or you can simply just follow him, I once followed a kid who refused to show me his ID from the cafeteria into the gym locker room, where he attempted to hide in the corner) but luckily, before I completely blew my stack, another teacher showed up and she knew the kid's name -- and so instead of following him, I simply went to the office and wrote him up-- and all this happened before first period, I hadn't even taken my jacket off, so then I had some time to cool-off before my first class -- which is second period, as I have hall duty first period, but I still had to tell this wild tale to my Creative Writing class, but when I was halfway through, one girl said, "You better stop this story now" and I said, "Why?" and she said, "because that's her boyfriend" and pointed to a very sweet girl, who I turned to and said, "You're going out with a guy who gives the middle finger to old ladies?' and she smiled sheepishly and said, "Yeah, but I already talked to him about it, and told him he shouldn't do that."
