Alec, Catherine, and I went to the River Road Tavern last night for cheap beer, fairly cheap Blanton's, and great cheesesteaks . . . and to watch the Knicks (because there's no dedicated sports bar in New Brunswick right now-- annoying) and the crowd in this joint was comically diverse-- all the ethnicities of central Jersey in one small dive bar-- mainly there to watch the Knicks dominate once again . . . this is an absurd run, ten wins in a row and a +225 point differential over that stretch-- but my son tells me that the teams from the West are very, very good, and if the Knicks make the finals, things won't be as easy.
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Reffing Inside Plato's Cave
I am finally home and drinking a cold beer after a taxing weekend: I reffed six games-- three on Saturday and three today-- and I worked three games as the center ref and two games as AR where the home team was running a serious offside trap, so I got some good experience calling various infractions, from the center and from the side-- and while I'm really starting to get the hang of things-- checking players in, keeping order during substitutions, calling fouls and restarts, and the various organizational duties of the ref, but I still haven't given out a yellow or red card yet and I haven't called a penalty kick-- but I'm ready to do so-- and this weekend, i worked with some veteran refs, including Rocco, an older Italian gentleman who condemns Venmo and only operates with cash and our one-armed assignor, who told a youngster who was nervous about his performance "the best ability is AVAILability"-- which is a fucking great old man statement; anyway, I've noticed that the difference between being a ref and being a coach is that when you're coaching, you are looking for reasons the ref should call a foul, but when you are reffing, you are looking for reasons to NOT call a foul: advantage, there was no contact, the player tripped over his own feet, the player's hands were against his body, little kids are just generally spastic, the ball is stuck in a pack of seven children and there's going to be random bumping without malevolence, a player tripped over the ball, etcetera . . . and there's definitely no way to get it all correct-- reffing is an exercise in futility, an exercise in unreliable narration-- but you have to be confident with your calls-- you can't reveal to the crowd and the players and the coaches that your perspective is limited, that you are at the mercy of your angle and your eyes and your old legs, you can't reveal that we are all residing in Plato's metaphorical cave, only perceiving the shadows of reality, not the actual truth, and your calls are just one subjective view among many, from one particular view of the field, your calls are not biased by rooting for one team or another, your calls are biased because you are a human, living within the flow of time, unable to stop it, run it back, rewind it, slow it time, look at it frame by frame-- this isn't TV-- and there's something very excellent and fun about this, you make a call and sometimes you nail it, and sometimes you wonder, and sometimes you get it wrong (and sometimes your AR corrects you) but you are outside, in the sun, watching sports and listening to passionate fans and players-- so, as a retirement job, it sure beats tutoring kids for the SAT or helping them write a college essay (plus, I got a shitload of exercise-- my feet hurt . . . also, if you bring any of this up during a game, I'll give you a yellow card for dissent).
Go Knicks!
My wife returns from Florida tomorrow morning, and then life will regain its usual rhythm-- not that I did anything wild while she was gone, it was mainly business as usual-- but I tried to do a bit of socializing even though my instinct when I am left to my own devices is to hole up and read and get high and strum my guitar: I went to Happy Hour yesterday at B2 Bistro, but I only had one beer (and then a Coke, which Cunningham roundly insulted for drinking) because I had pickleball practice at 7 PM and needed my wits about me (Terry also only had one beer because he was reffing a soccer match at 7 PM but he had a Diet Coke after his beer) and pickleball practice was fun-- my calf is healed and my new paddle seems to be functional (Vatic Pro V-sol Power) but because my friend Ann wasn't there-- her knee hurt-- there was only one other non-Mandarin speaker at practice and so I really did not understand exactly what was happening-- and then this morning I substituted for Catherine and had coffee at her friend Johanna's house (Connell and Adrian were there too, so I wasn't the only guy crashing) and I talked to my neighbor Pernille quite a bit about the state of education and AI (she's a Rutgers professor) and tonight I'm hanging out with Ian and his friend (and possibly Alex) for the Knicks game-- I'm buying sandwiches so that the youngsters will socialize with me-- but I will be very glad when Cat is back in Jersey.
Dave as a Bachelor is No Gourmand
My mom had heart surgery yesterday, and she is already checked out of the hospital-- the miracles of modern medicine . . . and she didn't even need Donald Trump to lay hands on her!-- meanwhile, back at the ranch, I miss my wife-- she went down to Naples with my brother to help my mom out . . . Ian and I have been eating the baked ziti she made before she left, but we're nearly at the end of it, so we got some sandwiches from Park Deli for dinner tonight-- and I did cut up some peppers and lettuce and cucumbers and eat a salad with the ziti last night, to get some roughage-- but it seems that if my wife leaves town, the menu mainly consists of pasta and beer (and takeout) and so I will be glad when she returns.
Bipolar Beach Day
Ahh . . . Spring Break . . . finally: Cat and I headed to the beach, and while the water was very, very cold, the air was alternatively very very warm and randomly-- if the breeze shifted-- quite chilly; we ate amazing sandwiches at the Speakeatery in Asbury and then stopped for some beer at the Source Farmhouse Brewery (I had the nitro-conditioned Irish Red Ale . . . it took several minutes to pour and had the character of Guinness but with a malty flavor: delicious) and then we got some bread and cheese at Delicious Orchards . . . a good day (aside from the traffic and construction on Route 18 . . . will it ever end?)
I Thought Last Year Was Well Organized?
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My cousin Kim pronounced last year's Easter Pizza resurrection as "total chaos" with no "quality control," and so this year things were much more organized, and generally the experts did the delicate work of folding dough and making the "toes"-- so my wife had to work all afternoon (and so did some small children) while I only had to cut some sausage and then got to watch basketball and drink beer-- and this year's pizzagaina were notably more uniform and delicious than last year's batch-- and I am certainly better at eating them than making them.
Spring Break!
Judging by the table on my deck, we got more snow during this storm than we did during the last storm (the top photo is the last storm; the bottom is this one) but shoveling out of this one is more pleasant because it's not as frigid as it was during the last storm-- and we have another day off tomorrow, so I'm trying to enjoy myself . . . since we didn't budget any snow days, this is ostensibly our spring break . . . and I'd be able to enjoy myself more if my wife had told me she was going to the beer store on Sunday-- she bought herself some Asbury Park Blonde, but she did not buy me any Asbury Park Stout (we only drink beer that represents our physical characteristics, thus I can't have any of her Blonde and she does not drink my Stout).
The Best Place to Be a Regular
We braved the cold with our old friends Mel, Ed, Rob, and Julie in Princeton yesterday: after lunch, we explored the recently opened Princeton University Art Museum-- Princeton University has always had an incredible art collection, but it was crammed into a smaller building-- but now everything is on display in an enormous 146,000-square-foot modernist building with 32 galleries stocked with incredibly art and history, Monet's "Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge" and a Manet and a Pisarro and a Van Gogh and a Rodin and an unfinished studio version of Jaques-Louis David's "The Death of Socrates" and several detailed Roman mosaics from Antioch, Turkey and much ancient ceramics and sculpture . . . and it's free! you just wander in! and then we went over to the newly renovated Triumph Brewery, which has the nicest lounge and the best jazz around (and the beer is great too) and we also noticed that Princeton did a much better job with snow removal and street and sidewalk shoveling than New Brunswick (and especially the no man's land between Highland Park and New Brunswick . . . Princeton, that's where the money is . . . and the endowment money . . . 36 billion dollars of it).
Crullers, Calder, and Cheesesteaks
Typical day in Philly: donuts from the Amish bakery at Reading Terminal Market, a visit to the new Calder Sculpture Garden and Museum, a cheesesteak at Shay's, and then we retreated to Stacey's apartment so I could rest my stupid swollen knee; last night, we enjoyed dumplings at Emei and beer at Love City Brewing, where we watched the Eagles eke out a victory over the Bills . . . there's nothing like a Philly bar during an Eagles game (even if you're secretly rooting for Buffalo to take it into overtime).
Gettysburg: A Whole Lotta History (and beer)
Some of the Gettysburg experience: Seminary Hill, Cemetery Hill, Pickett's suicidal Charge, Little Round Top, Big Round Top-- with my sense of direction, I would have definitely gone to the wrong Round Top-- thousands of corpses to bury . . . before the pigs got to them (and they weren't discerning between dead bodies and nearly dead bodies) a stench of bodies so bad it could be smelled several towns over, so many smells that paranormal experts insist that these ghostly scents still pervade the battlefield to this day, hastily assembled rock walls, the lone civilian casulaty Jennie Wade, philandering Dan Sickles and his amputated leg, the Dobbin House and a pile of amputated limbs, many monuments to many men, and so many bars and craft beers-- at one stop a rather inebriated lady asked us if we had been daydrinking and then said she had been to 17 bars in one day (maybe not this day) and then she proceeded to compare random people at the bar to celebrities. . . we saw faux-Freddy Mercury and an impoverished man's version of Rocky's trainer Mickey, then today we went for a rugged hike in Caledonia State Park and saw 19th century furnaces and hearths, and of course, many old houses-- made of stone and brick-- and we have read many placards, listened to many historians and guides-- and I've been plowing through some Civil War books, so in the end it is far too much history to digest (plus the film and the museum!) but the Military Park is very well-marked and quite easy to navigate (for its vast size and scope) and you really can understand how this infamous and pivotal battle went down.
Automobiles, Automobiles, Automobiles (and The Cult)
A very un-Dave weekend, but I survived and had a pretty damned good time, despite all the traffic: Saturday morning, I drove my Kia Sportage forty minutes through typical New Jersey traffic to Zman's house-- there's no good way to get there from Highland Park-- and then after listening to a few tales of Zwife's driving misadventures, we got into Zman's Alfa Romeo and headed up to Hopkinton-- home of Gormley and also the town where the Boston Marathon starts-- but we had to wade into epic traffic on the Hutchinson or the Cross Bronx or the Merritt-- who the fuck knows the difference between those roads?-- so we stopped for lunch at Zuppardi's Apizza in West Haven, which was delicious-- and then fought through a bunch more traffic on the way to Gormley's lovely abode, in the piney, fern gullied, rock-walled suburbs of Hopkinton-- and then we took a walk through the hood, where we did NOT encounter a beach ball (fucking AI is destroying reality) and then got ready to head to the show, which was in Boston city center, at the Orpheum-- and Gormley's wife drove us in, through even more traffic (thanks Liz!) and we hopped out at a traffic light and then I had to chase down the car because I left my phone charging in the backseat . . . I caught up to Liz as she was turning right, knocked on the window, jumped in and grabbed my phone, and then jumped out of the car before anyone could even beep at her-- a random middle-aged white dude was impressed by my alacrity and he said, "nice move!" and I held up my phone and told him "my ticket to the show is on here!" and he said, "Are you going to see The Cult?" and I said, "Yes I am!" and then we went to jm Curley's for drinks and food and then walked to the Orpheum for the show-- the opening act was a noisy duo called The Patriarchy-- but the lead singer was a lady . . . ironic!-- and then The Cult came out as The Death Cult, the goth-punk band that preceded The Cult-- and Ian Astbury was in some sort of Native American dress-robe and they played all the old stuff from Dreamtime and before (e.g. "Gods Zoo") and then the curtain went down, we restocked our beer, and then The Cult came out as The Cult and played all the old favorites, from "Wildflower" to "She Sells Sanctuary"-- I especially enjoyed a stripped-down double time version of "Fire Woman" . . . I guess they were like: we're required to play this but we're going to do it quickly . . . anyway, it was a great show, the band seemed especially energized and invigorated playing the old goth-punk stuff-- Billy Duffy had to actually pay attention to what he was doing instead of cranking out the power chords and the drummer, John Tempesta, is exceptional and really laid down those culturally appropriated tribal beats-- I did have to tell the guy in front of me to lower his phone-- he seemed to think he was filming a documentary-- but once I said something, he stopped holding it up without any conflict-- and in general, the crowd was very pleasant-- it was essentially a convention of burly middle-aged white males, a few still sporting long hair but most bald or balding-- and everyone looked like they were trouble thirty years ago but had since more-or-less assimilated into normal society-- it made me think of how long a history I have with this band-- I first saw them on the Electric tour in July of 1987 at the Felt Forum-- so 38 years ago-- it was an insane show-- they opened with "Bad Fun" and the moshing was actually violent and Ian got stuck on top of a amplifier at one point and roadies had to help him down . . . there's not many bands that I saw in high school that are still touring (The Who are probably the only other band that fits into this category, although I think they are done now) and then after the show we went back to jm Curley's for a nightcap and caught a ride back to Hopkinton (thanks for arranging that ride, Gormley!) where I finished the leftover pizza and hit the sack and then Zman and I got on the road early and hauled it back to Jersey-- that's more car-time than I prefer to do but I chewed some gum and enjoyed the good craik (as they say in Scotland) and Zman's flawless driving and now I'm home andd getting ready for school tomorrow . . . a whirlwind weekend.
Sandy Hook, The Mule Barn, Idioms, Lanternflies, Always Sunny . . .
Harvest Moon: Making Fairly Shitty Beer for Nearly Thirty Years
For the first time in a long time, I went to Harvest Moon last night for a few beers with the guys, and I was duly impressed: the Firehouse Red tasted bland and fuzzy; the Fuller Moon IPA left something to be desired in the way of hoppiness, crispness, and flavor; and the Dunluce Castle Stout, while drinkable and not as disappointing as the other beers, was not notable in any particular way . . . it's fairly amazing-- this microbrewery, which has been operating in New Brunswick since 1996, has consistently made lame and lousy tasting beer for three decades, yet they keep plugging along, while more interesting pubs have withered and died-- but you'd think they'd figure out how to make better beer by now.
Meta-Debate Tempered by Alcohol
You don't want to go down this road with your wife: arguing about who is more argumentative (although the Bradley Beach bar crawl with the Dom and Michelle Moccio is mollifying the debate-- we went to The Little Dog Brewery (Gretchen is the first female brewmaster/brewery owner in New Jersey and she is very nice and knowledgeable and her beer is amazing) and Wheelhouse Distilling (a cute young newly married couple-- a fireman and an accountant-- own this with another couple . . . best mixed drink I've had in a long time: in-house spicy watermelon mixer and their bourbon-- delicious) and then we went to the Bradley Brew Project and I drank a very hazy pale ale called "Unicorn Girls."
A Tough Predicament to Resolve in 30 Minutes
When I went for my early morning swim in the ocean today, I certainly thought about the tragic demise of Malcolm-Jamal Warner— he was one of the good ones from my generation, and born the same year as me and a native of New Jersey to boot— so when I swam out past the breakers, I pondered the fact that I was one riptide away from eternity— and Sunday night, I certainly thought about his TV dad — Bill Cosby— when I was out at the with my son and I forgot to watch his beer when he went to the bathroom and when he got back and found it, unguarded, he said: “Dad, I could have been roofied!”
Let Freedom Explode Loudly All Night
Most of my post-Independence Day was triumphant and celebratory: I returned to full force on the pickleball court, despite my sketchy hamstring and I celebrated my recovery with some beer and tequila at my friend's pool . . . but this celebration was interrupted by a phone call from Ian-- he found our dog panting and shaking in the bathroom and thought she was very sick, so I drove home to check her out but she was simply hiding from the bombs-- there's been fireworks goign off for days and she's losing her mind because of this-- she's getting more anxious about loud noises and she gets older-- and so am I -- last night I woke with a start and asked my wife who was knocking at our bedroom door, which is a scary thing to ask someone who is currently dreaming-- but it was just more fucking fireworks . . . maybe we should celebrate Independence Day with voter registration or a historical reenactment of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence . . . something less loud and more dog-friendly.
Severed (from the Humidity)
My wife and I visited Bell Works in Holmdel today-- the mixed-use facility built within the old Bell Labs building and the site where some of the show Severance was filmed-- and while we were not severed from our consciousness when we entered the vast and beautifully designed indoor space, we were severed from the disgusting humid weather . . . the air-conditioning in the massive atrium is top-notch (and there were people doing laps and walking dogs in there, enjoying the cool air) and on the way home we stopped at the Source Brewery for a beer and Delicious Orchards for some bread and cheese, a decent way to kill a very hot and muggy Sunday afternoon.
Stream of Consciousness
My buddy Whitney just arrived, so I figured I'd give him a crack at the sentence, so I asked him for something quotable to write, and he said, "Let me think about that while I urinate"-- but then he did come through with some interesting information a bit later: he taught me to pour a Guiness out of the can and into the cold mug quickly, not slowly and then the head dissipates-- a method unlike how you pour any other kind of beer.
Later Children, See You in the Fourth Quarter
Ahh . . . Spring Break . . . finally . . . and so I am drinking a beer, listening to Stereolab (very calming) and writing in peace-- my wife is napping on the couch-- and I am unwinding from a chaotic day with the youth: I started the day at morning basketball and we only had nine and then Frank, one of the older guys (but not as old as me!) went down with a calf cramp and so we played four-on-four full court until exhaustion, and then by the time I got out of the shower the first bell had already rung so I hustled (as fast as I could) to first period-- and I must say that THAT Creative Class is lovely and we read aloud the riddle poems that the kids wrote, guessed, and did a food metaphor fill-in and everything was fairly mellow-- but by my second 82-minute period, the kids were starting to feel it, they knew the end was nigh . . . so I read the end of We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my sophomores and then they made horror skits and enacted them-- and they had to have a couple of classic horror tropes in the skits plus some sort of get out/stay-in debate (lesson plan straight from my podcast!) and while they were loud and nuts, they actually got the skits written and performed them-- mainly because class is endless-- and then my last Creative Class was bananas, a lot of weird bickering and overly energetic teenagers-- and I can't express enough how much I hate block scheduling because 82-minutes is WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to have a class right before Spring Break (or basically any time at all) but I survived and someday I will retire and miss this?
Bar Stool Sporting Spectating Spectacular
Yesterday afternoon, my son Alex and I took the train into the city to have a beer and some food at a sports bar (he just turned 21!) and then go to the Knicks/Wizards game-- so we watched NCAA basketball on the train and then more college hoops while we ate and drank at Goldie's Tavern, a spacious place with good food and drink close enough to Madison Square Garden-- Goldie's was full of Knicks fans and a couple of beautiful people-- a dude who looked like he was right off The Bachelor and his date, who was a young Jennifer Connelly look-alike-- and then we walked over to the game, but we had some trouble finding our seats, which were in section 219 . . . but we were in row BS6 . . . which did not seem to exist . . . and then we learned we had Bar Stool seats, right on level with the concession stands-- with a temporary wall behind you and a nice little bar for your beer in front of you . . . and these tickets were pretty cheap, considering, probably because the Wizards are lousy (although Jordan Poole was fun to watch) and March Madness was happening-- but anyway, these seats totally spoiled me and I don't know if I could ever sit anywhere else-- there's no one in front of you or behind you, you have space on your side and can swivel, you can stand any time you like, you don't have to put your beer on the floor, and -- if there's a close college game you want to keep tabs on, you can rest your phone on the little wall above your personal "bar" . . . I guess the secret is out about these seats, to some extent, but if you can ever nab them, they make for a comfortable, non-claustrophobic game experience-- you don't have to rub elbows with the masses or ever stand up to let someone through and you have easy access to both the concession stands and the bathroom . . . pretty sweet.
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