Costco: Hyper-Capitalist Crucible

I made my triumphant return to 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- my pulled rib muscle feels much better and once again I can launch (chuck?) my patented long-range-high-arcing-randomly accurate three-pointer-- and I even dribbled the ball a few times, wending my way around the court; soon after, I had to wend my way through the halls, to get to my class to teach, dodging and weaving the masses while carrying my gym bag-- no easy task-- but all of this was light work compared to the swerving and weaving I did driving to Costco and the much more aggressive shopping cart pushing maneuvers I performed inside Costco-- I left work early to run this errand and thought things would be relatively mellow on a Tuesday afternoon but making my way through the traffic on the Route 1 jughandle was something out of Mad Max-- everyone was out roaming around burning fossil fuels and everyone sucks at driving once I arrived there was no respite: the Costco parking lot and warehouse were equally insane . . . just a moronic wasteland of people and cars and shopping carts-- and I am a fast walker and a fast cart-pusher, I've got places to go and things to do, but everyone else inside Costco always seems to be puttering along, browsing cheap cargo pants and remaindered books or stalled out and scrolling on their phone, their enormous Costco cart blocking the aisle-- it's infuriating, especially once I've grabbed the frozen salmon and shrimp, because then I want to get the fuck out as soon as possible, before the seafood defrosts, and I will lay waste to anyone in my path-- young, old, romantically entwined, bickering, whatever-- get the fuck out of my way!-- and then, once you get to the front, you've got to choose a line . . . and you'd better choose carefully . . . you need to evaluate the cashier, evaluate the carts, evaluate the idiots pushing the carts-- but I made it out alive and relatively quickly (though, to my chagrin, I left the dog crate in the back of the car, and I had bought both paper towels AND toilet paper, plus a case of wine and several cases of beer, so I had to put the beer and wine inside the dog crate so I would have enough room for the rest of the stuff in the back seat) and then I got to decompress at acupuncture and erase the stress from all this manic hyper-capitalistic behavior (and now I'm drinking some Conehead beer that I bought at a steep discount-- the irony! . . . I'm using the very stuff I bought in the stressful crucible of Costco to relax because I got stressed out going to Costco).

Super Tuesday

Big day: woke up early; voted for Harris instead of Stein . . . because my wife threatened me-- possibly felony? . . . then went to the gym-- and while I can lift weights, my pulled rib muscle still hurts, especially when I sneeze-- and it hasn't rained in 47 days, so I'm sneezing a lot-- terrible coincidence of a particular muscle pull and an oddball fall weather pattern-- is there a word for unserendipitous? . . . then we headed to Havre de Grace (no one can pronounce it) and wandered through the Graw Alley Art Park, which is full of murals illustrating Havre de Grace's history-- including a depiction of a tawdry and bygone local brothel from the early 1900s-- The Red Onion-- excellent stuff, every town should have a large and colorful tribute to a brothel-- then we had a delicious and cheap seafood lunch at the outdoor Promenade Grill; then stopped at a rest stop so Cat could get some coffee but the millennial Asian couple in front of her were taking so long reading the menu that she stormed out; then made our way through some traffic to Annapolis; got slightly lost in the narrow winding roads of Maryland's capitol city, finally unloaded at our AirBnB, then drove to Eastport and found some free parking and drank some delicious beer-- including a prickly pear jalapeno lager-- at Forward Brewing; and now we're heading out on the town-- and maybe we'll try to stay up and see who wins this stupid election.

Mistook!

Yesterday afternoon (or yesternight, as Shakespeare would have it) we went to the Grant Avenue Block Party and I played some cornhole and drank some beers and then it got too dark to play cornhole and I was getting kind of tired so I walked over to my wife, who was in a circle of women under the canopy, embroiled in a conversation, to check and see if I should grab another beer or if she was ready to go and I slid my arm around her, familiarly-- or perhaps even a step past familiarly, as this was my wife-- and then the two of us realized that this was NOT my wife, this was my wife's doppelganger . . . or certainly her doppelganger in this particular instance, in this particular lighting-- and while I was very embarrassed to have sidled up to this lady-- who I do know in passing from soccer and other town stuff-- and put my arm around her, in my defense, she was wearing the same white tank top as my wife; she has the same toned, tan, and freckled left arm as my wife; she was wearing similar glasses to my wife; she has blonde hair like my wife; she was gesticulating in an animated fashion, as my wife is wont to do; and from the angle I approached, she really looked like my wife . . . enough so that I went and found my wife and positioned her in the same spot, next to this woman, so that I could convince myself (and the other people who saw this awkward encounter) that it was a logical mistake and we all agreed that the resemblance was uncanny (and if you enjoy this theme, this recent incident complements this absurd moment of mistaken identity at the gym, from over a decade ago, quite nicely).

He Said "Less"

These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff,  Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.

Please Don't Sit So Close to Me

A well-deserved Happy Hour for the gang today at B2 Bistro-- I was proud that I survived the First Long Week, which included Back to School Night and Friday AM Basketball-- but, as usual, I was the first to arrive at the bar (because I RUN out of my class to my car when that final bell rings, to beat the traffic, even if I'm in mid-conversation with a student) and when I arrived one side of the bar was completely empty so I sat near the corner overlooking the lake, thinking the late arrivals would fill in around the bend of the bar but then an older couple came in and I watched them walk all way down my side of the bar, past all the empty seats, and the little oldish lady said to her husband, with a fantastic Jersey accent, "I want to be able to see the wataa" and then she wedged herself into the seat right next to me, like with her elbow touching mine-- and at first I thought I might stick it out, for principle's sake-- just fucking sit there next to her-- show her who was boss-- how dare she bully a lone man with a beer doing the crossword like this?-- but that sentiment lasted two minutes and then I acknowledged defeat and moved over a seat . . . I have NEVER had someone sit so close to me when there were other available seats but these two seemed like regulars, so perhaps I was in her seat.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

My wife and I went into "town" yesterday, which is how Tom Buchanan refers to New York City in The Great Gatsby, and both the hot and humid pathetic fallacy in Gatsby and The Lovin' Spoonful certainly came to mind-- though the weather yesterday was even worse than both works of art imagined-- we certainly got dirty and gritty, walking from the train station to our hotel to store our backpack (The Gallivant . . . the first room we were assigned was already occupied-- luckily the guests were out of the room and not in flagrante delicto when we stormed in; the second room had a broken floor unit AC and was broiling, but the third room had a window AC and was quite chilly-- third time was a charm) and then we continued walking around, through throngs of people, clouds of humidity, and wafting billows of strange odors-- we went to lunch at Bonsaii Tapas and Wine Bar-- delicious-- and then we trekked up to the Museum of Arts and Design and enjoyed their exhibits and AC and then we went and checked in at The Gallivant-- a long process involving three elevator trips-- and then we showered off the grit and grime, read for a few minutes, and then headed back out-- we needed to get to the Beacon Theater, which was uptown, Central Park West, and it was still steamy outside, so after getting caffeinated at Tiny Dancer coffee-- which was located underground, in a little warren of shops near the subway station (including See No Evil Pizza, which is rumored to be fantastic) and then we walked a bit and stopped at a bar, Tanner Smith's on 55th Street-- but it was loud as fuck, so we had a beer and then walked on, and we ended up at Ella Social, another tapas bar-- and we just caught the tail end of Happy Hour-- they took away the Happy Hour menus just after we sat down, so we lucked out and were able to get an order in, and then we sat there for a while and ordered various delicious tapas and then we went to the show: the opening band, Woods, had a great sound-- psychedelic alt country?-- but the singer couldn't quite pull off what he was going for (Jeff Mangum? Mark Coyne?) so it was more enjoyable when they got deep into instrumental and then Katie Crutchfield and her band Waxahatchee took the stage-- and Katie Crutchfield really took over the show: she has the best voice I've ever heard in person . . . I felt like I was seeing Alabama's version of Celine Dion or something-- and my wife and I could really see, because we were in the second row in the balcony and the three people in front of us were SO SHORT -- score!-- they were like five foot nothing, so we had an unobstrcuted view-- more on this tomorrow-- anyway, Crutchfield played almost every song from her new album, Tiger's Blood, which is fantastic and a couple of songs from St. Cloud, but none of her older straight ahead rock stuff or the indie stuff that sounds like Liz Phair-- she's really doing the alt-country thing full tilt-- a great show and her voice is awe-inspiring (and I think her bass player also does some amazing backing vocals as well) and then when we got out of the Beacon, at 11:30 PM, it was still very fucking hot-- unlike the Lovin' Spoonful song-- and we started walking back to the hotel and I suggested an Uber but my wife said it wouldn't take that long-- which was NOT true . . . it took so long that I had to stop for a slice of pizza-- but we finally made it back to The Gallivant-- over 12 miles of walking in the hot hot city-- even though were trying to keep things concentrated-- but the Big Apple is a very big fucking apple-- and then we got a nice breakfast and caught the train back to New Brunswick-- which was free! as was the train to the city . . . all Jersey Transit trains are free this week, for some reason, so they are quite packed . . . but now we're home again and the house is in one piece and the Appliance Doctor just fixed our stove door and the weather has improved and become seasonable and calm, but I must say, there's nothing like the overstimulus of Manhattan, especially on a hot day when everyone is out on the streets instead of in their apartments.

Thirty Years Ago

Damp and dank and dreary today, so instead of coming up with something new, I'll post an excerpt written by my buddy Whitney, from a news report of what was going on in our lives thirty years ago, in 1994: 

File Under: things you don't need explained to you. 30 years is quite a long time. Like, really long. A generation-plus for humans. The lifetime of a koi. And yet, it was just yesterday in my brain.

So what were you doing 30 years ago today? Summer of 1994?

I know what a couple of you were doing.

Dave was in the Garden State -- in grad school or maybe just having finished. Living in a converted whorehouse on Route 18 in New Brunswick with some reptiles that scared me and some of his old buddies... who also scared me at times. His old mates played in a band and occasionally let the Idiots jam with them for a minute or two at a time. They threw all their spare change into a big bucket every day for a year and then threw a major rager with the take. Dave read a lot of books, especially for a 24-year-old, and he drank a beer called Artic Ice. It was a Coors product misspelled badly, but Dave liked the ABV and it only had 11.5 ounces, which he said cut out the half-ounce of backwash. He also lived with a guy who took his bride's surname, but I think you would have, too. Dave also worked tirelessly to murder a monitor lizard that they should have named Rasputin. 1994 for Dave: it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

for the rest of the updates (downdates?) on the gang, follow the link and enjoy . . . and thanks for the nostalgia Whit, I forgot about my "Artic Ice half ounce backwash theory" but I still think it holds water.

Wood!

It's been a lovely Fathers Day (or Father's Day, whichever you prefer) and I haven't even had a beer yet-- early this morning I noticed that the dome lights were on in the van, but despite Ian's idiocy, the battery still worked-- so good thing I noticed early-- then I played some morning pickleball with Alec, Ann, and Ashley-- just the four of us so we really tried out a lot of new strategies and shots . . . I am gradually learning that pickleball is NOT tennis-- and then I went over to the pool and swam a few laps-- the water was still cold, but that actually helped my sore knees and calf-- like a lizard, I had to lie in full sun to warm up-- and then I ate a lemongrass and beef ban mi sandwich-- thanks to my wife-- and received some Father's Day loot: a new hat, giant beer pong, some swim goggles that actually fit, a couple t-shirts, and my younger son Ian gave me this nifty little wooden guitar-- which splits in two (and reseals magnetically) and has wooden picks inside-- and I had never played guitar with a wooden pick but I really like it-- especially because plastic picks always slip out of my fingers, but these wooden picks really have a grip to them-- and now we're about to head to my parents to see the rest of the gang-- and super-bonus-- I have off from school tomorrow because of Eid.

 

Dave Does Some Suburban Civil Engineering

Wild Saturday: after pickleball and the gym, respectively, my wife and I went to TWO mall-like areas-- this is highly unusual behavior-- but we had a Seasons 52 gift card (the best chain restaurant I've ever been to . . . besides White Castle) and Seasons 52 is right next to Barnes and Nobles-- which resides next to the Menlo Park Mall, in a semi-attached manner-- and we wanted to get my father a couple of books for Fathers Day-- and it was hot and sunny so we parked in the shade, underneath what I believe is more parking-- and it's kind of nuts that EVERYONE in the lot didn't park in the shady area-- but there were plenty of spaces-- weird-- and then we actually walked through the mall-- the first time I've done that in a long, long time-- and made our way to Barnes and Nobles, bought a couple of books (no more Educator Discount, boo!) and then we ate lunch and then when we got back to the car, it was nice and cool, despite the sun-- because we had the foresight to park in the shade-- then we went to Wegman's, which resides near Woodbridge Center Mall, and we got some fresh fish for dinner and some good beer and cider-- but when we got back to the car, it was HOT . . . because there was zero shaded parking-- and this makes me wonder: why don't we build all our large stores on top of the parking lots, which would save space, allowed for more green areas, avoid over-heated cars, avoid such long walks across hot parking lots, and it would look a lot nicer-- there should be some incentive to build over the parking lot and then have a belt of green space around the lot-- which would also avoid the incredible heat sink that is a large stretch of asphalt-- anyway, I'm sure there's prohibitive costs associated with this plan-- but maybe in the future we'll incentive the right things so that the cost is neglible (and Rutgers has some parking lots that are shaded by solar panels-- this is another solution) but the next time I go to the Menlo Park Mall when it's hot (which might not be for a decade) I know where to park.

Beer Gives Me Strength to Carry On

Long fucking day-- I worked every minute of the school day (due to coverage periods) and then I raced to a very hot tennis practice, where I learned that after school my first singles player stepped in a hole while chasing his friend's car, hurt his foot, and might be out for our State Tournament Match-- so this sentence is brought to you by a couple of well-deserved beers-- without them, I might not have had the persistence and gumption to sit down at the kitchen computer and write this half-assed description of what I did today:

Period 1: Special Ed coverage-- the kids did some work and then we did all the puzzles . . . Connections, the Mini, Wordle, and the Monday NYT Crossword-- which is easy-peasy;

Period 2: mock-epic examples, including some Mark Leyner and rites of passage-- so that they could read "Honey Harvest" and I could do my fake-bee-in-the-cup routine;

Period 3: in my new sophomore class (because Denise had to go and have a baby) we did some Emily Dickinson poems that feature portrayals of death (I Heard a Fly Buss When I Died, Because I Did Not Stop For Death, and I Felt a Funeral in My Brain) and I also showed them a clip from Meet Joe Black and Bill and Ted's 2;

Period 4: Shakespeare intro and 12th Night coming attractions.

Slurry Time!

No time to waste writing sentences, because I've got to mix the moss I scraped off a concrete block at the park with some yogurt and beer to make a "slurry" and then paint it on our concrete planter-- apparently in six weeks, the moss will flourish . . . I promise to keep you posted (although this project might not be great for blogging material-- the only thing more boring than watching grass grow is watching moss propagate).

Post-Birthday-Blues

Yesterday's birthday-get-together at Jersey Cyclone was very fun-- a perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon: the brewery is located in an industrial park and it's spacious inside, plus you can bring your own food-- Catherine made some of her incredible special sandwiches; we had a good crowd, and the beer was delicious, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves . . . and the bartender was an EBHS alumni, so Chantal and I had fun remembered folks from high school in the mid-aughts . . . and while all the varieties of beer were very delicious, and so were the sandwiches and the desserts-- my body can no longer handle that kind of stuff in large quantities-- luckily we stopped drinking around 6:30 PM so I suffered through my hangover around four hours later and then slept soundly . . . but today I re-tweaked my calf muscle playing pickleball-- I think I really need to let it heal for a couple weeks and it is HOT outside, which is kind of fun, but also reminds me just how much I hate the heat . . . Donaldson Park is still swamped and muddy, but today it is packed with people, all kinds of yahoos, and most of them drove int and are parked all over the place, in the mud, etcetera . . . and I have turned into a very aggressive walker-- if I see a car coming, I get myself and the dog into the croswalk, don't make eye-contact with whoever is driving and then I amble across the street-- hoping the car will stop-- and I know this isn't mentally healthy or physically safe but I'm sick of people in enromous cars ignoring stop signs near my house and in my park, so the least I can do is fuck with them . . . and if I get hit, I'll miss a few days of work and maybe some idiot will feel guilty about their shitty driving and realize cars are destroying this once great nation.

In Thirty Years, I Should Run For President?

Last week, I made a triumphant return to indoor soccer and I was able to play for 50 minutes before I felt a twinge in my calf--but I must confess, I also felt fat and out of shape on the soccer pitch, I've been going to the gym and playing pickleball and while pickleball may require some burst of speed and plenty of shuffling in a squat stance, it's not really stop-and-go aerobic exercise; this week, I was able to play for a little over an hour-- I got my 10,000 steps and then stopped before I hurt anything-- and wow, was I winded-- and I still felt fat and slow and without good touch, but I did score a nice left-footed goal on the volley, off a looping cross . . . so I am cautiously optimistic about athletics in 2024-- and my wife and I are trying to eat fewer carbs and more protein, so maybe we'll lose some weight this week, which I am assuming will really help my fitness in sports like soccer and basketball (I was annoyed last week, I didn't drink all week-- until Friday and Saturday, or eat dessert after dinner, and I still don't think I lost a pound . . . as I approach age 54 my metabolism has really slowed down-- when I was in my forties if I quit beer and dessert for a week, I'd lose five pounds).

I Have a Wife Who Makes Her Own Naan

Last night my wife whipped up some Indian food-- chicken tikka masala and daal tarka and some other lentil thing-- and then she realized we didn't have enough naan in the freezer and so I suggested we use some tortillas-- chicken tikka tacos!-- and then, satisfied that I had really helped out with dinner, I went back to drinking my beer and listening to music and watching her cook . . . and then Ian got home and I talked to him for a bit and then I saw that Catherine was doing something weird with flour on the counter and I asked her what she was doing and she said, "I'm making some homemade naan from scratch" and I was like WTF? and a Troy Barnes moment from Community popped into my head: after behaving abominably in the video game competition for the inheritance, Pierce's half-brother Gilbert says "Family can make a person do a lot of crazy things" and Troy answers: "I understand . . . I have an uncle who makes his own pizza."

Blame it On SantaCon?

Approximately three years ago, in February of 2020, we went into the city for my friend Connell's 50th birthday-- we went to Turntable Chicken Jazz and sat in a low-ceilinged room and ate Korean fried chicken and drank beer and then sang karaoke in a small crowded private room in a Koreatown fifth floor karaoke bar-- several weeks later, the world shut down and it was a miracle that we all didn't get COVID from this trip to the city . . . but perhaps some of us did-- and Connell reenacted this trip last night for his wife Lynn's fiftieth and the city seemed more crowded, chaotic, noisy and crazy than usual-- the train ride was slow and crowded, Penn Station was absolutely nuts, the streets were packed, as were the bars and restaurants, our Uber ride home was through bumper-to-bumper traffic. . . we should have just waited for the train, although we did get to witness an altercation from our slow-moving cab: a young guy on foot  kicked or bumped or did something to a parked Tesla and an older guy, a big older dude, got out of the car and started beating up the younger guy and pinned him to the ground and I think he was strangling him when a bystander broke it up-- and as we inched away, the peroxide blond wife was yelling at this young guy as well, for doing something to their car-- my friends blamed this ubiquitous insanity on "SantaCon," which pulls in a weird, drunkenly stumbling holiday crowd into the mix but I think quite a bit of the perceived chaos is because I am getting old.

When the Cat is Away, Dave Gets Sleepy

Catherine is away on a lady-hiking-trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so it's just me, Ian, and Lola in the house . . . Ian is eating pizza and watching "The Regular Show" and I'm drinking a beer, and writing this sentence and then I'm going to play a game of online chess and fall asleep at 7:30 PM, most likely (I've been staying up late all week watching the second season of "Fargo" with my wife, that is one intense show).

Note to Self: Take a Break

At the start of this week, I played 6:30 AM pickleball Monday morning-- a healthy and vigorous start to the week-- and then the weather turned balmy . . . what was once known as "Indian Summer," a term with ambiguous origins that the historian Daniel Boorstin believes originates from the "raids on European colonies by Indian war parties that usually ended in autumn”-- but because of the genocide perpetrated on the indigenous tribes of North America by the European settlers, there is no worry of raiding parties taking advantage of warm weather and scalping me and my family, so it's quite safe to play pickleball late at night at Donaldson Park, where the Lenni Lenape once roamed-- so I played Tuesday night with my adult friends (and my wife) and then figured I would rest my knees and ankles, but Wednesday I got a text from my young pickleball friends-- these 23-year-old pharma and med kids who switched from high-level tennis to pickleball, so I went out and played with them for a couple of hours Wednesday night-- I played until 9 PM! . . . which is pretty much midnight for me-- and then the weather got even warmer so I played again Thursday night-- the first time I've ever played pickleball four days in a row, and by the end of Thursday, I pretty much couldn't move-- my ankles hurt, my hips hurt, my knees hurt-- so even though the weather is beautiful today and everyone (including my wife) are down on the courts, I'm drinking some beer and taking it easy, because my game really deteriotates once I can't hustle.

Diet Soda, Beer . . . It's All the Same in the Catskills

We did several scenic hikes today and had a good meal at the Truss and Trestle but my favorite moment was when we were having a beer at the Creekside Bistro and a lady came in and sat adjacent to us at the bar and asked for a menu-- this was around 1 PM-- and when the bartender asked what she wanted to drink the lady said "a diet soda" and then, without skipping a beat, she said, "but what do you have on tap? Any Oktoberfest? Actually, I'll have a Smuttynose brown ale" and it made me wonder what turn her day was going to take because she switched from diet soda to beer.

 

90% Pleasant Bike Ride

Yesterday, to end our week of virtual teaching with something joyful, a few of us decided to head over to On the Border, a cheesy Mexican chain on Route 1 that offers a happy hour of cheap beer and free chips (no pay) and it was such a beautiful day that I decided to bike over-- and as the crow flies (if I had a kayak and some cliff-climbing gear) the restaurant is right across the Raritan River from my house-- less than a mile-- but to bike there I had to do a more circuitous three mile trip: I biked across the Albany Street Bridge to New Brunswick, then through Boyd Park-- along the river and south on Route 18-- and that section of the ride was quite lovely, then up the big hill to the Route 19 crossing into the Cook/Douglass section of Rutgers, where things got a little dicier-- there was the usual "you're not driving? fuck you" section of road where the sidewalk and the bike path disappeared-- but on the whole, it wasn't too bad-- there were a fair amount of college kids around, so plenty of pedestrians, and the cars weren't going too fast because of this-- but then things took a turn-- I wanted to head across the old Sears parking lot-- the quickest way to the restaurant, but I had forgotten that this was now a massive construction zone-- they are building an enormous mixed-use complex of town-homes, apartments, a grocery store, and shops-- but that was my only way to get to On the Border-- unless I looped around and biked on Route 1-- which would be suicidal-- so I followed a dump truck down a dirt road into a chaotic maelstrom of dirt piles, concrete and steel building frames, and construction equipment-- to my right an enormous metal plate floated in mid-air, held there by an enormous crane, and to my left were some completed town-homes . . . I was able to make my way across this site without being forcibly removed and then I went over a little temporary bridge that spanned a culvert and took my son's bike (a commuter bike, not a mountain bike) across a jagged rock field and finally I was able to enter the back of the On the Border parking lot-- I locked up my bike with a U-lock . . . I figured I might leave it there and pick it up the next morning because there was no way I was biking drunk through that site in the dark-- but luckily Catherine came to meet us, so I was able to throw the bike into the back of the Mazda and get it home safely-- and happy hour was a blast, it was nice to see Chantal, Terry, Liz and Stacey in the flesh and we all talked about how we had COVID-school flashbacks and would forget that the rest of the world was open while we were virtual teaching-- then once you got off the computer you'd realize . . . oh, the gym is open and we're not in a pandemic, our school is just a decrepit shithole.

Fan-O-Rama

We had friends over for dinner Saturday night and while we were enjoying wine and appetizers, our ceiling fan started behaving abominably-- worse than the dog, worse than me-- it was wobbling precariously, the glass bowl with the bulbs in it swinging to-and-fro, the blades whirling asymmetrically, so I shut it down (and wrote a note to myself to check it out in the morning, that's the kind of thing you can forget about after a dinner party) and then we ate some excellent food, much of it containing vegetables from my wife's garden (and discussed a lot of grim adult shit, like wills and trusts and retirement and money) and the next morning I saw my note to myself and got down to it; the fan-blade screws were loose but even after I tightened them, the whole contraption was still wobbling-- and I determined it was "fucked up" and we needed a new ceiling fan and because it was STILL FUCKING RAINING and I was going stir crazy, I tightened all of our ceiling fan-blades-- they were all loose (we have four of them) and I actually cleaned the blades-- they were caked with tons of gook, especially on top-- I don't know how the gook could build up on an apparatus that often spins round and round at high speed, but believe me, this is something you should check out if you have ceiling fans, and then-- after cleaning out greasetruck studios, which was also caked with gook and desperately needing a reorganization-- I removed the "fucked up" ceiling fan, after turning off the electricity in that room at the fuse box, of course . . . and I never would have done all these time consuming projects if it wasn't for all this fucking rain (and a day off for Yom Kippur) and while I'm jonesing for sunlight, I'm glad I got all these chores done . . . but I'm ready for sunlight and pickleball and general post-pickleball laziness again (and I was quite happy to play 6:30 AM basketball yesterday morning, run like a lunatic, and teach the rest of the day with a headache, and then take a nap after work, before drinking some beer while cooking dinner).