It's Hot

Stacey gave me a ride home in her jeep from our college writing workshop today (we got so much work done! I actually did some work in the summertime!) and riding in the jeep with the top down is generally a treat: the sun on my head, the breeze blowing through my (lack of) hair . . . but it was so hot today that it felt like we were driving in a pizza oven.

Softball Drivers

 

There's a big softball tournament in the park by my house and some softball parent from South Jersey passed out at the wheel of her Jeep, barrelled through the wood barrier in the parking lot, and knocked the community garden fence down-- and she was headed straight for my wife's garden!-- luckily, her car stopped and a county employee ran over, turned the car off, and got her out of the vehicle . . . apparently she didn't eat breakfast.

Twenty Years!

Today, Catherine and I celebrate twenty years of marriage. Twenty years!

That's ten years times two, man!

 

For a marriage to last twenty years, it has to endure the winds of change. It has to survive and thrive.

Twenty Things That Our Marriage Has Survived

Our marriage survived an extremely long courtship (eight years). Yikes.

Our marriage survived a wild wedding (include a wet and muddy ending . . . I got thrown into the Lawrence Brook and was too filthy to ride home in the vicinity of my lovely wife, instead, I got loaded onto a trash bag in the back of an SUV).

Our marriage survived our first years of teaching.

Twenty years ago, in Milan . . .

Our marriage survived cross country trips and a monthlong voyage to Ecuador.

Our marriage survived ditching tenure for parts unknown.

Our marriage survived three years living in Damascus and traveling the world.

Our marriage survived intestinal distress and the Second Intifada.

Our marriage survived life before we had money to pay for a cleaning lady (barely).

Our marriage has survived numerous births and deaths.

Our marriage has survived a house purchase and kitchen renovation. Our bank account barely survived.

Our marriage survived a child in a skull shaping helmet.

Our marriage has survived travel soccer.

Our marriage outlasted my 1993 Jeep Cherokee.

Our marriage survived our impetuous son getting hit by a car (he was fine).

Our marriage has survived the acquisition of two dogs.

Our marriage (and out basement) has survived floods and hurricanes (with FEMA assistance!)

Our marriage has survived epic family trips across our vast nation and beyond.

Our marriage has survived raccoons in the attic.

Our marriage has survived my wife teaching fifth-grade math remotely (barely).

And our marriage has survived the Covid-19 quarantine . . . so far.

To celebrate all of this survival, we planted something that could very well survive beyond our marriage . . . a Scarlet Fire dogwood tree.

Apparently, although we stumbled on it serendipitously, it's the perfect tree to commemorate our anniversary. Catherine and I met in New Brunswick, while we were both attending Rutgers, and this tree was bred and developed at Rutgers. Forty-five years of horticulture to produce this tree.

There's a Chinese proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” 

I hope twenty years from now, Catherine and I will be able to look at this tree and remember when we planted it.

The Test 102: Superstitious Spray Butter Intervention

This week on our podcast The Test, things get real . . . grievances are aired, alliances are formed, and amidst the chaos, I manage to administer a quiz on superstitions and their origin stories; so tune in, take sides, keep score, and if you don't learn something, I give you permission to key Stacey's Jeep.

Dave is Never Too Old to Learn Stuff (but He'll Never Have a Nice Car)

I went for a run with the dog this morning on the towpath (the narrow park between the Raritan River and the Delaware and Raritan Canal) and I learned several valuable lessons:

1) if you are several miles out on the towpath, and your dog poops, and you bag the poop and then put a plastic bag filled with poop in your pocket (because the canal is a watershed, so you don't want to leave poop near it) and you then run several miles, you'll forget you have poop in your pocket (it cools down) and you'll eventually stick your hand in your pocket to see what's in there-- luckily I tied the bag shut, so I didn't end up with a hand full of poop (although I did smell the bag, in the name of science, and despite the fact that the poop is sequestered inside plastic, it still smells like poop);

2) it's not worth parking in the tiny Landing Lane lot, right next to the towpath, because it's an extremely sharp turn out of the lot and there is always traffic on the other side of the road . . . I cut it a little too sharp and caught the lip of the guard rail and tore a hole in my van . . . I'm going to attempt to fix this hole with some auto body repair tape-- ten bucks on Amazon-- which leads us to lesson number three . . .

3) I am a terrible car owner-- fans of this blog know the stories of my infamous Jeep Cherokee, and I am doling out the same kind of abuse to my Toyota Sienna . . . when it comes to cars, I just can't have nice things.

The Avalanches Reveal the Fault in Dave's Brain

 I was very excited a few weeks ago when I got to listen to The Avalanches new album Wildflower . . . I clearly remember the day I heard "Frontier Psychiatrist" on WRSU while driving home from work in my 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport . . . Since I Left You became a staple on my iPod, and I really like the new album as well, but I was surprised to learn that it's been sixteen years since the band released Since I Left You . . . in my mind their last album was from a few years ago, and it is categorized in my brain under "Hip New Music of which Dave is Aware" and maybe this is because of the liberal and bizarre use of samples . . . I suppose I consider Girl Talk to be new music-- but not Paul's Boutique-- or maybe it's that most new music doesn't dent my consciousness, but anyway, it was a bit frightening when I learned that Since I Left You came out in the year 2000, a fact that bears plain witness to just how faulty my memory and cognition is (though I think we all have these experiences all the time: I can't remember who was in the Super Bowl three years ago, but I vividly remember Super Bowl XXIII, the 49ers/Bengals game when Pete Johnson couldn't gain a yard on fourth down) and I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn't trust anything anyone says about things that happened in their past, because people tend to compress the past, or conflate it, we exaggerate memories from our youth, forget the rest, and generally just remember things however we want.

Ben and Dan: Guides of the Southwest

The differences between the Jeep tour we took in Sedona and the "open air vehicle" tour we took in the Canyon de Chelly were perfectly appropriate for each place; Sedona is a well-run tourist machine and Chinle is an off the map little town in the Navajo Nation, and our tour guides embodied these characteristics in an archetypal manner;

1) though they both have three letters in their name, Ben and Dan couldn't be more different as guides-- Dan was born in Connecticut but lived in Maine and also did some time overseas, as an itinerant musician and guide, and he kept up a steady stream of conversation, anecdotes, trivia, corny jokes, and interaction-- if you mention you're from New Jersey, he knows somebody in West Caldwell, if you mention you coach soccer, he played on his high school and coaches his kids team-- while Ben grew up and still lived in Canyon de Chelly and is a recognized Navajo guide, storyteller, and keeper of Navajo cultural history, but his style is just the facts (aside from occasional griping about the National Park Service and how they don't maintain the road and some of the sites as well as he'd like . . . he thinks there's some money somewhere, and he's been repeatedly asking them to trim the cottonwood trees that are blocking the beautiful colored antelope petroglyphs near the Antelope House Ruins);

2) Dan's Jeep is a dependable, well-oiled machine that conquered slickrock peaks, but Ben's "open air vehicle," which my wife wisely requested (because who wants to be cooped up in an SUV) is an old Dodge Ram Power 350 with a modified bed of bench seats, and while it's the greatest way to see the canyon, Ben had some trouble navigating the sandy riverbed and the truck stalled out several times, and the engine overheated twice-- luckily, we were in an incredibly scenic area, so it was no trouble to wait while he fixed the engine, but we really wondered if we would make it out of the canyon before sunset . . . and though his daughter had a brand new Polaris four-seater dune buggy, there was no way she was letting us use it-- she was headed out on the town (Denny's?) with some friends;

3) Dan's tour was definitely organized and built up to a great view, and he was well-practiced at his schtick, while Ben's tour ended at his house, where we got to play some two-on-two basketball with his grandkids . . . on the ride back, all the cotton-pods from the cottonwood trees were floating around in the canyon, and though it was 90 degrees, it looked like it was snowing; we really didn't know if we would make it through the sand-- but we did, and he dropped us at our hotel and then spent several hours fixing his vehicle in the hotel parking lot . . . while Dan dropped us off right on time, we took a picture with him and off he went . . . I think the kids will remember both tours, but I especially liked the trip through Canyon de Chelly, it reminded me of the time Cat and I spent in the Middle East, we were always a couple of clueless white folks being guided out to the ruins by the natives who still lived amongst remnants of ancient civilization, but were trying to maintain their own civilization on top of these relics . . . once again, for pictures, head to Captions of Cat.

Red Rocks and High End Shops

Sedona is a weird place-- it's incredibly beautiful, a town set within red rock buttes, mesas, and spires, with a clear shady stream running down the Oak Creek Canyon and then right under Route 179 . . . it's essentially like placing a bunch of houses and restaurants and shops inside Arches National Park, but there's more vegetation and the weather isn't as severe . . . check out the pics at Captions of Cat if you need some visuals . . . so you've got a super-touristy and rather cheesy "uptown" and then high-end galleries and the Tlaquepaque Arts and Crafts Village, which is essentially a giant outdoor sculpture in the form of a ritzy shopping mall-- I've never seen anything like it-- and there are houses in the hills owned by celebrities-- our guide mentioned Nicholas Cage (who was in a film called Red Rock West) and Walt Disney and Al Pacino and Lucille Ball . . . but then there are umpteen miles of hiking and biking trails, so you've got all the outdoors people wandering around, and then there are the vortex people and the hippies and the psychics and the folks living in a van in the hotel parking lot and the dude sleeping in the botanical garden . . . it is a wacky mix of high end resort, low-end tourist trap, retirement community, and outdoor wonderland . . . we did a few hikes, into Fay Canyon, which was shady and had some excellent rock climbing at the end, and around the Airport Mesa, which offers the best views, but we also rested our legs one morning and took a Jeep Tour to Soldiers Pass . . . our guides name was Dan and here are a few things we learned on the trip:

1) Dan wears a cowboy hat, carries a .41 caliber pistol, a rare size which he claims shoots flat and straight, hails from Connecticut, and-- like Andy Bernard-- went to Cornell . . . this totally amused me, but he's been out West since 1991 and has lost all traces of East Coast accent and mannerisms;

2) Dan is very proud of the fact that his Jeep Tour Company-- Red Rock Western Jeep Tours-- has the exclusive rights to the Soldiers Pass route, which features the Devil's Kitchen Sinkhole . . . and he pointed out that this sinkhole is seven times bigger than the Pink Jeep Tours sinkhole on the Broken Arrow tour . . . my sinkhole is bigger than your sinkhole kind of stuff;

3) my wife believes Dan is legally blind-- which is a bit scary, considering some of the steep slickrock trails he navigated-- but she might be right, his sunglasses we extraordinarily thick and he couldn't see the large Cooper's hawk perched on a tree in the middle of the trail until we pointed it out to him . . . despite this possible disability, he did a fantastic job not driving off any cliffs;

4) we saw the Seven Sacred Pools, high in the red rocks, and learned that in the desert, dirty water is clean and clean water is probably contaminated with arsenic and/or mercury . . . and these dirty little pools were full of tadpoles and frogs;

5) Dan knows a great deal about botany and zoology, and we all listened intently when he told us about the thirteen species of rattlesnakes and the deal with Mormon tea (it's stronger than coffee, a Mormon loophole!) and about the shaggy barked juniper that Walt Disney used as a model, and he also knows a great deal about geology, but we usually zoned out when he talked about sediment and erosion and tectonic plates . . . although I did like the fact that the Devil's Kitchen Sinkhole increased in size in 1989, a consequence of the Bay Area earthquake that cancelled the World Series and I now know the correct definition of a butte (it's not a rock formation shaped like a butt).

Cross Country Again: Jersey to Pittsburgh to Topeka

I have driven out West five times now; once with my buddy John-- we made it all the way to Montana before I blew four of the engine rods of his Jeep Wagoneer-- and once with Catherine, we took the Jeep all the way to the Grand Canyon, and once with Whitney-- we lost our minds in Kansas but finally did make it to Boulder-- and once with the entire family, again to Montana, and now this time-- alone-- and I've made it Topeka (the family is flying in to Denver on Thursday morning) and I'm not doing this again until we have self-driving cars . . . but while it was a long way, I had a great pit stop at John's place in Pittsburgh and watched the NBA finals and I had far more to listen to than on the previous trips; I don't remember what John and I listened to in the Wagoneer, but I had to take the bus home (John and Ryan abandoned me and flew, but I didn't want to spend the money) and all I had were two cassettes -- Dead Letter Office by R.E.M. and The Velvet Underground & Nico-- and a yellow walkman, so I listened to those over and over . . . with Catherine I guess we listened to CD's and talked (this was the mid '90's) and I don't remember what Whitney and I listened to because we mainly played stupid games, including drafting bizarre "Olympic" teams from among our fraternity brothers-- the events were darts and pool and such-- and these teams offended a lot of people once we arrived in Colorado (plus we were very very hungover, so if we listened to anything it was at a low volume) and our family trip two years ago we were stocked digitally and listened to plenty of podcasts, including Professor Blastoff and This American Life . . . for this trip I have a smartphone loaded with stuff, and so here is an incomplete list, for posterity, of how I killed twenty hours alone, driving from Jersey to Topeka:

1) Squarepusher Go Plastic-- yikes, like being inside a broken computer;

2) Slate Money;

3) Paul F Tompkins Impersonal;

4) Norm Macdonald Me Doing Standup;

5) Wilco Summerteeth;

6) Beck Odelay;

7) The Grateful Dead Live/ Dead;

8) Jimmy Smith All the Way;

9) Shut Up You Fucking Baby David Cross;

10) Maria Bamford Ask Me About My New God;

11) The Replacements Tim;

12) Chris Rock Never Scared;

13) Christopher Titus Norman Rockwell is Burning;

14) several episodes of Planet Money;

15) several episodes of Vox's The Weeds;

16) an episode of Invisibilia;

17) some Rush Limbaugh . . . when discussing the Orlando alligator incident, he claimed that "animals don't think" and "alligators don't think" and "your dog doesn't think," which flies in the face of all current research, and then he ranted about how there is no gun show loophole and that the Obama administration is redacting the fact that the Orlando shooting was connected to Islamic terrorism because the administration doesn't want to offend Muslims;

18) Husker Du New Day Rising;

19) a fantastic episode of This American Life: Tell Me I'm Fat;

in other notes, I did NOT stop at "The World's Largest Wind Chime" and I had a delicious burger and two local pints of beer at Henry T's in Topeka.

Dave vs. The Fuzzy Green Ball

Everything seems epic when you're sick, and so yesterday, during my drive to the MedExpress while running a fever (turned out to be bronchitis)-- I fought an epic battle against a worn out tennis ball; the ball kept rolling under my feet while I was driving down Route 18, and I was worried that it would become lodged under the gas or brake pedal, and so I repeatedly bent down and grabbed the ball from under my feet-- temporarily obscuring my view of the road-- and then tossed the ball to the back of the van . . . and moments later it would come rolling back up again, like it had a mind of its own, and so-- finally-- and, as I said earlier, I was running a fever and my mind was cloudy, I thought to put it in one of the many cupholders my Toyota van possesses, and this was a perfect fit-- the ball will stay lodged in there until my kids decide to remove it, so they can play catch in the car (and it is possible that this fairly obvious idea didn't dawn on me for so long because my old car, a Jeep Cherokee, had no cupholders and so I had to use the sneaker which resided in the passenger seat . . . there were rarely passengers brave enough to ride in the "deathbox," and I'm too sick to do any research-- so I'll leave this work to Sentence of Dave fanatics-- but I wonder how many automobile accidents are caused by unrestricted rolling tennis balls . . . I'm guessing this is at least as dangerous as trying to clip your dog's nails as a stoplight.

Kids Trick You Into Thinking They Are Civilized

After a productive morning of podcasting, Stacey, Cunningham, my wife, Alex, Ian and I went out for Mexican food-- and Stacey treated the boys to a ride to the restaurant in her new Jeep (with the top down) and the ladies were very impressed with our boys' behavior at the restaurant . . . and when Alex and Ian were finished with lunch, they asked if they could walk home, which they occasionally do instead of sitting and waiting for the check-- it's four or five blocks, so if Cat and I have driven, we usually arrive at home around the same time-- and after the kids left, Stacey said, "they're just like regular people!" and we agreed and we were very happy with our children . . . BUT . . . and this is the update for Stacey and Cunningham-- they are NOT like real people, even though they occasionally fool us into thinking they are . . . when we arrived home, we heard screaming and a loud banging noise coming from the backyard, and quickly surmised that it was Alex, banging on the giant glass sliding door-- I raced around the side of the house and told him to stop and he explained that Ian had locked him out of the house (and chained the front door) and then taunted him from the comfort of the air-conditioning and Alex totally lost his mind and came close to shattering a very very expensive window and probably hospitalizing himself . . . moments later, Ian's friend showed up and Ian had the awkward task of sending him home, since he was in so much trouble, and then we sent Alex over to Ian's friend's house to explain what happened, and Ian had to stay home, miserable and alone, and face the consequences of his actions.

It's Happening Again

I am rapidly turning my newish (2008) Toyota Sienna minivan into my beloved and but heavily abused 1993 Jeep Cherokee . . . three years ago, when I bought the van, it was in perfect shape, but now it is missing a hubcap, there's a big scratch on the side from when I scraped my friend's car in the school lot, and the back latch is broken so you can't open the hatch, so I have to get all my soccer stuff out through the sliding doors . . . I'm worried that soon enough I'll be crawling in through the passenger side and using a boot as a cup-holder.

Do You Drive Your Car, or Does It Drive You?

I drive my Toyota minivan like a 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport (because that's what I drove for the twenty years before I got the van) but I saw a lady in the high school parking lot with a brand new sporty Jeep with a jacked up frame and removable doors, gingerly poking in and out of her parking spot to avoid rolling one of her giant tires over a low concrete lip (not even a curb).

Road Trip Day 17: Riparian Reunion

We floated a beautiful stretch of the Yellowstone yesterday-- and though the trout weren't biting, the time passed quickly-- as our river guides were my old friend Darren and his wife Pam; I hadn't talked to them in fourteen years, so we had a lot of catching up to do (the last time I was out to visit them, I blew four rods in my friend John's Jeep Wagoneer and we ended up living on Pam and Darren's apartment floor until Pam got so annoyed with us that she left town . . . John had to sell his car in Billings) and because the river was so high and fast, our trip only took a few hours, so we spent the rest of the afternoon at Chico Hot Springs, an idyllic spot under the shadow of Emigrant Mountain . . . and Catherine and I had a great time chatting with Darren and Pam, but the real surprise of the afternoon was that Alex and Ian had a great time hanging out with Annabell and Larkin-- in other words, Alex and Ian had a great time hanging out with a couple of girls . . . Montana girls who raise their own sheep and sell their own eggs, but still, actual females, which is impressive for my boys (this might be explained by the fact that they were starved for socialization with kids their own age, after spending so much time with their parents, and so even girls would suffice-- but Ian did ask if we would ever see those kids again, so I think they actually liked them).

iPod, I Name Thee Lazarus

One of the perks of writing a trivial blog filled with drivel is that I can fact-check extremely mundane details from my life; for example, I know for certain that I bought my iPod Nano in April of 2008 and I made a habit of swimming with this iPod in November of 2008 (which didn't last long, as my supposedly waterproof Otterbox case leaked, resulting in a waterlogged and broken iPod . . . but one of my well-connected students set me up with an "appointment" with her ex-boyfriend at the Apple Store and he gave me a new one, despite the fact that water damage is NOT covered by the limited warranty) and then I used the new iPod-- an exact clone of the old iPod-- without incident for many years, until I lost it for several months in the winter of 2013, and now I am realizing that this particular iPod (which I have conflated with the original water-damaged iPod in a philosophical leap reminiscent of the Ship of Theseus dilemma) is imbued with miraculous qualities, because my wife's iPod -- a newer, sleeker model-- doesn't hold a charge and gives her loads of problems, but this model (like my Jeep) is built to last, possibly to infinity and beyond; to make a long story short, Tuesday morning, when I got in my car to go to work, I saw my iPod lying prostrate in the road . . . it must have fallen out of my gym bag, and so it spent the night on the pavement, getting soaked by several rainstorms and quite possibly run over by cars, and so I assumed this was finally the end -- R.I.P iPod-- but when I pressed the "play" symbol, the screen popped right up, and so I put it in a bowl of dry rice and it is now in good working order-- and this tempts me to to try other more extreme experiments on the device: fire, acid, ice, my digestive system . . . but perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate, as I'm sure I will place it in peril some time soon, without forcing the issue.

I Learn Two Things in One Day!

I have been on a podcast binge, and if you listen to enough podcasts, it's hard not to learn something . . . and so while I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible about augmented reality called "Reality (Only)" I noticed that Roman Mars was talking much faster than usual, in an almost robotic voice -- but this fit the theme of the show, which was about "reactive music": a unique soundtrack that comes from your headphones, an auditory overlay created by and from the sounds around you, mixed and mastered in your smartphone -- but then a young woman explained something about "reactive music," and her voice was too fast and so I took a look at my Ipod and apparently there is a "variable speed" function for people who don't have the patience to listen to a podcast at normal speed . . . and so I fixed this and Roman Mars returned to normal, his voice deep, calm, and collected and then I actually learned something from a podcast, not about the podcast playing device; and I am going to hyperbolically call this podcast my favorite of all time, it is an episode called "The Modern Moloch," which details how automobiles went from hated, lethal contraptions . . . technological demons to which we sacrificed our children (a political cartoon from the 1920's) to a piece of Americana that we always had a "love affair" with; the podcast explains how an auto lobbying group called "Motordom," realized that it was in the automobile industry's best interest for cars to be allowed unlimited access to the city, and so came up with some NRA style logic -- cars didn't kill people, reckless drivers killed people (this brings to mind Neil Postman's rule of thumb, that no piece of technology is neutral) and along with reckless drivers, you can also have reckless pedestrians . . . this was a paradigm shift, as before this the street was a place for kids to play, adults to socialize, work to be done, and carts to move at somewhere around 5 miles an hour . . . and then Motordom brilliantly co-opted a term for redneck -- a "jay" -- and came up with the novel idea of "jaywalking," which was more a term of ridicule than something legal -- and from this time forward, the streets belonged to the auto (the podcast also has excerpts from Dupont's program where they explain that Americans have a "love affair" with the automobile . . . and since it's "love," then we don't have to behave rationally) and while I try to drive as little as possible, because I hate cars, I know that I'm a hypocrite, because I still use my car to get to work, to go on vacation, and often to get around town, when I could walk, and I often wax eloquently about my Jeep Cherokee and fully understand how many of us fondly remember our first shitty car . . . but it still makes me happy to learn that we didn't always have a "love affair" with automobiles, the affair was shoved down our throat by industry and propaganda, and if we try hard enough, perhaps some day we can take back the streets for our children (I think this bucolic vision involves flying cars).

I Come To The End of Two Significant Nineteen Year Relationships on the Same Day

My mother-in-law passed away last night after a long battle with cancer-- and while it was very sad, she went on her own terms, peacefully, at home (she lives with us) and surrounded by family . . . and I can honestly say that our relationship defied the typical, as I got along quite well with her for the past nineteen years: she lived with us for seven of those years and took care of our children for much of that time, she was a vital woman and I have no regrets about electing to have my mother-in-law live in the same house as me . . . and as my mother-in-law was gradually losing consciousness, I was buying a used car-- more on my fantastic negotiating skills in a future sentence-- because my weather-beaten and ancient 1993 Jeep Cherokee was also near the end of its time . . . but the "Deathbox" managed one final ride down Route 130, to the Toyota dealership, where it immediately ceased working-- I couldn't get it started so the sales lady could take it for a test drive, and it took a team of people to jump start it and move it out of the main lot-- they gave me 100$ of pity money for the "trade-in," perhaps in deference to the many years of excellent service this car provided me (and all the material it has provided for this blog) . . . and so, in one of life's profound, mysterious, and miraculous coincidences, two outstanding nineteen year relationships ended on the same day yesterday, and my life will be very different from here on out.

One Tiny Step For Dave . . . and Zero Significance for Mankind.

I'm seriously thinking about thinking seriously about purchasing a mini-van . . . no that's not true: I am thinking seriously about seriously thinking about the purchase of a mini-van (but not in the near future-- I was going to try to buy a van before Spring Break, but since we're only headed to the Catskills, I've figured out a way to stall the purchase-- we're going to drive both the Subaru and the Jeep to the cabin so we can bring everything and the kitchen sink . . . I've been shopping for a new car for over five years, and so I don't want to rush the process at the end . . . and now I'm far more excited about buying a new bike, anyway . . . especially since I could buy thirty new bikes for the price of one used Toyota mini-van).

I am an Idiot, My Wife is a Saint

Friday, as I was pulling into the school parking lot, I felt my cell phone buzz and I instantly remembered what I had neglected to do . . . and then my phone started ringing and I realized that I wasn't going to escape this transgression with a mere text . . . my wife was going to talk to me about this, and so I accepted my guilt, accepted the call, and braced myself for the oncoming tirade . . . "What is wrong with you?" she began and I immediately started apologizing, because there was no excuse-- for the third time in two weeks, I had driven the wrong car to work-- we were trying to take my Jeep to the shop to get the brake lights fixed, but every time she made an appointment (and you need an appointment because our mechanic is so good) I forgot to drive the Subaru to work and instead took the very car that my wife needed to drop off at the garage . . . forcing her to call our mechanic and report to him that her husband was a complete idiot and she would need to reschedule . . . so this time she wasn't going to do that, and so she devised a plan whereby I would drive the car to her school and we would swap cars and I would be able to do this because I had a half day of classes and my parent conference schedule was light in the afternoon-- but there was only one problem, which I explained to her: "The only problem is that I'm supposed to go to lunch with Terry . . . if I drive all the way over there then he won't have anyone to go out to lunch with," and right after I explained the "problem" I realized that it wasn't really a "problem," and more just my concern with eating, but it was too late and so I braced myself once again for a deserved angry rejoinder: "I think it's more important that you get the brake lights fixed on the car that you drive both your children around in, rather than get a slice of pizza with Terry!" and I couldn't agree more and told my wife that I would meet her, and then went into the school and while I was summarizing this book in the English office, and explaining how I was in a System 1 mood, because my wife made me a chart for what I had to accomplish in the mornings (the kids have a chart and I have a chart, and my wife is on the chart, but I don't actually think she needs the chart) and I was very happy that I completed my Friday morning duty (walk the dog) and so I blithely walked out the door and hopped into my car, not thinking that I wasn't supposed to drive my car, and went straight to work . . . and while I was summarizing System 1 and System 2 to a colleague, my phone rang again and my wife told me that she was driving to my school right then, to swap the cars, so that I wouldn't have to drive all over during my lunch, and while I was extraordinarily happy that I was going to be able to have lunch with Terry, I also realized that it might be my last meal on earth and immediately decided that I would send my wife some flowers or perhaps place them in her car at work . . . but then I couldn't even get credit for that, as while I was recounting this story to my first period class, I felt another text arrive on my phone and it was from my wife and it said, "You better send me flowers" and the text also included her school address and the name and phone number of our local flower place, so not only did I know she was serious, but also that she thought I was an incapable idiot . . . but I managed to successfully send the flowers and I have smoothed things over . . . for now.

Yikes

Last Wednesday, I drove all the way from New Brunswick to Highland Park with my car door open . . . this is partly because my Jeep is so loud and porous that it doesn't sound any different if the door is open or closed, and partly because whenever I get any time alone, I recede deeply into my thoughts . . . and I must have noticed something odd, but when I looked over my left shoulder to see if the window was open on the driver side passenger door, because I didn't see a half-open window, I assumed that it was closed, but in reality, I was actually looking at air and thinking it was a closed window, and so I drove right across the Albany Street Bridge with my door jutting out at a 45 degree angle-- as Jeep doors lock into place at this angle-- and it's something of a miracle that the door didn't strike another car, as the bridge is narrow (although I guess people were giving me a wide berth as they thought I was insane, and now I know why that guy beeped at me . . . I thought he was an asshole).