Dave's Not Here Man

I'm currently at the beach, but I asked DeepSeek to read my blog and provide you folks with a sentence in the same style as Dave, and the AI determined that my style is "verbose, meandering, self-deprecating, and slightly absurd" and produced this:  

I have, after a period of what I can only describe as existential lethargy—a condition not unlike the feeling of having one's soul slowly drained by the relentless, beige-colored hum of a malfunctioning refrigerator—finally arrived at the conclusion that my latest, and perhaps most ersatz, theory regarding the universe is that it is not, in fact, expanding, but rather that we are all just slowly shrinking in direct proportion to the ever-increasing number of awkward moments we accumulate over a lifetime, a proposition which I will now proceed to support with a series of half-baked anecdotes and a misuse of the word "miracle".

Crisis Averted! Miraculous!

I was midway through Jane Harper's fantastic (and very grim) Australian thriller The Dry when I realized the Libby Kindle loan had expired and so I put my Kindle on airplane mode so that I wouldn't lose the book, but that didn't work-- it disappeared from my Kindle and I still need to solve the mystery . . . did the drought drive Luke Hadler mad, leading him off his entire family (except the baby) or is there another culprit . . . luckily, Highland Park library had a copy of the novel in the library . . . when the fuck does that happen? so I just biked over there, unperturbed by the heat because I was on a mission, and not only was the novel on the shelf, exactly where it was supposed to be, but I also borrowed the second Thursday Murder Club mystery-- which I thought was on hold but was actually sitting on the shelf, so now I've got a couple of actual bona fide library books to read (and thus I'll have to wear my progressive glasses) but still, this is rather unprecedented and definitely a minor miracle.

Dave Keeps His Mouth Shut and Reaps the Rewards

Over the past few days, I've been killing it with the lies and half-truths-- essentially refraining from saying my actual opinion: on Saturday night, my wife realized she lost her engagement ring and I immediately thought this was because she never zips up her purse-- I'm always zipping it for her . . . she leaves it unzipped ALL THE TIME, and shit is always falling out of it and hanging out of it—but I refrained from saying this and I remained totally positive and optimistic that she would find it-- even though I figured it fell out of where she put it (her sunglass case?) at some random moment and was lost forever-- because she leaves her purse unzipped-- and then, miracle, she found it under her desk at school today and all was well and I did not get in trouble for blaming the loss on her poor zipping habits or being pessimistic; then today, I made a RADICAL move to amend her poor sandwich roll selection-- she bought some smallish, rather stale rolls when she went grocery shopping Sunday but instead of complaining this morning, I made my sandwich on this lousy stale roll and remained stoic and silent, knowing that complaining about these rolls would NOT be a good idea for the health of my marriage-- because grocery shopping sucks-- and then third period— - just before lunch-- when I walked into the English office, there was a loaf of sourdough bread and butter on the table and I took a slice and slathered it with butter and ate it and it was delicious and then I was struck by a bolt of lightning, the lightbulb went off-- and I was alone in the office-- so I hacked two slices of bread off this loaf (consuming most of it) and TRANSFERRED my sandwich from the shitty stale roll to this amazing flavorful chewy sourdough bread, and when people returned to the office, there was a complaint or two that I had sorely depleted the sourdough, but it was worth it because my sandwich was much improved (and I did not provoke my wife's wrath by complaining about her roll selection) and so this just goes to show that sometimes Dave should keep his mouth shut and he will be rewarded by fortune's good favors.

New Stuff at the New Museum

Took the train back from the Big Apple today . . . though we only spent one night, we did quite a bit: we got a great deal on Hotwire for the Sheraton Tribeca (probably because it's under serious construction, it doesn't really seem safe to have patrons, but they did let us check in early, and there's a lovely rooftop bar, and they gave us two drink vouchers!) and we did lunch in Chinatown at Shanghai 21 (cash only) and then went to the New Museum, which has just reopened-- it's a fantastic sci-fi space and all the exhibits are on the theme of "New Humans: Memories of the Future," so surreal modern art and sci-fi exhibits (including the original "Alien" sculpture that inspired the creatures in the film and the original animatronic E.T. robot) and then we did something new-- we couldn't secure tickets for the Comedy Cellar or Village Underground so we stood on the waitlist line-- which was really easy because once they take your name, you're free to wander until right before the show-- and they called our name right at showtime and we got to see five outstanding comics (Erin Jackson, Dan Soder, Greer Barnes, Daniel Simonsen, and Adndrew Schulz) and today, before checking out, we got some excellent bagels at Leon's and then-- miracle beyond miracles-- we caught the subway just as it was leaving and THEN we caught the Northeast Corridor Jersey Transit just before it was leaving . . . public transportation working the way it always should!

Daddy Needs a New Computer for Audio Processing

My iMac-- which is now over a decade old-- is laboring under the duress of the large audio project I am working on . . . but VCU gutted it out in overtime last night, netting me 11 points in the "select 8 and get the points for the seed" pool and Kentucky pulled it out in overtime today (7 points my way!) and Louisville and Illinois and Vanderbilt all won . . . so if Hofstra steals a miracle win over Alabama and St John's wins tonight, I might have the cash to buy myself a new-ish Mac Mini. 

Schrödinger's Swordfish

Today, in preparation for a Valentine's Day dinner with my wife, I went to Archar Seafood in Somerset and bought some very expensive swordfish (the last time we got swordfish from there, it was exceptional) and placed it on the back driver-side seat and drove home, and then when I pulled into the driveway, I grabbed my gym bag and went into the house-- and I should point out that it was warm today, a balmy 46 degrees-- and then, when I was in the kitchen-- miracle of all miracles-- I remembered that I left the fish in the car, that I put it onto the back seat, and so I went out and retrieved it, no harm, no foul . . . but I came very close to turning that pricey swordfish steak into a warm, bacteria-laden, rotten mess, which would have ruined both dinner and the smell of my (relatively) odor-free car . . . but who knows how the mind works-- it's truly a black box, sometimes remembering things at the right time, sometimes minutes later, sometimes the next morning, and sometimes not at all.

The Miracle of Hot Running Water (and Sanity)

Like most people, unforeseen expensive house repairs put me in a dark funk (although this particular repair was not exactly unforeseen, it was more imminent and inevitable . . . but still, replacing a tankless Navien hot water heater/boiler is not a particularly fun or anticipated purchase-- it's not like buying a dirt bike or a jet ski) and that funk obviously carried through the weekend-- because I went to early morning basketball (which is normally on Tuesday but because it is Thanksgiving Week, we had an unprecendented Monday game) and the main reason I went was so I could take a hot shower before school-- over the weekend, I showered at the gym-- and obviously I also wanted to play some basketball, but my knees and hamstring weren't especially excited about waking up early on a Monday, after playing a few hours of pickleball on Sunday, and I had some trouble getting moving and then when I got to school, I realized I had forgotten my school bag at home-- the very important bag with my school issued computer and my gradebook and all the items I needed to grade-- so I had a choice to make, I could either drive back home and get my bag, and miss basketball-- or I could play basketball, check out a loaner computer, and make the best of it . . . I decided on the latter, which was the right choice-- I had a good time playing basketball and though I had trouble getting the loner computer to do anything I needed, I still managed to print out some guided reading questions, right before class, and teach the bulk of Act IV of Hamlet . . . and show some movie clips-- but I didn't get any grading done-- and then when I got home, I received some good news-- the plumbers were able to install the tankless boiler/heater without any problems, improve the venting and draining, use the larger gas line, and fix everything else that needed fixing, without any additional cost-- and I did remind my students to appreciate the miracle of hot water in their homes and I also told them that I was proud that despite all the financial and cold-water related trauma over the weekend, I managed to hold my sanity together, unlike poor Ophelia.

Bad News/Good News

So we found out some bad news and some good news today . . . bad news first, of course: the bad news is that when my son Ian hydroplaned the other night in my wife's car—just down the street from our house—he ran over the curb and smacked into a concrete barrier by the public works building; while he was not injured, my wife's sporty Mazda CX-5 was not so lucky: because the airbags deployed, the car was totaled, and we will be doing some car shopping this summer—but we also found out some good news at the vet today—the weird, strong antibiotics I administered for two weeks (I was supposed to handle them with gloves) cured our dog Lola's UTI and her new expensive food has dissolved all her struvite bladder stones, so she is totally in the clear—a miracle!— and so while it sucks to have to shop for a car, we are lucky that both our dog and our son are healthy.

Even More Thoughts on the Serendipitous Miracle of Creativity

My new episode of We Defy Augury-- "Weezer, Creativity, and the Nullity of Identity"-- is loosely inspired by the SNL Weezer sketch, Jonah Lehrer's article "Groupthink", Song Exploder episode 70: Weezer "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dory," the Atlantic article "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" by Spencer Kornhaber and a bunch of other stuff . . . check it out if you're looking for inspiration and the ideas behind good ideas.

Good Ideas . . . What the Fuck?

 

My new episode of We Defy Augury philosophical, literary, and musical meditation on creativity and good ideas; the working title is "The Serendipitous Miracle of Creativity: Part 1" and my thoughts are (loosely) inspired by Jonah Lehrer's article "Groupthink," Plutarch's "The Ship of Theseus Dilemma," and Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation . . . the topic got too long and unwieldy for one episode, so hopefully I will finish part two sometime soon.

And We're Back . . .

Saturday morning we left our children in charge of the house and the dog-- they're certainly big enough-- and headed to Philly for the weekend, but first we picked up my parents and dropped them at the Trenton Airport, then we met Mel, Ed, Julie, and Rob at the Mount Laurel Topgolf-- both stops were on the way to the City of Brotherly Love-- and though it was wet and cold, the bays are always heated and the beers are always cold at the Topgolf . . . 

then we drove to center city, parked the car, and checked into the hotel (Sonesta) and hit a bar (The Dandelion . . . very British and cozy, with great cocktails and beers) before a comedy show at Helium (we saw Gareth Reynolds-- he was excellent, very quick-witted, lots of crowd work, and some very funny stuff about technology) and dinner at Dan Dan Noodles--

Sunday morning we went to Carpenter's Hall and did a walking tour of the Old City, split a cheesteak at Shay's,

and then I threw on a green golf shirt and we went to a packed to the gills McGillin's Olde Ale House to root for the Eagles-- I am allowed to occasionally root for the Eagles in this time of famine for the Giants because I have lots of relatives in South Jersey (that were originally from Philly)  

 

and then we walked WAY south, well below South Street, to a little neighborhood that puts up a lovely light show (this is called Miracle on 13th Street . . . so I've now seen Miracle on 13th Street but I've still never seen Miracle on 34th Street)

and then we walked all the way back to center City, stopping for a couple of espresso martinis-- the White Elephant is highly recommended-- and we ate some delicious bao buns and other Asian delicacies at Sampan . . . we were seated facing the kitchen and holy shit are those guys churning out food and then we shuffled back to the hotel, 32,000 steps later, and slept very soundly--

and we finished the trip at Reading Terminal Market, of course, purchasing sausage, sharp provolone, and hot soppressata as souvenirs.

Entropy, It's a Winner

The car shopping continues (RIP Toyota minivan) and the engine light has reared its ugly head on the Mazda dashboard, our dog probably needs surgery for bladder stones-- but we're putting it off and trying a special diet and hoping for a miracle-- and while we were able to replace one window (out of the three we wanted to replace) it seems the other two were installed incorrectly by total incompetents back in the 1980s and will require major construction to be swapped out . . . entropy always wins (and in case you were wondering, I checked and there's already a t-shirt with this phrase on it).

The Older You Get, The More You Pack (Until You Get REALLY Old)

The older you get, the longer it takes to pack for the beach . . . but it's because you're smarter and realize that you need more stuff-- sunblock, sunglasses, seltzer, change of clothes, sunhat, Kindle, variety of snacks, a chair, umbrella, etcetera-- stuff you eschewed and forgot when you were young and could handle the full effects of the sun and you were limber enough to be able to lay comfortably on a towel on the bumpy hot sand (and today we preceded the beach day with some pickleball at Wardell Park-- which made for even MORE packing-- wrist bands, paddle, baseball cap, extra pickleballs, even more snacks, water . . . it's a miracle I left the house) still I suppose once you get REALLY old and you're just going to shuffle along the boardwalk, then you won't need to pack anything.

I'm Tired and I Didn't Even Play . . .

Longest day and longest tennis match ever . . . we left at 2:45 and got home at 7:45 . . . Roselle Park only has four courts-- but we won and advanced to the Group 1 semi-finals, which will occur tomorrow (we play Edison Academy and, barring some kind of miracle, we are going to get whipped).

Moses = Moses?

As I was plodding through Rober Caro's The Power Broker yesterday morning, I wondered whether Caro will eventually pluck the low-hanging-fruit and make the pun I am anxiously awaiting-- will he compare urban planner Robert Moses, who parted the neighborhoods of New York City to make way for superhighways (including the Cross Bronx Expressway) to the Biblical Moses-- who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could get to the Promised Land-- if he does make the pun I'll be satisfied and my expectations will be fulfilled, but I'll also be disappointed-- because Caro is such a classy writer and this is such an obvious and rather stupid pun (Robert Moses implemented his projects by learning the ins-and-outs of political bureaucracy, soft power, and acting without permission-- and not asking for forgiveness either!-- while Moses was the recipient of an Omnipotent Miracle from an All Powerful Lord) plus puns are the lowest form of humor . . . I've got 950 pages to go, so the much awaited resolution to this sentence won't be happening for a while. 

A (Photographic) Xmas Miracle

Christmas morning, I remembered that months ago I had bought one of those mini-phone-tripods and never opened the box . . . so I gave myself a Christmas present that was entirely symbolic of the holiday-- I opened some random shit I ordered online in the summer and literally forgot about because we live in the land of plenty (I bought the tripod because I had an idea for a series of TikTok videos but I never really got started on them because . . . well, that's an insane thing to get started on) and when I opened the mini-tripod box, I found that not only did I get the mini-tripod, but I also got a mini-remote . . . so that we didn't have to do the phone-timer photo thing-- which is a random nightmare and rarely produces a good picture-- but instead I could trigger the phone-camera by Bluetooth-- a fucking Xmas miracle if there ever was one-- and so I was able to take these pictures and also be in the picture-- and I'm going to declare that these photos are probably my greatest photographic accomplishments in a lifetime of not really accomplishing very much photographically.

The Boys Do Good Stuff

A couple of pleasant holiday moments:

1) I picked up Alex from Rutgers yesterday-- he survived his engineering exams but in regards to them, he said, "That was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life" but then we blew off some steam playing hoops at the Piscataway Y-- last night we just shot around and this morning we kicked some butt playing three-on-three . . . despite my sore calf muscle . . . I shot from outside and let Alex handle the athletic stuff;

2) while Ian can't play basketball with us until he undergoes his ankle surgery-- a fact which makes all of us very annoyed and sad-- he still made a clutch play last night . . . he's now working on the production end at Birnn Chocolate, a venerable candy factory on the north side of town, and my wife and I put in a couple of gift orders for some dark-chocolate raspberry jellies, as they are unequivocally the best around-- but they were all out . . . Ian said maybe they were going to make some today but you can't go to Birnn on the day before a holiday-- the line is too long-- but then when he got home from work last night, red-cheeked from biking in the cold, he plopped down three boxes on the counter . . . he made the jellies himself-- obviously he knows how to do that now-- he poured out the jelly onto a sheet, used some giant cutter than makes the jelly into little rectangles, and then dipped the individual jelly rectangles into the dark chocolate . . . a Christmas miracle!

Good Students = Actually Having to Teach

My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.

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.

Snakes in the Rite-Aid?

Alexander Plumbing came to the rescue this morning-- on FaceTime-- we had some work done Wednesday afternoon to stop the leak in our tankless water heater and the plumber also showed me how to rinse off the magnet filter that removes the iron sediment from our water-- but this morning our forced hot-water radiators were cold and winter weather is headed our way and I couldn't figure out the issue-- the hot water was on and the heating pumps were pumping; I bled the radiators but there was no air in them, just cold water-- it was a mystery so my wife gave it a shot and texted the guy who was at our house yesterday and though it was Thanksgiving, he called us back and took a moment to have her FaceTime the various valves around the tankless heater and he guessed-- correctly-- that he forgot to switch both dials back to green that surrounded the filter-- so it was a quick and easy fix and a Thanksgiving miracle that we have both heat and hot water (and no leaks) for the holiday weekend; I then went to play pickleball while my wife prepared several Thanksgiving dishes and when I got home, my wife assigned me one simple Thanksgiving chore-- go get a good bottle of wine to bring to Jim and LouAnne's place (my brother's inlaws) so I went to the Rite-Aid, found a good bottle of wine, and while I was paying I noticed that the young lady behind the register had a serious case of the hiccups and I was tempted to go into my whole "hey, hold still, hold very still, there's a spider in your hair" routine-- which always works on my high school students (and scares the shit out of them) but there were people in line so I went with something more economical and said, "Hey there's a big snake behind you!" which didn't make much sense inside a Rite-Aid-- the only things behind her were cigarettes, vapes, chewing tobacco, and little airplane bottles of liquor . . . so my ploy didn't work and she said said she wasn't scared at all, not even . . . hiccup . . . a little bit.