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.

Hello Humans!

Now that we've entered the AI revolution, it's highly improbable that anyone other than my good friends will end up in the godforsaken corner of the internet-- there's no reason to follow a trail of digital breadcrumbs to a weird space like this, as Google now provides a linkless AI answer to any query-- the internet is becoming more like Walmart and less like a digital version of the Route 1 Flea Market and while this is convenient, it's also sad-- because there are amazing human stories of resilience and perseverance out in the world . . . I've been writing this blog with a pulled hamstring, which now seems to be recovered enough for me to play pickleball tomorrow-- I tested it out at the gym today with a variety of sprints and starts and stops, and now I'm writing this blog, tired and sweaty and a bit sore, something AI will never be able to claim . . . unless it sometimes feels its heatsink getting hotter and hotter and impairing its computing abilities?

Embrace the Absurdity

I played indoor pickleball this morning at an open play and ended up paired with a fairly skilled but very surly man named Sergei-- we were winning games, but he was far more concerned with telling me all kinds of things about where I should be and what shots I should and shouldn't take-- I think he forgot we were planning giant ping-pong with a wiffleball.

D.P. Phone Home

So yesterday I believed that my crappy-Android-phone fell out of my pants pocket and was lying prone on the pavement in the high school parking lot, most likely run over by automobiles multiple times-- and once I realized this, when I got home from school, I decided not to drive back to the school and rescue my phone from this fate because 

1) I hate driving 

2) my phone is an ancient piece of shit

3) pickleball-- 

so I figured I would leave it to whatever fate befell it and then when I got to school today, I would see if someone picked it up and turned it in or if it was still intact on the ground near my parking spot-- but when I used Find My Android this morning, Google no longer reported my phone being in the school parking lot but instead just outside my house . . . weird . . . and so I thought maybe it fell out of my car when I got home-- and this would explain why the podcast played all the way home yesterday-- so I set my phone to ring and then went outside and it turned out my phone was not outside my car, but inside it-- it fell down under the driver seat-- and while I swore I looked in the car yesterday, I guess I didn't look in this spot and I also think I should get a different colored phone case (mine is black) because it blends in with the interior of my car and the main thing about this stupid incident is I won't be getting on iPhone anytime soon so for the foreseeable future my wife will have to deal with all the GIFs in the basketball group chat.

What Comes Around Phones Around

I confiscated a student's phone today, which is always an ordeal, but it's the fourth quarter, and at this point, they should know better-- and then when I got home from work, I couldn't find my phone-- but I knew it was either in the house or in the car because I listened to a podcast on the way home . . . but when I used Find My Android, the computer reported that my phone was still in the East Brunswick High School parking lot . . . which was weird but I guess my car downloaded the podcast and played it even though my phone fell out of my pocket-- and it definitely fell out of my pocket because I had it in this weird little phone pocket in my work pants-- usually I wear cargo pants that have velcro sealed pockets but I have this one pair of Dickie's pants with a weird little open pocket and this morning, I was going to put my wallet in it this little pocket but I was like: "my wallet's going to fall out of this stupid pocket" and so I put my phone in the stupid pocket, because I don't care about my cheap-piece-of-shit-Android-phone and it turns out I made a good decision . . . and I didn't feel like driving back to school and searching for my phone because I had a pickleball commitment so I'll find out tomorrow if my phone is intact and in the parking lot, or crushed in the parking lot, or in the school office-- and if it's crushed or lost, then perhaps I will get an iPhone so I can join the AM basketball group chat and my wife won't have to get so many stupid GIFs from all my basketball buddies.

Mainly Lame Day Off

No school for me today because of Eid al-fitr-- my wife had no school as well but she's on a lady's long weekend in Savannah, so I decided to optimize all my terrible shitty chores into one day: I did some lesson planning (I'm underwater) and our taxes (we owe a shitload) and went to Costco (costly trip, but on the bright side, it wasn't particularly crowded) and cleaned up the house, then I took a break and went to the gym and shot baskets and lifted weights and played some pickleball-- but now I'm in the home stretch, cleaning the bathrooms and then, finally, I need to shave, shower and do the netipot-- allergy season has arrived . . . and THEN I'm going to lie on the couch and read my Longmire mystery.

Pickleball Initiates the Severance Procedure?

During these troubled times, certain subjects are hard to bring up in social settings because of the controversy and awkwardness these topics engender-- for instance, I play a lot of pickleball with my friends Ann and Craig but we are NOT allowed to bring up pickleball in mixed company because everyone else gets annoyed, so Ann refers to it as "the game that shall not be named" and we do our best to keep our pickleball gossip on the DL . . . it's also hard to discuss current TV shows because of the general fragmentation of media-- no one is watching the same show at the same time and so you don't want to spoil anything, or talk about a show that no one has seen-- I truly miss Fridays at work the day after a new Seinfeld aired on Thursday night . . . there was something for everyone to discuss-- anyway, my wife is away in Savannah and so I hitched a ride to the brewery with Ann and Craig yesterday, so during the car ride, we were able to talk about pickleball and a TV show without being chastised-- we have all been watching Severance (but we had to curtail the conversation once we got to Flounder because we were meeting people) and then, at the end of the ride, Ann articulated her theory that synthesizes pickleball and Severance . . . she said that playing pickleball with all these various groups of people we've met, is like going to work in Severance . . . it's kind of wonderful, you just show up, you have these fleeting relationships with these people, but you really don't care that much about them because they're not part of you're "outie" life-- or that's not exactly true, your pickleball self cares about them quite a bit during the session and you see them quite often, yet you know nothing about their childhoods or outside lives and you don't think about them during your outie life and they don't think about you, you only know if they have a good backhand or fast hands at the net-- there's really no time or space to chat, it's not like golf-- it's a fast-paced game with lots of switching partners-- and then once the session is over, you barely remember what happened-- that's the nature of the game . . . it's not soccer or basketball where you might remember two critical plays, instead you hit the ball a zillion times, and you often felt like a hero and you also often felt like an idiot, so it all evens out and you remember nothing except it was a time-- but there are glitches in the severance, of course, because after Ann revealed her theory during the car ride, we saw a pickleball guy at the brewery!-- and we had a brief but awkward conversation about when and where we would next be playing pickleball and then he wandered away and we did not pursue further interaction, for fear of reprisal from Lumon.

Spring: Time to Shed Some Clothes (and Some Body Fat)

As usual, with the end of winter comes the annual "it's time to shed a few pounds and get in shape" portion of the year-- my wife and I are going to stop eating dessert after dinner while watching TV . . . which was perfectly acceptable behavior this winter because it was dark and cold and bleak-- but now the dark-times are over and it's time to shed the fat-- and my wife listened to some lady on a podcast (who might be an orthopedist? I would ask her, but she's in Savannah on a ladies' weekend) and this lady doctor on the podcast said it's all about various types of movement and that during the course of each week you should:

1) do four 45-minute walks-- you don't need to do crazy amounts of cardio;

2) lift weights twice a week but lift heavier than you might normally lift . . . 3-5 sets of weight you can put up 4-6 times;

3) twice a week, do four repetitions where you run "as fast as you can" for 30 seconds, then let your heart return to normal and do it again-- so four sets of these each session for a total of eight sprints a week;

and I like this routine as I can work this stuff in around pickleball, basketball, and soccer, but I did the fast running on Wednesday, at the park, and while it was fun and not all that hard while I was doing it, it was a longer sprint than I've run in a while-- full court basketball requires sprints but they are three or four second sprints-- same with indoor soccer-- and on Thursday and Friday my right quad was occasionally cramping up, maybe every eleventh step-- which made for some humorour walking around-- but my leg recovered and I felt great at pickleball this morning . . . I did the heavy lifting Thursday and my shoulder is a bit sore, but again, I survived at pickleball today, although my shoulder started to hurt when I was hitting into the wind, there was a stiff breeze today, and you had to whale the ball . . . so we will see how this new routine goes-- my guess is I will either get injured soon and be a total disaster or I won't get injured and get super-jacked and super-fit and everyone will be so impressed by my physique that they will put a statue of me next to Rocky at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Dave Clocks This Metaphorical Tea

Today was metaphor day in Creative Writing-- I reviewed the types of metaphors (simile, personification, etcetera) and I gave them a way to remember the difference between synecdoche and metonymy that I thought of this morning in the car-- and it is car related-- with synecdoche, you use part to represent the whole-- so "check out my wheels"-- while with metonymy you use an association to represent the idea, so "check out my ride" and then I gave them a couple of metaphorical quotations to unravel:

Language is fossil poetry (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Prose is the museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept (T.E. Hulme)

and some of them got the  collective point-- that a dinosaur is older than a fossil and the weapon is older than the museum and so living breathing interesting poetic language becomes dead fossilized prose and we barely notice it--then we had a fossil poetry fill-in-the-blank challenge-- I have a quiz with fifty body part metaphors-- eye of a needle, head of lettuce, safe by a hair, save face, sticks in your craw, etcetera-- they are easy for old people but quite difficult for highschool students . . . and then I went over how there are dead metaphors all around us-- when you call someone bright or brilliant or a clear thinker or lucid, you are comparing them to the sun or a lightbulb-- and when you call someone sharp or keen or they have an acute wit or make a good point, you are comparing them to a blade-- and thus the word "clever" derives from the word "cleaver"-- and we went over runny noses and running faucets, which run like a river-- but running motors run like a horse . . . which is why car engines are measure in horsepower . . . and then things got interesting because my first period class is smart and they started thinking of recent examples: many of them paradoxical . . . if you're "the shit" it's great but if you're "a piece of shit" it's bad . . . you can spill the tea or you can clock that tea . . . someone said, "I'm not a monster" because being a monster is bad -- unless you're a "beast" on the basketball court; the party can be "lit" or "fire" and those are probably related to smoking weed and those are good, or you can be on fire, which is good, but it's not good to be fired or burnt or cooked-- those are bad-- although if you're "cooking" then that's good; being hot is good and being cool is good, but being "mid" or cold is not so good; if you "ate" or you "served," you did well-- but if you got "served" you need to appear in court-- and "ate" is so popular that if you did well, they might say "4 plus 4" or "one more than seven" and if you're chopped, that's bad-- you're ugly-- and the chuzz are chopped whores, and if you did it well and finished strong, they don't say "mic drop" anymore, the kids say "period" or "point blank period" and there's a new one for old people that I really like, when you are playing pickleball, if someone speeds up the ball at you and you bend your body out of the way and dodge the ball and it goes out of bounds, you "matrixed it" and then we speculated about how the kids of the future would be doing a fill-in quiz about "clocking the tea" and "that party was lit" in the same way that they did a quiz on old phrases like "skeleton in the closet" and those kids would be using some new incomprehensible metaphorical slang and the cycle would continue.

Strange Things Afoot All Over the Place

My stomach hurt, and I had a low fever on Sunday night into Monday, but I suffered through the school day and then collapsed on the couch after school-- and after eating nothing but plain noodles and oatmeal, I finally felt better by lunchtime today (and ate a chocolate donut to break my bland food fast) and then I went to acupuncture and Dana crushed my traps and neck and shoulder-- they were incredibly tight from an extended pickleball session on Sunday-- and even though I was sort of sick, I also graded a bunch of essays Monday and today, which means I was hunched over my computer screen (and to add to the pain and suffering, the underclassmen are nuts lately: I think they're finally coming out of their shells, which is annoying-- I preferred when they were quiet and awkward . . . and soon enough the seniors will go berserk) and then this afternoon when I was walking the dog in the park and I let her off leash, she raced over to a large object and then jumped away from it-- for good reason-- as it was a giant fishhead, perhaps a monstrous carp or some other riparian behemoth, that some animal must have dragged into the middle of the grass field, several hundred yards from the riverbank.

The Frenemy Known as Sunshine

Yesterday's copious and unseasonable sunshine caused a classroom disaster-- we're doing great American art forms and genres in Grade 10, and I showing the kids a Western-- Unforgiven, which is the best Western-- but the film has a number of dark and rainy scenes and my blinds are bent and mutilated and my projector bulb is getting dim and at certain times of day, if it's sunny, the sunlight just streams through and creates a glare on the screen, so the kids couldn't see shit when William Munny (Clint Eastwood) calmy goes on his murderous rampage to avenge the death his good buddy Ned (Morgan Freeman) because of the horrible glare and while this really upset me, the sunshine made for a fantastic afternoon of pickleball, where I took all comers, young, old and in between and coldly slaughtered them in various ways before coming home to do some emergency yardwork because the soil around my bamboo plants was very dry, because of all the unseasonable sun and wind. 

Dave is Declared a Hero (of a particular sort)

I think for future generations-- so they understand what is happening around here-- I should describe just how much pickleball is being played . . . normally on a Friday afternoon, I would have already ingested several beers and be getting logy, but instead, I took a nap and I'm about to don my compression socks, visor, and knee-brace and head out with my buddy to the 7 -10 PM open play at Pickleball HQ . . . and then on Sunday, instead of playing in my normal indoor soccer game, I agreed to drive down to the Mercer Bucks Pickleball Club and was declared a "hero" for doing so-- it's a 35-minute drive-- because my brother desperately needs an eighth player in his game-- he plays with an elite bunch and most of them are playing in a tournament, so they needed an extra body . . . I was really trying to avoid getting involved in indoor pickleball, but they keep building places and my friends (and brother) keep getting involved in various games and it's honestly not the worst way to spend the winter because the weather is fucking awful.

Friday Potpourri

Today felt marginally better than yesterday-- the sun was out and it warmed up to 40 degrees-- but we were still fairly chilly when we had an unexpected and rather lengthy fire evacuation because something started burning in a cooking class-- I was about to call it a fire "drill" but it wasn't a drill, it was an actual fire-- albeit a very small one-- which interrupted an important discussion in Creative Writing where I was informing my students that The Beatles were not fro the midwest, they were from England . . . seriously . . and I today also introduced my sophomores to the idea of a "very special episode"-- a concept from the 1980s and 90s where a normally humorous TV program tackles a delicate or controversial event with the appropriate gravity . . . the one I'll never forget is the WKRP in Cincinnati episode about the Who concert where 11 people got crushed to death . . . a total bummer . . . we had a very special episode of class today about the LA fires-- and it is to be continued next class!-- perfect . . . I'm going to try to make the lesson into a very special podcast because it would take too long to describe here and I've got no time to sit and write because I'm about to finish my week-long triathlon of old man sports on a bad knee-- I played indoor soccer on Sunday, morning basketball on Tuesday, and now I'm about to go play some indoor pickleball-- if my knee holds up, I'll be very pleased.

Dave Carries On Carrying On

Yesterday, on the last day of 2024, the usual themes unfolded-- I was sore from my second shingles vaccine but I went and played pickleball anyway-- wearing my knee brace of course and some KT tape on my Achilles tendon-- and I'm glad I went because even though I was a little sluggish, for one brief moment I was quick and coordinated, and I chased down a very wide ball and hit a crisp and perfect "around the pole" shot-- and then I took a much-needed nap, but still felt kind of lousy from the stupid shingles shot, but rallied enough to drink some mezcal at the neighborhood New Year's Party . . . so while I'd like to make some 2025 Resolutions here, things such as: I'm actually going to change my diet and lose weight; I'm actually going to start stretching every day and do all the recommended exercises to preserve my body and I'm going to give up alcohol during the week, at this point, realistically, these things are probably not going to happen so this year I'm just going to try to do the same shit I did in 2024, and continue to rinse and repeat until things really get Yeatsian and truly fall apart.

Right Knee Stuff, Part Two

One of the many incredibly essential things I do on this blog is keep track of all my athletic ailments-- so that when I injure myself (or reinjure myself) I have some idea of when I last fucked up this particular body part and how long it took to heal and what exercises I did and all that . . . so yesterday I played some indoor pickleball and my right knee started hurting but I was playing so well that I couldn't stop-- I'm using a new technique with my two-handed backhand, instead of trying to get both hands on the short paddle handle, I'm just slapping my left hand on the back of the paddle, two or three fingers splayed on the surface, and this works wonders-- and I've also added a backhand flick, a backhand roll, a deceptive speed-up, and a decent lob to my arsenal of pickleball weapons-- and the important thing to remember is that pickleball is NOT tennis . . . I started out playing mini-tennis but now I've adapted to the peculiarities of this game (and if you want to see a really peculiar game, check out Padel . . . you can run out the door!) but one of the things I'm doing is hitting the return of serve on the run forward, so I can get to the kitchen line immediately, but I guess that's a lot fo starting and stopping and so my right knee is killing me, hopefully due to "patellofemoral pain syndrome/chondromalacia patella"-- which is what Dr. Morton diagnosed me with back in the summer of 2021, which just means that my kneecap doesn't always stay in the groove and sometimes rubs on the bone and causes arthritis and swelling-- but I'm proud to say that I'm headed to the doctor this morning to get this checked out, instead of reading WebMD for a few days and self-medicating . . . although I did make the mistake of searching "when do you need a knee replacement?" and I definitely check a few of those boxes-- but I'm going to go to the doctor and see what he has to say before I make any big decisions (also, I am NOT a doctor, so there are no decisions for me to make, aside from what stupid thing I'm going to search next on the internet).

Two Things I'll Never Understand

While I'm starting to get the idea of 5/4 time, here are two things I will never, ever get right, no matter how hard I try:

1) knowing which side of the court to stand on when my friend Ann and I "stack" in pickleball;

2) which direction to place the ear-hook when I'm putting on my JLab Go Air Sports-- you'd think I'd get it right fifty percent of the time, but I seem to always get it wrong.

Things Fall Apart . . .

I was having a healthy and efficient post-vacation week-- cooking lots of excellent meals; exercising intelligently; avoiding alcohol; recording some music; cleaning up after myself-- but today is where it all fell apart: the dishes have piled up, the garbage needs to go out; there's a shitload of laundry to be done; I'm drinking some delicious Honey Brown Ale that I bought in Annapolis from Forward Brewing; and all I've done so far today besides go to work is play pickleball and write this sentence.

Tennis vs. Pickleball

I played some pickleball this afternoon at Castleton Park with seven guys I know quite well from playing there for the last three years and I am certain a good time was had by all-- lots of exciting play, some sun, not too much wind, plenty of jokes (especially about Kevin's anger at having his pop-up pickleball stool stolen-- he left it behind Monday night in Highland Park and when he came back it was gone-- and he pronounced all of humanity "scumbags" and "thieves" . . . so sad, but also kind of funny) and plenty of socializing while waiting to play; meanwhile, on the adjacent tennis court, a dour guy with a hopper of balls was diligently practicing his serve-- alone-- and his serve looked pretty good, he was getting into trophy position, with a nice knee bend, and some good whip to the racket-- and if you want to be good at tennis, that's what you have to do, practice your serve for hours, alone (or in a lesson) but if you want to get better at pickleball, you just meet some friends and play (although I guess you could drill alone for hours, but you're not going to get the some benefits as practicing your serve in tennis-- there's no one dominant shot to practice in pickleball-- the serve isn't that much of a weapon and you're going to hit every kind of shot every time you play-- and a bunch you never thought existed too).

Dave Survives a Normal Amount of Weekend Events

Four social events in one weekend, which is not my style, especially after. along week of school and parent/teacher conferences . . . too many social interactions and too much stimulus and not enough napping and reading time can sometimes make me cranky-- but I guess keeping busy is good right now (otherwise I might get sucked up in all the election bullshit) and so Friday night, my wife and I attended the Jimi Hendrix/Pink Floyd tribute band show at Pino's . . . the Hendrix cover band was comprised of some locals in their early twenties and they put on a great show-- but they were certainly the opening act, as the Pink Floyd show was absurdly good---- ten of the best musicians in the area squeezed onto the little stage in the back of the liquor store/bar/club, including a chick whose only job was to do the wild operatic back-up vocals during "The Great Gig in the Sky" and several keyboard players to reproduce all the sci-fi sounds and they served up several hours of all flavors of Floyd, songs from Dark Side and Animals and The Wall, and they even played some Pipers at the Gates of Dawn-- at one point a guy turned to me and said, "This shouldn't be free" but these guys do it for the love-- and hopefully the bar gives them a cut because the place was packed . . . then I played in a pickleball tournament down in Trenton (Mercer Bucks) where my partner and I got banged up-- rough draw-- but the competition was fun and the place was hopping and I never got to see young five plus players play-- the open even was wild, those guys get really low-- and there were phenomenal women players as well-- so a good experience-- and then I headed straight to my brother's house from there, for a birthday poker tournament-- and while I lost at pickleball, I got incredible cards at poker-- knocked my brother out-- we had two exciting all-in scenarios-- and ended up chopping the pot even though I was well ahead, so a nice ending to the night, and then I slept over at my brothr's house, drove home in the morning, went to the gym with my wife, then played some more pickleball, and later today we are headed to my parent's with the kids to celebrate Marc's birthday with them, before they head to Florida . . . and then I have to go to work tomorrow?

Last Day of Summer Synopsis

Although my randomly assigned partner Kit and I did not win yesterday's Fords Park 8 AM pickleball tournament (we advanced to the playoffs and immediately lost to a couple of youngsters) I still think I deserve some kind of MVP Award because I got home from the tournament at 10:20 AM and was able to shower and get dressed and make the 10:50 AM train to Penn Station-- the last day of free train transport-- where we met our friends Dom and Michelle and their millennial-aged cousin, a museum curator at the Museum of Natural History (particularly, the hall of mammals) and then we walked the High Line, wandered through Hudson Yards and Chelsea Market, climbed up for the view from Little Island, and visited two fun bars: The Brass Monkey and Crown Alley, and enjoyed good company and good weather-- and I'm quite proud of this for two reasons:

1) I'm not good at making quick turnarounds from one activity to the other . . . I like some transition time (and some nap time)

2) I managed to enjoy the last day of summer instead of fretting about school-- and there's really no reason to fret about the first day of school meetings (aside from this long lecture about lock-downs and school shooters, which is pretty grim-- the SSO Officer has said the word "carnage" several times) because it's mainly boring and tedious and it's better to be tired and spaced-out, rather than rested and focused (but wow does my butt hurt from sitting on this cafeteria table disc seat).