Halloweek is Too Much Halloween

 

This week, our kitchen table (and most every counter space) has been an unholy, ungodly, disorganized mess—and the culprit is Halloween (and my wife's wife's job: fifth-grade teacher) and Halloweek is not over yet; on Wednesday, my wife and her class transformed her Honda CRV into a "Frog Prince"-- spectacular job, and her class won first place for their efforts; then today my wife's entire fifth-grade team dressed as all the characters from the Mario video game—my wife was a Piranha Plant—and my son Ian and his girlfriend Kyla are attending various parties and doing different costumes for each, and my wife and I are attending a Tim Burton-themed party, and my wife is being the spider from James and the Giant Peach (and I am being James, which only entails wearing a hat and suspenders, just my speed).

Slow Horses . . . Slow Viewers?

I'm not even going to attempt to explain the plot of season six of Slow Horses—but be assured, it is complicated, fragmented, and obfuscated . . . and full of espionage, maguffins, double-crossing, and paradoxical intrigue-based irony; I do wish I recorded the befuddled conversations my wife and I had before, during, and after the episodes—we must have sounded very, very slow, and if we worked for the MI5, we would certainly be demoted to Slough House.

The Smallest State Makes It Big

No fresh sentence today, as I am in Newport, Rhode Island, with my wife and some friends-- and I've never really explored much of Rhode Island, but I do know that it is the smallest state in the union, so I am sure they are excited to have me and have prepared for my visit.

Dave Is Visited by Public Teacher Nightmare Number One (or perhaps number two?)

Now that this incident is in the rearview mirror, it's a little easier to discuss—but yesterday . . . yesterday, I was going through it, but during the school day I kept it all to myself, I didn't tell a soul until I got home and saw my wife; I should point out that yesterday was the dreaded day after night conferences, which is already a miserable day, even without extra distress: you drive home in the dark from three hours of night conferences, three hours of boring, desultory conversation; you pass out from exhaustion; and then you get up and head right back to school, right back to the room you were in what feels like moments before—it's very Groundhog Day—but to add insult to injury, yesterday morning, on my drive to back to work, while driving on Harts Lane, I thought I had to pass some gas but it turned out there was something a bit more solid (but also kind of liquidic, thixotropic?) needing to exit my bunghole-- and while I thought that I curtailed the excrement in the nick of time and figured  that I'd simply make an emergency trip to the bathroom before first period, and that would be the end of it-- but when I arrived at school, I raced to the main office bathroom to evacuate my bowels, and once I got down to business, I realized I was living out one of the worst of teacher nightmares-- I had indeed shit my pants right before school-- but as far as shitting your pants goes, it was fairly minor (but not THAT minor) so I cleaned out my underwear as much as I could, sprayed some Fabreeze on the stain, and then scrubbed it a bit more, ended up getting some urine on my pants during this clean up, stuffed some toilet paper inside my underwear to absorb some of the dampness, and then went on with my day-- and while I did visit the bathroom several times, just to clean things up a bit more and swap out the toilet paper in my underwear, I managed to successfully perform my afternoon conferences and teach all my classes with shit-stained skivvies, and I lived to tell the tale . . . we'll see what other demonic teacher nightmares visit me in this last year of teaching . . . perhaps my car will break down on the way to school, or I'll show up wearing my pajamas, or I'll forget the names of all my students-- but none of them will be as gross and awful as this one, I surmise.

THAT's The Spirit (Spirits!)

I refereed five soccer matches this weekend, and a couple of those games got out of hand; they were played on a slippery grass field, and the home team, mainly Portuguese and Hispanic kids from the South River club, were much more experienced on this surface than the white kids from down the shore; when one team crushes another in youth soccer, it's always a disaster, even though there are rules in place—you're not supposed to beat a team by more than six goals, but then once you are ahead by six goals, you have to do something with the ball-- playing possession is demeaning, scoring more goals is unsportsmanlike, going to the corners and shielding the ball is rather violent, putting kids in random positions ends up being chaotic, and trying to dribble through the entire team leads to fouls-- in one game, once the home team was ahead by six, the away team pulled the goalie and let him go up and play striker—but then in the general madness, a couple balls slowly rolled into the empty goal, thus running up the score beyond a six goal margin—and some of the parents got very butt hurt that their team was losing so badly—and then the home team decided maybe they should let the other team score, but that's demeaning and it didn't work out either . . . I had to convince one dad to get off the field; he strode a few yards into the pitch and yelled to his son NOT to shake hands when the game ended . . . it's never fun when it goes down like this, and after tha match, I gave the young coaches, who I know pretty well—they went to the school I teach at—some tips on how to rein in the score EARLY when you see a blowout developing (when I coached, once some of my more dominant teams got a three or four-goal lead, I would tell them the only they could score was on a header off a weak-footed cross; that was usually difficult enough to stop them from running up the score, but it also gave them something to practice) but I did hear one dad on the sideline with the RIGHT attitude about his son's team getting slaughtered—after the seventh goal was scored on his team, he asked his wife, "Is there a bar nearby?"

Leon's Getting Larger

For the past week, I've been confronting larger and larger bugs in the downstairs bathroom—first there was a mosquito, then a little cockroach, and then one of those spindly camel crickets, and yesterday there was a fairly large spider crawling down the tiled wall—and though I'm a bit of an arachnophobe, it was 5:15 AM, so I couldn't wake my wife to take care of the intruder, so I fought it with a long-handled broom (and won!) but I'm kind of nervous about what tomorrow will bring in this escalating creepy-crawly sequence.

King of Pain

Yesterday, I went to Source Wellness Center (chiropractor, massage, acupuncture, and OT all in one spot!) and—under advisement from my wife—let the new deep massage guy Joe work on my calves and hamstrings, and while I endured the hamstring work fairly well, when he started doing stuff to my calves, he said, "You're going to hate me for this, and you're very messed up, but we can fix this," and then he started pressing spots on my calves, and the pain was so inordinate that I, in quick succession, prayed to all the gods of mercy in the universe, saw little black spots on the sun, cursed, cried, white-knuckle gripped the massage table, and understood the pain of childbirth . . . today, I am a bit sore, but my knee is much looser—all the muscles surrounding it were incredibly tight and restricting it, and so I am going back again next Thursday for more of the same.

Katie Zacharia vs. C.J. Kregg: Steel Cage No-Holds-Barred Coffin Mexican Death Match

It is not fair to compare fictional characters with reality . . . but it is fun; my wife and I just finished season two of The West Wing, and perhaps the most savvy, tactical, witty, and upright person on President Bartlet's staff is C.J. Kregg—she's tall, fast-talking, assertive, and poised . . . and perhaps because she crushed this role, Alison Janney gets to play the president on The Diplomat—anyway, to then see Trump's new secretary, Katie Zacharia, bumble her way through her first propagandistic disinformation monologue, after recently watching so much West Wing, this made me very, very sad . . . so I definitely can't go back and rewatch Battlestar Galactica, because President Roslin would give President Bartlet a run for his money—although I would love to see Trump handle a Cylon attack: "This war against these aliens will end as soon as I want it to end."

Hey Democrats! Watch Some TV and Learn Something!

My wife and I are watching season two of the widely renowned show The West Wing—and, holy shit, I am wondering if any of Joe Biden's inner circle, close friends, family, or White House staff—the people that concealed Biden's cognitive state and health from the general public—saw this particular season—because if they did, they should have understood the potential political fall-out and consequences of shielding the public from this important information—and if they HAD seen season two, which is highly unlikely (or else these people are very short-sighted) wherein President Bartlett and his wife and his closest aides hide his diagnosis of relapsing-remitting MS from the American public and the administration faces severe blowback for perpetrating this omission, maybe the Democratic Party would have taken a more transparent political tack, and then they wouldn't have lost the trust of the American people, and then Donald Trump would not have been elected again.

Dave Tries Not to Stone the Young People

Here are a few phrases and facts the children did not recognize this week, leading me to believe that you need to explain EVERYTHING to anyone younger than thirty:

1) my wife's fifth graders (and all the young teachers in proximity to my wife's classroom) did not know the phrase "up the creek without a paddle," and I said most people say "up shit's creek without a paddle," thus the name of the popular sitcom—and my wife did not realize the show was named after the idiom . . . so everyone learning some stuff;

2) Cunningham's senior classes did not know the phrase "carbon-based life form," probably because they did not grow up watching Star Trek;

3) my seventy-five senior English students—aside from one or two kids—had not heard of the "Spanish Armada," nor did they know that Queen Elizabeth defeated this massive fleet of bellicose Catholics;

now I am sure that the young folks know plenty of important things that I don't know, delulu Labubu kind of stuff, so I'm not casting any stones (and for you young people, that phrase comes from the New Testament, when some old-timey people wanted to stone a woman to death, and Jesus said, "He that is without sin, cast the first stone," and this persuasive tactic actually worked and all these old-timey sinners walked away, and then the phrase evolved to "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," and there's also a Billy Joel album titled Glass Houses).

Is This Going to Be a Thing Now?

I don't know if this is a thing that happens when you get older (and produce less skin grease) but my ankles are really itchy and the skin down there is all dry—so for the first time in my life (heeding my wife's advice) I put on some moisturizer cream . . . and it seems to have helped.

Birds on the Brain

Last night (or actually 2:30 AM this morning) while I was in the depths of slumber, my wife yelled, "No! No! Don't let the turkey in the house!" which startled me from the depths of slumber—or momentarily startled me, then I started laughing—and while I normally don't recount dreams on this blog because dreams are stupid-- this one affected my actual physical existence, so I will attempt to sort out what happened here, psychologically, the concatenation of factors which created this dire and frightening avian scenario in my wife's subconscious mind:

1) my wife is afraid of birds;

2) we recently watched an episode of The West Wing in which Press Secretary C.J. Cregg finds two turkeys in her office—named Eric and Troy—and she has to determine which one is more photogenic and therefore will receive a presidential pardon from execution and consequent basting and roasting

3) fall weather has moved in, and Thanksgiving is approaching;

4) the weirdo across the street has several chickens and a rooster, and the rooster crows several times every morning.

Major Monday

I reffed six soccer matches this weekend-- and the Hyaluronic acid gel injections obviously haven't blended with my existing joint fluid because when I woke up this morning, my knee fucking hurt-- but I managed to finish my newest episode of Pig on the Wall (aside from the mix down) before school and then I rushed to the 7 AM Faculty Meeting (beats going 3 PM) which lasted a VERY long time, then I taught all day, but conserved my energy, because I knew when I got home from school, I was going to have to summon all my culinary skills and acumen . . . because I promised my wife-- in celebration of the fall weather-- that I'd make crockpot chili and crockpot chili needs some time in the crockpot, so right when I arrived home from school, I put on a pot of coffee and some Aphex Twin on the kitchen speaker and got to it-- caramelizing the onions, browning the meat, roasting the peppers, filling the crockpot with fire roasted tomatoes from my wife's garden, using the immersion blender to chop these tomatoes into slightly smaller pieces (very messy) and adding all the spices (I had to grind some black pepper with the mortar and pestle because we are out) and rinsing the beans and then doing all the dishes (aside from the ones I am soaking) and now I am done and the chili is simmering away in the crockpot, and I need to switch the Aphex Twin to something more mellow because it is stressing me out while I write this sentence.

Through Surf and Storm and Howling Gale, to Call Offsides and Such

I (barely) survived yesterday's viewing of Resident Evil at the Rutgers Cinema—when I wasn't laughing hysterically, which was fairly often, I was either curled into the fetal position, clutching my wife's hand, or jumping out of my pants . . . then after the movie, we decided to go to the nearest liquor store and buy some beer, and we took a cut-through road (School Street) that wound its way through one of the strangest neighborhoods we've ever seen in New Jersey—every house was a completely different architectural style; many looked like they had endured home improvement projects built by very unskilled laborers, but there were also occasional McMansions dotted among Cape Cods, colonials, weird little beach house-style ranches, and houses with stucco walls—and now I am headed to ref in the storm, but I know it won't be as bad as the weather in Resident Evil, nor will there be zombies that send out fleshy tendrils, mate with each other despite decapitation, and form a huge aggressive ball of agglomerated bodies with many legs and arms.

Ghost of Jersey Past, Food Edition

Tom Perrotta's haunting novel about one strange summer in  the suburbs of New Jersey, Ghost Town, is set in 1974—before the entirety of New Jersey was home to an incredibly diverse population and an incredibly vibrant, inexpensive, and unparalleled selection of ethnic food from around the globe; there are hints of this future gustatory paradise in the novel: Jimmy, Wayne, Nilda, Hector, and Yvette visit a fictional Chinese restaurant called the Jade Palace, and Jimmy has wontons, hot mustard, egg rolls, and Asian noodles for the first time . . . this reminds me of our go-to Asian spot in the early 1980s, A-Kitchen, an authentic Hunan and Cantonese place that started in a gas station in Monmouth Junction and then moved to a traditional, rather rambling building on Route 27 in Franklin—we learned about the restaurant from the Asian kid on my travel soccer team, Kenny Cho, whose family either owned or managed the place—and we went all the time when I was young, and I would try to order "shrimp ding" as spicy as they could make it, and my father would wink at the waitress, th wink telling her NOT to make it that spicy-- as I was just a child, and a Caucasian hild at that-- and I would see him wink and tell the waitress to ignore his wink and make it spicy . . . typical family dinner drama-- but this place A-Kitchen was the real deal, the New York Times even wrote an article about it . . . and now some slightly more practical food nostalgia, if you live in Central Jersey-- becasue A-Kitchen is long gone, but Gambino's, the classic Italian place in New Brunswick, on Remsen Avenue, where my dad and his buddies would hang out is now a fantastic new restaurant-- with a liquor license-- called Tequila House . . . the mixed drinks are amazing, the decor is festive, the bottled beer is cheap, and the birria tacos contain ACTUAL steak-- when I ordered them the Hispanic server (we were the only gringos in the place) gave me a subtle nod, like Oh yeah amigo, you know what to order and my wife got the enchilads verde and they were also top notch-- so while the neighborhood has changed and La Cort Bakery and Gambino's are no more, there's some great Hispanic food replacing the Italian spots, which is exactly how Jersey operates.

Ghost of Jersey Past

Tom Perrotta's new novel Ghost Town is evocative, haunting, and nostalgic—each concise chapter is a set piece on grief and adolescence . . . and Ouija boards—and the story is especially moving if you grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey . . . while the book is set ever so slightly before my time, the narrator is thirteen in 1974, and I was only four years old then, so I don't quite remember the early 1970s— the songs on the radio are "Kung Fu Fighting," and "Rock the Boat," and "When Will I see You Again"-- which I vaguely remember, but I certainly can't name the bands that played these hits; I also appreciate that this is a different version of New Jersey than when I came of age; the fictional town of Creamwood seems to be inspired by Perrotta's Union County hometown, Garwood, a factory town full of Cape Cods and split-levels, and—in the early 1970s, the town was segregated in a de facto fashion . . . while my middle school experience in Central Jersey was at the start of the incredible diversity that Jersey is now known for-- there were mainly Italians, Irish, Hungarians, and Jews in my town-- which we considered "white" people-- but there were also Indian and Asian and Black and Hispanic families in my neighborhood; not so much in Creamwood, which is pretty much all white, but the narrator, Jimmy Perrini, starts to question his town's tacit racism and-- after his mother dies from cancer-- he's pretty much left on his own and starts to have some experiences with his hippie cousin and his hippie cousin's racially ambiguous wife Nilda and her Black cousin Hector-- while the plotting of the novel is pretty formulaic, it builds up to a big climax and all that, Jersey is in the details; I love the moment where Jimmy is riding around with burnout Eddie Fitzpatrick in his Chevy Vega, and Jimmy says he likes Jethro Tull, and Eddie says—which are my sentiments exactly—"I might like them a little better if he shoved that flute up his ass."

Supine Straightening

At night, my wife likes to get into a "made" bed, but I usually go to bed before she does—I'll go upstairs to read my book while she watches an episode of "Below Deck," and I usually remember that she likes her side of the bed to be neat and organized and flat and tucked in AFTER I've gotten into bed and set up a bunch of pillows so I can comfortably read my gigantic Kindle Scribe, and I will tell you, it's really hard to MAKE the bed once you are already IN the bed.

Dave Ends Up Plus Five (Cents)

Yesterday, in a mad rush to get to the 7 AM Faculty meeting, I forgot my lunch-- and the meeting was a boring explanation of why teachers will no longer be getting "highly effective" grades because administrators are revisiting the language in the Danielson evaluation model . . . super-fascinating, especially for someone who is retiring-- and then this morning, because it's Back-To-School-Night, and I wanted to go straight to the gym before going back to school, so I brought my gym bag, which was green, but forgot my school bag, which is also green-- so I had to get a loaner computer from the school library and I couldn't leave and reenter the building because I did not have my ID; my class was a humid jungle, absolutely disgusting, but we suffered through (the principal walked by, felt the wave of heat coming out of my classroom and said, "That's awful, you should put a in work order" but I don't know what that will do-- my little portable AC, which is too loud to teach over (or hear the children, they all whisper now when they speak) and it's miserable output can't combat the body heat generated by twenty-seven teenage bodies, so there is not any foreseeable solution . .  but I did make it to the gym-- where I learned that my phone is probably dead and the Google Messaging app, which hasn't been working well for two days, completely blacked out-- and I also went to Barton's Nursery, where I bought some Creeping Jenny and Ajuga-- and then I went home, walked the dog, snacked on Bradley Beach biscotti, but I was too tired to dig holes for the plants, and I briefly saw my wife-- who has no AC at all in her classroom-- and she had an awful migraine from the heat and humidity in her class and immediately went upstairs and passed out-- and then I showered, noticed I lost three pounds (water weight) and got back in the car and headed to school, but I stopped for a large can of Coke on the way and the dude rung it up: $2.30 and I happened to have cash and a few coins, $2.35, and I thought the register guy was going to give me a nickel back, but instead he just passed me back my dime (and when I got back into the car, I realized why he may have done that, as I had a large booger in my nose and perhaps he felt bad for me) and now I am about to begin my last Back-to-School-Night ever, and that makes me very happy-- you shouldn't go to work twice in the same day (and run through the same schedule in miniature-- it's tiresome).

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once . . .

Yesterday afternoon, the dog and I were turning the corner from the park, and I saw my son Ian in the driveway, standing in the bed of his pool technician company pickup truck, wearing his pool technician collared shirt, sweeping—and when I got closer, he explained that some pool chemicals had spilled in the bed of his truck and he was cleaning up the mess . . . he was sweeping the granules of calcium hypochlorite—the stuff you use to "shock" a pool—and putting it all back into a big plastic drum; I didn't like the smell of it, so I told him to put on his ventilator mask, and he did so, and I grabbed him a trowel and a flat shovel to make the cleanup easier—and I should mention it was drizzling while he was cleaning up the spill and it had been drizzling while he was driving back from the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border, where he was working earlier in the day-- covering for someone who maintained pools in that region . . . once he got the bulk of the granules into the plastic container, he twisted the lid onto it, and we did a bit more hosing things down and cleaning up and then when he went to pick up the drum, he noticed it was HOT—there was some kind of reaction going on inside; I'm an English teacher, not a chemistry teacher, so I ran inside and googled some things and learned that because the calcium hypochlorite had gotten a bit wet and also because it was mixed with other organic matter from the back of Ian's work truck—some leaves and cardboard—that this was a highly unstable chemical situation, liable to spontaneously combust or explode . . . so I told Ian to call the fire department because there was no way I was allowing him to take the top off this plastic drum, which was getting hotter and hotter; a fire truck arrived in a matter of minutes, and the firemen got out and we explained the situation; just after the fire truck pulled up, my son Alex drove part way down our street and then had to back up, and he got out of Ian's car (which he had borrowed) and told me some very good news-- he got an engineering job in Brooklyn! with a company that takes city buildings and makes them ultra-energy efficient and green . . . awesome, amazing, incredible news!-- but there was very little time to celebrate, because the fire department had called the Middlesex County HAZMAT unit and they were on the way—and some police cars were pulling up . . . so I hugged and congratulated Alex and then got back to the task at hand—what was going to happen with this very hot drum of toxic chemicals in front of our house?-- I thought the HAZMAT crew would just take it away, but no such luck . . . they wanted Ian to call his boss and see if the company had a way to deal with and dispose of the drum—and then my wife arrived home from work, and I had to convey the GREAT NEWS! ALEX GOT A JOB! and the other, not-so-great news: YOU ARE STANDING IN A TOXIC EVENT! and then there was much consternation and many phone calls—Ian's boss had to talk to the HAZMAT crew— and there was much use of equipment—chlorine meters and heat meters and fire hoses (to wash away the pool chemicals in the street) and there were probably a dozen various town firemen and county HAZMAT guys chatting and discussing, and then another youngish guy from Ian's pool company showed up—but slightly older and much more experienced than Ian—and the HAZMAT guys put on their HAZMAT suits and tried to open the lid of the drum, but some yellow gas emerged, so they stopped—because they didn't want to release the gas into the neighborhood, so instead, the more experienced pool guy, who was a stand-up dude with an 80s mustache, a self-prossed "safety freak" who never removed his ear buds during the entire ordeal and had a wonderful, slightly jaded outlook on the scene (and he also gave Ian a nice plastic scooper) and this self-professed CPO (Certified Pool Operator) took the drum and put it in the back of HIS company pickup truck, and his job was to transport it to some county building in North Brunswick, where the HAZMAT people would meet him and figure out how to dispose of this mess—but before he took off with the drum, he shook hands with every guy there and thanked them, and then Ian and I shook hands with people and thanked them—this was quite the social event: town fire department, county HAZMAT guys, a schoolteacher and a couple of pool technicians, and the EMT guys that checked out Ian's vitals—all trying to figure out how to deal with this toxic, unstable drum of pool chemicals . . . but it seems we avoided a major explosion or a Don DeLillo-style airborne toxic event, and in the end, Alex got a job, and Ian might still have a job . . . we shall see (and I was going to abstain from alcohol this week, after a bibulous summer, but that resolution fell by the wayside—for stress-relief and celebratory reasons).

Thar She Blows . . . Or Thar He Blows: It's Hard to Sex a Humpback Whale

Unlike last summer's epic fail, we had some success on today's whale-watching excursion—the Miss Belmar took us a long way from her home waters, nearly all the way to Sandy Hook, to see a juvenile humpback whale that our onboard cetologist called "Fishmer"—because the whale has a marking on its tail that either looks like a fisherman on a dock or a mermaid in the ocean (or perhaps it looks like a white blob on a giant sea mammal's tail) but it was well worth the long voyage because Fishmer spouted and splashed and even breached once—very exciting, check out the video—and then, once we got back on land, my wife and I biked to Talula's and enjoyed some local beers and sourdough crust pizza . . . an excellent end to an excellent vacation—but that's it for whales and dolphins and fevers of cownosed rays, back to the subtropical jungle of Central Jersey tomorrow morning.