Correlation? Causation? Who Knows . . .

My wife turned 53 today but apparently, the Rutgers men's basketball team did not know this, and they squandered their lead against Texas A&M.

The First Rule of Caddyshack is Different Than the First Rule of Fight Club

So we truly had a happy Thanksgiving this year (tinged with a bit of sadness because my parents are still down in Florida-- my dad needed to finish rehab for some bruised ribs and wasn't ready to board a plane yet, but they are headed home next week) but we Facetimed my parents while were at Jim and LouAnne's, my brother's parents-in-law, and despite the fact that I got yelled at by Louanne for hating and forsaking all Thanksgiving food and the fact that the Giants totally suck ass, a good time was had by all-- especially after last year's events at the same household (we were lucky to be invited back, which was very kind, and-- also kind-- no one there brought up last year's events which my son Alex described as a holiday episode of "The Bear") . . . here's a basic account of how it went down, minus some of the crying and melodrama: 

Ian forgot my wife's approaching birthday in the car and I think this ticked Alex off and then at Jim and Louanne's words were exchanged-- some sort of insults directed at corresponding girlfriends-- and Ian was especially sensitive because he had recently withdrawn from college-- and Alex's insult really enraged Ian (Alex claimed this is a thing guys do-- insult each other's girlfriends but I explained to him that this is NOT a thing guys do and is a good way to get killed) and so Ian got up from the table and punched Alex in the back of the head-- and this went down in the basement so I didn't see any of it-- the kids were down there-- so I get pulled from the upstair's kitchen table to sort this out -- Alex was on the front stoop, bleeding from his lip, and Ian was down the block so I was talking to Ian on the phone and then I walked back to the stoop and Ian had come back there and now the whole family was out there-- my brother's wife Amy and her brother and my brother, sorting the whole thing out, but then Alex decided to get his shot in because Ian sucker-punched him and so Alex punched Ian in the face and there was another scuffle-- and I'm used to breaking these two up, I've been doing it for nearly two decades-- even though now they are WAY too big to be fighting-- so I step in to separate them but so does Amy's brother Tommy and he falls and sprains his ankle-- and everyone calsm down but Tommy is hurt and the party is a mess-- my mother is a disaster and and we're incredibly embarrassed and decide to leave immediately, so Catherine doesn't get to eat any of the apple pie she made and Alex has a paper towel on his lip but does not seem to have a concussion and he was the designated driver so he drives us home, dabbing his bleeding lip and mouth the whole way (even though I only had a bit to drink-- but he insists on driving, perhaps so he can't beat the crap out of Ian or vice-versa) and when we get home, we tell the kids that tomorrow they will be making phone calls an apologizing and all that and then we get a good look at Alex's lip and it's split an punctured from the fork that was in his mouth when Ian hit him-- so Ian, Alex and I go to the emergency room at 8 PM, sit in a hot stuffy room together for a long time-- the only entertainment being a very cute crew of young ladies that are the plastic surgery/stitching team-- it's weird when you get old and doctors are so much younger than you-- and everyone was really nice at the hospital and these ladies didn't bat an eye at this insane fucking story-- they had obviously seen far worse-- and Alex was a real trooper and got six stitches in his lips and we didn't get home until midnight-- quite a Thanksgiving--but luckily, his wound healed without a scar-- nice job emergency room plastic surgery/stitching team!-- and my children have gotten along extraordinarily well since this incident and are following the first rule of Caddyshack (which is different than the first rule of Fight Club).

Happy Thanksgiving (with Qualifiers)

Happy Thanksgiving . . . unless, of course, you were a Wampanoag, slaughtered during the chaotic violence of King Philip's War because of the colonists' insatiable desire for land-- Harvest Festival be damned-- although if you were a Native American back then, I guess you could have been thankful that you were alive in the first place, and had not perished from the diseases the English settlers brought to the New World . . . and the Native Americans that did make it until the 1800s didn't have much to be thankful for either, as they were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern U.S. to Oklahoma, marching and dying on this "Trail of Tears" . . . but at least we commemorate the Native American culture by eating some pumpkin pie once a year . . . yuck (and don't even get me started about gravy and mashed potatoes . . . I really don't like historic American food).

Detroiters . . . Don't Bring It Up Around My Wife

So as a rule-- or an eccentricity, I'm not sure which-- I don't watch TV alone (unless it's a sporting event because then I feel like I'm part of the crowd) but there is an exception: there are a small number of shows that I consider hysterically funny and my wife detests-- such as Saxondale-- and so I have to go it alone with these programs (unless my son Alex is home, because he enjoys I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson as much as I do) and now there's another show to add to this category, Detroiters-- which also features Tim Robinson (who my wife finds incredibly annoying) and the utterly charming Sam Richardson . . . the show is an absurdist combination of Madmen and Dumber and Dumber . . . but perhaps even dumber . . . anyway check it out, it's on Netflix right now (along with A.P. Bio with Glenn Howerton, which, thank the lord, my wife DOES find funny) if you're looking for something stupid, surreal, and very funny.

I Probably Need a New Phone (But I'm Not Buying One)

I started to watch the Netflix documentary Buy Now: A Shopping Conspiracy-- which honestly seemed a bit hokey and melodramatic . . . but still a good reminder that there are a bunch of smart people trying to get us to consume ever-more goods that we don't need, especially around the holidays-- but my wife said: "I don't think you should watch this right now" because I'm already irate enough around Black Friday, so I turned it off . . . which was a good idea.

F#&k All Phones

I just spent thirty minutes trying to send a mass text about my wife's birthday celebration on my Android phone (using a third-party app called Textra) and I received a bunch of error messages and I have no clue who got the initial message-- and I can't see the morning basketball group chat because someone with an iPhone started the chat and so I can't join with my Android-- so I had to join on my wife's phone (which is annoying for her because the AM basketball crew sends a lot of lame GIFs) and while I had to cave, it seems like everything is pushing me to switch from Android to an iPhone . . . even though I hate the monopoly Apple has over phones and messaging in the United States (and I hate the fact that I can't put an SD card in an iPhone so I can download all of my Spotify music and photos).

Lola Defeats Urethra Bacteria

Our very concerned and conscientious veterinarian just called and our dog Lola is finally in the clear-- she recently endured some rather expensive bladder-stone removal surgery, and now she's eating some rather expensive prescription anti-bladder-stone dog food, and now her rather expensive extensive urinalysis has finally come back negative-- which is positive!-- she originally had some awful antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection that our vet was VERY worried about but she took some rather cheap human antibiotics and they worked . . . and hopefully this weird infection was the cause of the bladder-stones and so we won't have to deal with this again.

My wife + idioms = weirdness

I was telling my wife a story about how some boys tore down some class council election posters when my sophomore class took a walk around the building-- our periods are 83 minutes long, which is absurd, so I usually break it up with a lap around the school, but it's gotten cold so we had to walk inside, giving these three boys an opportunity to vandalize a rivals election posters-- and so I told my wife that I was no longer taking that class on walks because "the rotten apples spoil the bunch" and she started laughing and said she just realized that she butchered that exact idiom with her fifth-graders earlier in the day-- quite a coincidence-- she told her class that "the bad egg spoils the bunch," somehow combining the idea of a "bad egg" with the old Ben Franklin adage (which is actually "the rotten apple spoils his companions") but I explained to her that:

1) eggs don't come in a bunch

2) a bad egg doesn't spoil the rest of the eggs in the dozen because eggs have separate little compartments in the container and they are also insulated by a shell

and she found this logic so funny that she asked her class the next day if they noticed how she misused an idiom and a girl raised her hand and repeated my wife's distorted maxim back to her-- and my wife told the class that she really appreciated that no one corrected her and shamed her (as I often do) and then she told them about some of the other idioms she's butchered and she said the class was laughing so hard they were crying and one girl insisted that my wife was lying about these mixed metaphor mishaps but my wife told her that this was no exaggeration (and she believes this started happening more frequently twenty-five years ago when she got several migraines that were so bad that they thought she had a minor stroke and that this destroyed the idiom section of her brain-- but my theory is that she doesn't remember these phrases as single units, and instead substitutes synonyms for words within them at will, creating new phrases that are very close in meaning to the original saying).

You Know Hermano?

Let us celebrate this cold, dank, dark rainy Friday afternoon with good coffee and the mellow musical stylings of Hermanos Gutierrez . . . the Swiss-Ecuadorian brothers that play expansive spaghetti-western instrumentals with a King Tubby/Ennio Morricone vibe.

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.

Take Five and Think About Five

I am trying to compose a song in 5/4 time-- the time signature with five quarter notes per measure?-- and most recognizable in the Mission Impossible theme song and Dave Brubeck's eponymous tune "Take Five"-- and while this video is supposed to be helpful, I'm not sure that it is . . . but Logic does have a way to change the time signature to 5/4, so I've got five "quarter notes" per measure now and I'm creating some Frankensteined music that might be in this oddball rhythm-- I will keep you posted.

Costco: Hyper-Capitalist Crucible

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

Gross Meatbag/Corporeal Irony!

Today in class, my College Writing students wrote a synthesis essay about the "Always Be Optimizing" chapter of the Jia Tolentino book Trick Mirror-- and while my colleague Cunningham wrote a wonderful prompt about how Tolentino describes women with an odd triad of imagery, as "gross meatbags, robots, and spiritual beings," I couldn't handle the term "gross meatbag"-- too visceral-- and so I changed it to the more academic-sounding "corporeal" and then told the children Cunningham's phrasing-- and there certainly is some "gross meatbag" imagery in this chapter, including a vivid account of a woman "queefing" in Tolentino's yoga class . . . so the kids had to write about the tension between these three portrayals of women and what it revealed about the world-- and, ironically, during last period, while I was robotically grading the previous class set of essays, and trying to inspire my current class to transcendent new heights of learning, the lunch of lentils, chicken, and cauliflower that my wife packed for me (which I had eaten an hour previous) made its way all the way through my corporeal digestive system, and so I had to make a hasty exit from class, quickly use the bathroom, and then return as though nothing unusual had happened . . . because, as I mentioned earlier, I don't like talking about that kind of gross meatbag stuff.

Ivermectin For All . . .

I have finally recovered from Friday's COVID booster and flu shot-- I felt crappy all day yesterday: aches, a headache, low fever, and fatigue . . . but soon enough I won't need any vaccines-- when R.F.K. Jr. takes over as the minister of Health, Human Services, and Abundant Full Stops . . . because then I'll be able to get government-approved ivermectin and raw milk to combat all the diseases.

Mike Tyson for President?

While we recently learned that a very old, amoral man could make a comeback in the political arena, that's not so easy in the actual arena-- so while all the old, amoral people (like myself) were rooting for Mike Tyson, he had a better shot at winning the presidential election than beating that jacked youngster last night (and while the main event was nothing special-- aside from when Jake Paul's trainer shot water down his shorts to cool off his junk-- there was plenty of spectacle before the fight: two women beating each other to a bloody pulp, and-- randomly-- Mike Tyson's bare flabby ass).

Dave Womans Up

Today's sentence is in honor of my perseverance and valor because I really" "manned up" at school today and suffered both a COVID booster shot AND the flu shot at the annual vaccine clinic-- and I took these shots ON THE SAME SHOULDER! with my colleagues watching me!-- and I place quotations around the phrase "manned up" because my wife womaned up and endured both these shots a few weeks ago and she had no symptoms or side-effects . . . but my immune system is especially robust and so I assume I'll be down for the count tonight.

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).

What More Could You Ask For?

I've been taking creatine and Metamucil every morning for several weeks, so I am both jacked AND regular.

Almost Forgot . . .

Fun (and gross) fact I learned from our Blackwater Refuge kayaking tour guide while we were perusing muskrat burrows: the Eastern Shore of Maryland hosts a muskrat skinning contest-- which means you first have to hunt the muskrats (and then after you skin the muskrats, you eat the muskrats!)