Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Get Stung in the Testicles

Sports can often be a weird exercise in futility: you practice and practice but never get to use your skills in the perfect situation (unlike learning how to knit or draw or play a musical instrument, where practice usually rewards you with a linear increase in skill and enjoyment) but once in a great while, the sporting gods shine their light on a lucky soul . . . and right now the light is shining on my son Ian . . . he plays on the middle school soccer team that I coach, and the team is comprised of 6-8th graders and this means there is a HUGE difference in sizes and development among the players-- Ian is on the small size for a sixth grader (78 pounds) and so when he's next to a large 8th grader, he looks like a midget-- the jersey goes down past his knees-- but he was the only sixth grader in attendance at last Friday's home game (I made him come to cheer on his team) and it was a close one, we were playing better soccer but the the other team (South Amboy) had a free kick specialist who bent it like Beckham used to bend it: he scored two forty-five yard curling spinless rocket shots and they also had a six foot tall Asian kid playing goalie who wasn't that coordinated but swatted down everything we shot at him; it was tied 2-2 in the second half and we just couldn't finish, so I threw Ian a bone and put him up top-- I figured it couldn't hurt and I could give him a few minutes of time as a reward for showing up (the rest of his sixth grade friends were playing Nerf war) and within moments, he got to use every soccer skill I've ever taught him, all in one play-- he ran through a ball forty yards out-- I'm a huge proponent of opening your hips and running through the goddamned ball, instead of stabbing at it-- and then he kept it glued to his body, juggling it on his chest, thighs and feet, then he sealed off a giant defender, faked a shot with his strong foot (he's lefty) and then cut it to his right and shot to the far post with his weak foot . . . it was, as my friend Roman described it, a David and Goliath moment . . . unforgettable and awesome . . . and, as if this wasn't enough, on Wednesday we had an away game against Woodrow Wilson, a middle school three times our size, and once again, we were playing much better soccer but the field was awful, the bumpiest I've seen, and we gave up a handball PK and an ugly counterattack goal and were down 2-1 in the second half . . . so I threw Ian in again, for luck, and two minutes later he snuck over to the far post and one of 8th graders zipped a ball across the box, from the left to right, and Ian-- a lefty-- took it off one bounce from ten yards out and slotted it in with his right foot . . . most kids will take a whack at that ball with their strong foot, and often whiff or knock it over the goal, but Ian kept his composure, used the proper foot, and scored another critical weak foot goal . . . this fired us up and our star player drilled one in from the eighteen moments later and that was enough to do it-- we won 3-2 . . . so good stuff for Ian: two huge goals in twelve minutes of play . . . I'm interested in what he'll do in the game this afternoon, as he insists he's going to score again . . . but I've got another son on the team: Alex-- he's a seventh grader and he's a skilled player as well, but despite skillfully juggling with me for an hour on Saturday, he didn't play very well in his game on Sunday-- not for lack of practice, but probably because when we were at a BBQ on Saturday night, he was attacked by a swarm of yellowjackets and got stung eight times (including two stings on his testicles) and so you'd think the sporting gods would reward him for enduring the stings and still showing up to play on Sunday, maybe give him an easy goal, but instead he was recompensed with a cleat to the ankle in the early minutes of the game, and then-- once he limped back out there-- an elbow to the face, so he was a gimpy bee-stung trainwreck, and while he toughed it out and didn't ask to sit, he didn't play particularly well . . . so you never know how it's going to go out there-- one moment you're the hero, the next you're the goat, and it doesn't always correspond with how hard you practice.

Pronouncement of Dave

Though I'm using an extremely small sample size and only anecdotal evidence, I am officially declaring that the Fitbit Craze is now over . . . the folks in my department are still walking and jogging and doing zumba, but their digital step-counters have ceased to operate and they are not replacing them . . . I think they have come to the collective realization that taking a walk still "counts" as exercise, even if a little device doesn't count the number of steps and post this information on a bar graph.

This Should Be an Olympic Event

Usain Bolt might be fast enough to inflate all four of his car tires to the recommended PSI in one three minute session, but I always fall a few seconds short and have to pony up another 75 cents in order to finish filling the final wheel.

Yesterday Was NOT Groundhog Day

I have a short window of time (30 minutes) between the end of the school day and soccer practice, and my house is right next to the middle school soccer field, so I have just enough time to go inside, change into my coaching gear, and do one or two other random things: sometimes I take the dog for a short walk, sometimes I eat a snack, sometimes I play the guitar or read, sometimes I unload the dishwasher or start the wash, sometimes I make iced coffee, sometimes I read Gheorghe:The Blog, and sometimes-- and this is a new one from yesterday and I hope it doesn't become a mainstay of my after-school-before-practice-schedule-- sometimes I let the dog out into the backyard, grab a bag of potato chips from the cabinet, and while I am opening the bag of chips, I hear fantastical growling and snarling in the yard, so I run out onto the back porch and see that the dog has a large groundhog by the scruff of the neck, shaking it to death, so I grab a wiffle ball bat, sprint down the porch steps, yell at the dog to drop the critter, and swing the bat menacingly (I'm not sure if I was swinging the bat at the dog or at the groundhog, it just seemed like the thing to do) and Sirius obeyed and let go of the groundhog, which fell on the grass and lay there, prone but breathing heavily, eyes open . . . so I led Sirius onto the back porch, brushed the groundhog hair off his legs, told him he was a good boy, and put him inside; then I went back out to deal with the dying animal in my yard-- knowing full well that my kids would be home in a few minutes and I needed to get down to the soccer field ASAP . . . and that's when I realized I should have let my dog finish the job and then made him drop the creature because now I had to finish the job, and I didn't grow up on a farm but I also didn't have time to contemplate much about the deed, and so I went inside, emptied out a cardboard box (Popchips . . . a humiliating casket, but what could I do?) and then went back out to the yard to tend to the groundhog . . . I had hoped that he might have miraculously recuperated and shuffled off, but he was still lying in the same spot, neck and back broken, but alive, so I whacked him over the head with a metal shovel, used the same instrument to load him into his cardboard casket, taped it shut, and drove the box to the park and tossed it in a dumpster . . . minutes later my kids arrived home, I told them an expurgated version of the story, and we went on our merry way to soccer practice.

Awkward Dave Learns Why Dreams are Stupid and Mean Nothing

I had an incredibly "realistic" dream last night that I ran for governor (absurd) and actually won the election (ridiculous) and then, when I went over to the statehouse to start my term, I learned that the salary was abysmally low (which is patently untrue, New Jersey governors are paid the fourth highest salary in the country-- 175,000 dollars) and so I told them that I couldn't afford to do it; it was embarrassing and awkward-- and everyone was really pissed off at me for wasting their time-- and, as a compromise, they made me do the job for a month while they found someone else, and that really annoyed me because I had to drive to Trenton every day, which ruined my summer vacation (also silly, as the next gubernatorial election in New Jersey will take place on November 7th).

The Test 62: History and Futility

This week on The Test, I challenge the ladies with a rather grim thought experiment (thanks to Chuck Klosterman) and while they perform admirably, it might all be for nought . . . so check it out, keep score . . . or don't, because we are all merely grains of sand in the hourglass of time, drifting down down down, towards the neck, and the inevitable drop into the abyss (unless some greater power flips the hourglass over, and we all get another crack at it).
 

Postcards from the Dead

My friend and colleague Stacey has to sort out a morbid holiday dilemma . . . she made a family-photo Christmas card last year, printed a stack of them, but she but neglected to mail them out, and now she wants to use those cards this year-- why waste them?-- but the photo on the cards includes her deceased dog, Norman . . . and so we were trying to figure out if it's weird and creepy to send out a Christmas card with a dead dog on it . . . and besides, she has a new dog (Walter . . . she likes old man names) and it would be rather rude to cut Walter out of the picture . . . and while we never came to a concrete decision on the proper thing to do, the discussion reminded Stacey of the grim death announcement postcard that has resided on the English Office bulletin board for many years . . . no one remembers who delivered the card to the office and no one knows the person the card "fondly remembers" . . . he might have been a student at the school or perhaps he was a substitute teacher or an aid, his identity has always been a mystery, but for reasons of superstition, no teacher would throw the card away; I had long forgotten about this item, but when Stacey pointed it out, I took it down and tore it to shreds, right in front of her face, just to freak her out, and it worked like a charm-- she shrieked and then yelled, "He's going to haunt the shit out of you!" and so I did my usual taunting of the gods and spirits, demanding that they strike me dead with lightning or stop my heart, but neither thing happened, and so it seems that I am immune to spectral power of all apparitions and phantasmagoria.

Are These Pants Blue or Black?

They should write the color of the clothing on the tag.

I Might Be From Pungudutivu

J. D. Salinger waits until chapter five to reveal that Holden Caulfield's brother Allie died of leukemia-- and this is an excellent characterization strategy-- after reading the opening pages of the novel, you form one opinion about Holden . . . that he's rather whiny and annoying, disaffected and disenchanted, and then you have to totally revise your opinion when you are presented with this new and rather grim piece of information . . . they say that first impressions are everything, but that's not necessarily true, especially if a later piece of information that you learn about someone is particularly relevant; for example: you probably think this blog is a puddle of drivel and you only read it so you can register your disgust with my insipid ramblings, BUT if I divulged that I was not actually Dave, but a ninety-four year old Sri Lankan woman named Ajani who lives in a mudbrick house on the island of Pungudutivu and who loves to post discursive sentences as a pretentious balding American pseudo-intellectual, then this blog would take on an entirely new tenor . . . unfortunately, that's not true . . .  but it does raise an interesting question: what game-changing piece of information would you withhold until the middle pages of your autobiography?

Let's Do the Time Suck Again

When I first enter my classroom in the morning, the amount of time I spend opening difficult to access windows-- actual glass windows that I need to open to let cooler air into my room, which are set up in six columns of three, so that I have to stand on top of the window ledge in order to open the top set-- and then the time it takes to set up the many fans, and then the time I spend opening various virtual windows on my computer, so that I can log in to all the various platforms we use (if we use Google classroom then why did we switch out email to Microsoft Outlook?) is a tedious, inefficient time suck, as I could be grading papers, preparing my lessons, organizing my materials, and writing this blog (which is also a tragic tragic time suck . . . but unlike opening windows, real and virtual, I actually enjoy wasting my time on this . . . or, as is the case this morning, seven minutes of my school contract time . . . please don't rat me out).

R.I.P. Greasetruck Studios . . .

It looks like the desktop computer and digital audio converter in my makeshift music studio have finally bitten the dust . . . I've resuscitated them many times from the brink of disaster, but I think this is it . . . new drivers and updates have done nothing-- luckily, I pumped out one last podcast before everything exploded in a burst of feedback-- and while I'm a little sad, that it ended with a power surge and some kind of short circuit that busted my Steinberg UR22,  I've had this computer for a long long time (and I put it together myself) and I'm excited to finally update my hardware, but now the question is: do I spend the $$$ on a Mac?

Give Us This Nada Our Daily Nada

I recognize the absurdity of a blog about nothing commenting on a TV show about nothing, but Seinfeld is actually about everything (and so is this sentence) and it took a book about nothing to make me realize how complicated and deep my feelings are about a show about nothing; Seinfeldia, by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, sports the subtitle "How A Show About Nothing Changed Everything" and this is accurate . . . the book is not some deconstructive analysis of Seinfeld's philosophy, neuroticism and anxious characterization . . . it's more of a history of change, both during the course of the show and during the course of the zeitgeist during the show's run, more of an an explanation of just how difficult it is to write, cast, and maintain a dynamic television show and maintain quality and consistency, week to week, year to year, and even day to day; Armstrong refers to the great moments in the show's history but doesn't overly describe these moments, so the writing is fast and fresh and informative (but probably only totally comprehensible to a true Seinfeld fan) and while the book is a comprehensive history of the show and the alternate universe it created (and the interaction of the Seinfeld universe with the actual universe) it also encourages plenty of nostalgia for people who watched the show when it aired . . . this is a tribute to the last time that network TV was cool, to the last time that there was a true cultural touchstone that everyone shared in a timely fashion (the show aired on Thursday night, and everyone at work dissected the episode Friday morning) and this deeply fond nostalgia about the show has motivated me, in true Seinfeldian fashion, to NOT watch any reruns . . . this is the one great sitcom I've completely withheld from my kids-- we've done The Office and Parks and Rec and some 30 Rock and lots of Community-- but I don't want them to see Seinfeld until they are ready to appreciate it . . . and this book makes me want this to happen soon; anyway, one of the interesting things Seinfeldia explores in detail is that almost all of the plotlines in the show were inspired by real-life anecdotes-- at first they used things that happened to Larry David, and then, when they ran out of Larry David anecdotes, they used things that happened to the ever-revolving crew of writers . . . Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld basically mined the writers for these real incidents and then sent them packing) and so, in this spirit, I'd like to share two Seinfeldian moments that happened to me that were provoked by the show, both of them spongeworthy:

1) I won't mention any names in this story because I'm rather embarrassed by my behavior (a common Seinfeldian theme) but the setting was a high school cafeteria-- I had "cafeteria duty," which means you need to loosely monitor the students while they eat lunch-- and there was a "close talker" in my section-- she was a Spanish teacher and when we conversed, I often had to literally back away from her to preserve my personal space (I do enjoy my personal space . . . in fact, I'm a bit claustrophobic) and this was so pronounced that she would often drive me around and around the lunch table that we stood next to . . . I would slowly back up as she got closer and closer to my face, and the other teachers in our section were English teachers-- friends of mine-- and they enjoyed watching this to no end, as the woman only did this to me, and the two English teachers were Seinfeld fans, of course (as was the close talker!) and so one day, after several months of close talking, I told my friends to find an obscure vantage point where they could observe me talking with the close talker because I was going to make history and stand my ground and we could all see what happened, and so I did it-- despite my claustrophobia-- I stood my ground . . . though I wanted to laugh-- and the two of them witnessed this from the corner of the cafeteria . . . I didn't back up, I stood solidly and she got closer and closer until she was less than an inch from my face, talking away, so close that I could see the specks of saliva on her lips . . . I didn't know what she was saying and I wanted to laugh, and I stole a glance at my friends and they were laughing and then I suddenly felt very guilty and regretful for doing the experiment, because the close talker was a super-nice lady and we were in real life, not a sitcom . . . but still, it was profoundly awesome to see just how close she got to my face, and I'm glad I had two witnesses that bore testament to this insanity;

2) the second Seinfeldian moment will only make sense to fans of a certain age-- Catherine and I often taped the show on VHS, because I went to Doll's Place on Thursday nights, and so on a hungover Saturday morning, we tried to watch "The Betrayal," which is also known as "the backwards episode" and I didn't rewind far enough and we started watching and it seemed like we were at the end, but it was the beginning, and I kept rewinding and fast-forwarding in spurts, not realizing that the chronology of the episode was backwards, taking note of the size of Kramer's lollipop, watching a scene, then attempting to get us in the right place . . . and, in a perfectly Seinfeldian technological twist, we ended up watching the episode in some semblance of the correct linear order, with many stops and starts, before we realized that the entire story was told in reverse . . . so then we re-watched it "properly," noting the irony and absurdity, of course, but not knowing that the Seinfeldian brand pre-9/11 irony and absurdity was on its way out, to be replaced by something darker, and the hypersensitive, super-silly tone of the '90's was about to end, and people my age (46) would yearn for this feeling for the rest of their lives (Beavis and Butthead).

The Test 61: Nicknames

Stacey brings the pain this week on The Test with her quiz on nicknames, and Cunningham and I mainly flail-- especially when we are trying to remember actual names-- but we occasionally guess the common thread, and so will you . . . so take a shot, keep score, and you'll certainly do better than us; and remember Method Man's real name is Clifford.

Throw Caution to the Wind: Don't Look Either Way

I take in pride in entering crosswalks without glancing at the oncoming vehicles-- I'm not going to deign to "ask permission" from a fuel-guzzling, carbon spewing noisy motor vehicle in order to cross the street under my own autonomously ambulatory volition, and if I get hit by a car, fuck'em . . . I'll collect my well-deserved, well-earned settlement; I'll never work again, and I'll cruise around town evoking sympathy in a brand new Jazzy . . . and now there's a study that insures that if I do get clobbered while legally crossing the street, then I'll probably receive a healthy pay-out, as it is most likely that a rich person will commit the crime . . . and I will readily admit that this is one of those studies that I'm eager to pass along because it confirms exactly what I've always believed about how wealthy people behave when they are behind the wheel of a luxury car, and perhaps when I get hit and collect, then I'll "pay it forward," buy a nice car, and hit someone else in a crosswalk and pay them a large lump sum.

Spooky Etiquette

When people at my place of work--mainly women-- are talking about contacting spirits, receiving signs from the afterlife, and decoding messages from dead relatives and deceased strangers, am I allowed to crack jokes, question their sanity, and express my very specifically skeptical feelings about ghosts and the netherworld, or do I have to pretend to believe in that stuff?

Common Kowledge?

Everyone knows that Kilgore Trout is Philip K. Dick, right?

This Is Lame

I'm too tired from Two-practice-Tuesday to think of anything creative and interesting to write, but I did write a piece (with multiple sentences!) for Gheorghe:The Blog a few days ago, so if you need a daily dose of Dave you can head over there and read "#39 on Your Roster, But #1 in Your Heart."

Dave Nearly Receives a Darwin Award (Yikes)

This event happened Friday afternoon, but I totally repressed the memory-- I told no other human about it, and it would have sunk deep into my subconscious and never surfaced again if it wasn't for a discussion in philosophy class yesterday about the flaws in our perception-- we were talking about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and how our senses often deceive us; how we all too often mistake shadows for reality . . . and while students were providing examples, I suddenly remembered my ride home from work on Friday . . . I was overheated and extremely tired and engrossed in an episode of Planet Money; driving on Ryders Lane, across from the Acme; and I saw a flashing red light on a sign, and the sign said DO NOT STOP ON TRACKS and I thought to myself: that makes sense . . . I will not stop on the tracks . . . you certainly shouldn't stop on the train tracks . . . and then I drove across the tracks, and when I crossed them I heard a loud loud horn, and this sound snapped me out of my cataleptic stupor; I looked to my right and I saw a TRAIN . . . and in a cognitive flash I understood it all: the blue and white freight train engine, the cars stopped on the other side of the road, the flashing red lights . . . and I realized that those flashing red lights weren't simply emphasizing the fact that you shouldn't stop on the train tracks, they were indicating that there was an actual train coming, and the drivers on the other side of the road had figured this out and had stopped, but I plowed right across . . . luckily, I think the engine had slowed to a crawl to assess the situation, because Ryders Lane rarely sees train traffic (and thus there was no traffic control drop arm at this crossing) or I might have been t-boned by the engine, written off as a typical idiot, and posthumously presented a Darwin Award . . . and never gotten to plead my case, which was that in my decisive moment, I thought I was obeying the signage-- the red lights reminded me not to stop on the tracks-- and while I realize this was a rather grave, boneheaded error, it is also a lesson in how heat and exhaustion and a compelling podcast can lead to a total lack of peripheral awareness.

Duct Tape + Dave = Lazy

Here are four things I recently "fixed" and/or "installed" with duct tape, instead of doing the job properly:

1) I "fixed" a rust spot on the roof of my minivan . . . I ordered the touch up kit, with the correct color paint and the sandpaper and all that, but it was so much easier to slap an "X" of duct tape over it . . . and, as a bonus, my van is duct tape gray . . . and no one is looking at the roof of my van, anyway;

2) I "installed" a motion sensing light in my closet-- the light is circular and you should put some screws into the wall and then attach the base to the screws, but I stuck it up there with rays of duct tape, making it look like a white sun with gray streams of light emanating from it;

3) I "fixed" the rubber covering of my tailgate door handle on my minivan . . . age and heat has transformed it into a decaying plasticine pulp that gets black gook all over your fingers when you apply pressure, but I covered it with a swatch of duct tape and now the decay is sealed away;

4) I "fixed" the bottom drawer of my dresser-- the dovetail corner joint came apart when I pulled it out, and what I really should have done was use some wood glue and let it set, thus adhering the dovetails back together, but I didn't have the time or energy for that, so I shoved the wood back in place, and used a few strips of duct tape on the inside of the drawer to solidify the joint . . .

stay tuned for more half-assed fix-it solutions that can be completed in under forty-five seconds with duct tape!

To Be or Not To H20

The ultimate existential dilemma is not "to be or not to be" nor is it "is the bathroom very very wet after my children shower," because those questions are binary . . . you should obviously stop whinging and do your best "to be" and yes, the bathroom is very very wet after my children shower, and so the final question-- once you've arrived at "being" in this very damp universe-- is just how premeditated the soaking of the bathroom floor is . . . because there's no fucking question that it's soaked, but do my children cascade gallons of water over the edge of the tub and onto the tile because they want the bathroom ceiling to collapse into the living room, and thus they'll have to pay for their own college, or is this some sort of inevitable physical law, that when you put and 11 year old and a 12 year old in claustrophobic space with spraying water of a certain hydraulic pressure, that a great deal of it will end up not in the tub, but on the floor . . . I'm not sure which answer I prefer, but I'm guessing that the motivation doesn't fall into a simple a dichotomy, such as "to be or not to be" and that the nightly wettening might be some combination of calculation and klutziness . . . but this might be one of the unknowable things (on par with Thomas Nagel's philosophical essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") because I remember my mother chastising me for the same infraction and I can't remember how or why I sluiced so much liquid out of the tub and onto the tile.

You Probably Had to Be There (But F#$@ It)

If this sentence is a failure, then I apologize in advance, but I'm going to try to capture one of those tiny, humorous moments that makes a day at work, if not quite entertaining, at least bearable; we were all suffering through the first day of school for teachers, an endless workshop on curriculum revision and how to use the new software platforms, and I was showing Stacey my class roster on my school-issued Chromebook-- which is NOT a touchscreen-- and Stacey put her finger on the screen, to point to a former student that she really liked, and my hand was resting on the touchpad of the computer, and my brain instantly decided that the best course of action would be to make the screen move a little when she physically touched it, so then she scrolled with her finger, and I surreptitiously scrolled on the touchpad (this is easier than it sounds) and then she scrolled the other direction, and I followed suit, and for four seconds or so, she thought that I had in my possession a very special school-issued Chromebook with a dynamic touch screen, and she looked at me with a mixture of awe and jealousy, a "how-do-you-rate?" kind of look . . . and then she realized I was fucking with her and she started laughing . . . and the weird thing is, my brain decided to play this "joke" before my consciousness did . . . I just started doing it, and then I realized how funny it was . . . my finger on the touchpad instantly mimicked Stacey's finger movement on the screen and then I realized I was screwing with her perception, and even after we both knew the deal, it was still fun for her to flick the screen and watch it do what she desired . . . and soon enough all this will work fluidly and we'll control screens with our minds (but not yet, in fact, Stacey and I spent twenty-five minutes on Friday attempting to log someone out of Microsoft Outlook email-- God knows why our school adopted that platform this year-- only to determine that it's utterly impossible).

Ambiguities and Aesthetics (of Bumper Stickers)

I apologize for the tardiness of this sentence, and all I've got is more bumper sticker stuff, but, as they say, better late than never: I was driving behind an oldish Hyundai Sonata that was sporting a Hillary '16 bumper sticker, which was artfully placed over a Bernie Sanders 2016 bumper sticker; the Hillary Clinton sticker didn't completely obscure the Bernie Sanders sticker-- which was definitely an option, because the bumper stickers were the same size-- instead it was placed solidly over most of the sticker, in diagonal fashion, as if to indicate that the person was a realist and knew that the realpolitik play was to run Clinton (despite her many flaws) but there was certainly enough of the Bernie sticker left to illustrate that the Hyundai owner lamented Sanders' loss to Clinton and did not want to erase what Bernie had accomplished (he certainly moved the Clinton platform to the left) and while I applaud this person for conveying all those political opinions with two stickers, this person had a third bumper sticker (why does everyone have a third bumper sticker?) which said Stop Bigotry and this text was accompanied by a weird yellow and tan blob, and I googled this one and it turns out the weird yellow and tan blob is a stylized caricature of Donald Trump's head . . . and I'm not sure if the sticker means "Stop Being Bigoted Towards Donald Trump" and is encouraging us to just love him for the irascible racist blowhard that he is, or if it means "Stop Being a Bigot, Donald Trump," but I'm guessing this driver interpreted it as the latter and didn't even consider the former possibility.

Truly Madly Frustrating

Let me begin this rather critical review by saying that I love Liane Moriarty's precise prose, her mathematical plotting, and the fact that she hails from Australia . . . and while her new book Truly Madly Guilty is certainly intense and suspenseful and full of intriguing cast of characters carrying lots of weird and emotional intertwined baggage, the book is not much fun-- it's compelling in a I've-got-to-get-to-the-end sort of way, and that's an accomplishment in itself (and I love all the psychology of hoarding stuff) but there's not many enjoyable set pieces in this one (like the mom footrace in Big Little Lies) and the tone and diction of every chapter is framed by the dictates of the form-- in other words, the purpose of each page is to keep all the secrets obscure, the secrets at the heart of every relationship in the book and the secrets of the plot-- and this becomes rather annoying and contrived . . . I read the whole thing, because I had to, but I hope in her next novel she takes some time to breathe, and just let the story tell itself, instead of forcing it into such a convoluted box . . . and I know you're reading this, Liane-- I can call you Liane, right?-- and I just want to assure you that you're a really good sentence writer, incisive and clever and witty-- and this is coming from me . . . Dave! . . . the author of Sentence of Dave! . . . I've written MANY MANY phenomenal sentences and so a compliment from me is a real feather in your cap! and so listen to me and listen closely: in your next novel, take some time to write some funny sentences-- comedy . . . people love some comedy amidst the carnival disasters-- and develop some entertaining scenes, entertaining scenes unrestricted by the constraints of a maddeningly formulaic plot structure . . . and you can thank me in the credits (although I would prefer a dedication page).

Dave Endorses Taco Trucks on Every Corner

I'm sure diligent readers of Sentence of Dave remember my incredible 2011 Taco Count, but for those of you who don't, here's a quick synopsis: I polished off 200 tacos in one calendar year, and this inspired both my children and my students to comparable feats of gluttony . . . but just imagine how badly I could shatter my own record if Marco Gutierrez's delicious dream of American greatness were to come true and someday, in some utopian reality, there really is a "taco truck on every corner."

The Test 60: Let's Get Biblical, Biblical

Summer is over, thus it is time to go Old Testament on yo' ass . . . so tune in, keep score, learn why God was so goddamned angry back then, and if you do well on this test, then you can join Stacey and virtue signal to your heart's content . . . but even if you find Jesus boring (as Cunningham does) you don't have to worry, he's barely mentioned in this week's episode of The Test . . . we're more into vengeance and betrayal than forgiveness.

Dave Labors to Complete Summer

So I'd like to assure everyone that the summer is complete-- diligent readers might be worried, but yes I saw Lecompt at the Springfield a couple of times . . . I just never got around to writing about the shows, and yes I wrestled in a pool with a bunch of men, some teenage boys and one brave young woman for a greased watermelon . . . this year's scrum was especially epic and went on far too long; the watermelon actually split into pieces in the first match, but the lifeguards had a back-up watermelon (also fully slicked with vaseline) so we were able to play a second game, and while I was fighting for my life, treading water, breathing heavily, occasionally shot-putting the melon, and mainly trying not to drown, I managed to salvage two proud moments: the first was when I made an accurate behind the back pass (with a greased watermelon) under heavy pressure from The Deatz and the second was when one of my soccer players got into space on the wing, called for the melon, and finished perfectly . . . and though when he tossed the melon over the lip of the pool, this was to defeat my team (Team 2!) I attribute his heads-up play, communication, and spacing to my unparalleled coaching . . . so though it was a loss, it was also a victory . . . but let me assure you, it wasn't all treading water and high-fives, I also had one shameful moment, when an opposing player surfaced with the melon, and I violently dunked this person, and then I realized it wasn't an adult, it was one of the youngsters . . . one of the kids on my middle school team, in fact, and I know this doesn't bode well for the future-- when we started this watermelon thing five years ago, it was a bunch of dads and a few twenty-somethings, but this year a lot of the older guys decided they would not participate-- they were too old and it was too exhausting-- and so we recruited a batch of kids, and they're just going to get bigger and stronger and angrier . . . eventually, vengeance will be theirs.

Quest for Frog

I was driving down Woodbridge Avenue Thursday afternoon, behind an ancient Honda Accord that sported three bumper stickers:

1) Don't Steal . . . The Government Hates Competition;

2) What If the Hokey Pokey Is What It's All About?

3) and a third bumper sticker, old and faded, that featured an anthropomorphized frog-- his arm raised and his green finger pointed philosophically into the air-- and next to the frog was a speech bubble with some text in it, but the text was rather small and very faded . . . and-- after briefly meditating upon the first two stickers-- I decided that it was imperative that I find out what the anthropomorphized frog was saying, as his amphibious mantra would not only unlock the personality of the person in the car, but would also offer a key to uniting the yin and yang of our anxious national partisan consciousness-- the first two bumper stickers were so different in tone, one whimsical and silly and the other cautionary and angry-- and the frog's words would resolve this paradox, a paradox lurking at the heart of our national culture and our polarized media; whatever the frog's sage advice would be the balance-- the golden mean-- between absurd vacuous humor and a healthy critical skepticism, between enjoying life's weird and possibly futile ride and being an active, informed citizen in a democracy . . . and so I crept closer and closer to the car, as close as I could possibly get . . . but--alas--I could not read the words that the philosophical frog was saying, and so I drove home, frustrated, and searched the internet but there were no fruitful results for "philosophical frog bumper sticker" and so, for the good of our collective mentality and for the good of our conflicted nation, I have invented his words of wisdom: Life is Short and Then You Croak.

Teachers, The Ethics of Waiting in Line, and Why Dave Is a Great Humanitarian

The PTSA always provides the teachers with a nice spread of food on the first day back, so we can load up before the endless meetings; this year there were several tables in a row, parallel to the cafeteria wall, offering a buffet of fruit, muffins, donuts, coffee, bagels and cream cheese, and cookies . . . but when my colleague Krystina and I made our approach, we had to contend with a long line . . . a long line inching along on ONE side of the row of tables, the closer side, but no one was serving themselves along the other side of the tables-- and the tables were a good six feet from the wall, so there was plenty of room for people to line up and serve themselves on that side as well-- so I said, "Let's go" to Krystina and walked past the line, grabbed a plate, and served myself-- unimpeded-- on the far side of the buffet, but I looked back and Krystina was still in line and she wouldn't budge-- most teachers like to follow the rules-- and I think a few people might have looked at me askance, because while I didn't cut per se, I did serve myself before a lot of people who were waiting patiently in line, and I served myself much faster than the people slowly plugging along on the crowded side of the row of tables, and once I got back to my own little table and sat down, I noticed that the other teachers had followed my lead and they were now serving themselves on both sides of the row of tables, so though I did something slightly immoral, it was ethically utilitarian, because once I broke the ice, a greater number of people served themselves in a more expedient manner . . . so nice job Dave, for making things flow more smoothly and for making a bunch of teachers realize that sometimes you need to break the rules of etiquette in order to get a system to work more efficiently.

Prepare to Be Confused, Then Outraged, Then Confused Again

You may have heard some news about the exorbitant price increase for the Epipen, the ubiquitous life-saving anaphylaxis injection, and that the Heather Bresch-- the CEO of Mylan, the company that produces Epipen-- is the new Martin Shkreli, but the the issue is more complicated than a couple of greedy executives incentivised by stock prices and financial gains; if you really want to understand some of the context and the big picture, listen to the first third of Slate Money in their Worse Than Marxism edition, as they can explain it better than me; their point is this: sometimes markets and capitalism work worse than Marxism . . . markets are great for fungible items that aren't totally necessary and don't need to be on constant flow-- oranges, sneakers, houses, milk-- but crazy things happen when markets and regulation coexist (because the item or service is necessary for day to day infrastructure) so when you have electricity markets (Enron) or health care markets, where there is regulation, monopolies, the hurdle of the FDA, middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers) and no consumer transparency, and so in this instance, Mylan has increased the price of an Epipen from 100 dollars in 2007 to over 600 dollars today AND they did an incredible job marketing the need for the product (which remains mainly unchanged) so that dental offices and schools and Disneyland are required to have these things, generally in first aid kits-- which rarely get used, as most people who need an Epipen carry one-- and so most of these Epipens will gather dust and expire in a year (do they really?) and so you've got to replace them all and while, of course, we should try to have Epipens in as many places as possible, we should have them in as many places as is reasonably possible-- without incurring insane expenses (and I recognize this is cold utilitarian morality in the face of peanut and bee sting deaths, and so I'll let Louie CK do his thing . . . I put it up top, go 40 seconds in) while Heather Dresch is saying the system is broken, deductibles are too high, and we never wanted consumers to pay full price for these items, and then she's offering a 300 hundred dollar rebate card to consumers, this means that the health care system is going to foot that bill, and unless a big story breaks like this, most of the time-- because of opacity, collusion, and the inability for our government to negotiate and regulate prices on drugs-- we'll be unwittingly paying for all this because we never know what anything costs . . . and Heather Bresch, in her CNBC interview, blames the system for the price and she does offer a silver lining-- which is probably specious-- is that Americans are subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the world . . . because you can get an Epipen in Europe and Canada for less than 100 dollars-- the problem with this logic is that there hasn't been many blockbuster drugs developed recently, as big pharma has been more interested in researching older very specific drugs that have no generic, improving them slightly, and then jacking the price way up and marketing these drugs effectively, and so getting Epipens into restaurants, hotels, etcetera and we will again unknowingly foot the bill in increased deductibles and health care costs . . . so Heather Bresch has shown she can be just as big an asshole as one of the guys, but she's a product of the system . . . in Australia, Europe and Canada, health care is treated like water and electricity and there are bureaucratic means to set prices so that the services flow steadily . . . markets and capitalism work well in some instances, but without the right regulations they can also produce things like the institution of slavery (supply and demand . . . Europe needed sugar!) and the stock market crash of 1929 . . . near the end of the interview Bresch finally says, "I'm running a business" and she's right, that's what health care is in America, and--like education-- it probably shouldn't be.

Imminent Narcoleptic Apocalypse

I've taken a nap nearly every day this summer, and now the school year is approaching and I am full of dread and anxiety . . . how am I going to stay awake from sunrise to sunset and then into the great darkness beyond?

I'm Only Responsible for 20% of this Post

You'll have to head over to Gheorghe:The Blog today to get your daily dose of Dave . . . but I warn you: there are philosophical musings and superficially connected anecdotes-- the only payoff is you get to learn what the title means.

Two Vacation Complaints

We had a great vacation with friends in Sea Isle City, but I know you don't want to hear about that (or you'd be wandering around on Facebook) and so I will skip the fun stuff and get right to the gripes:

1) when the kids say they are going to cook dinner for the adults, and the kids are bunch of middle school boys, then the kids are NOT actually going to complete this task, and will require help, supervision, and labor from their mothers;

2) beach umbrella carrying bags are impossibly small and getting the umbrella, flaps, pole, and stakes back into the bag required super-human dexterity . . . beach umbrella companies (particularly Sport-Brella) need to consider the circumstances in which a beach umbrella is going to be stuffed back into the bag: the person cleaning up the umbrellas is often the last man on the beach, and will probably be tired, inebriated, wet, and sandy, and could be battling wind, flies, or the tide . . . so I beseech you: stop trying to cut costs and use a little more fabric on the bag!

The Test 59: A Cult Classic

This week on The Test, Cunningham uses her quiz on cults to whip Stacey and I into a fervently rapturous passion . . . so give it a listen, keep score, promulgate the tenets, try to maintain autonomy of consciousness, and be warned: you may need some deprogramming once the show is over.

Two Things I learned at the Pool Yesterday (Both Explosive)

The first thing I learned at the pool yesterday is that if you put enough rubber bands around a watermelon, it will explode . . . my wife and I saw a bunch of kids clustered around a picnic table, and so we went to investigate, and we saw a dad and a bunch of brave children stretching rubber bands around a watermelon-- which seemed very odd until someone explained the premise, and it took quite a few rubber bands and a good ten minutes, but the end result was a real crowd-pleaser; moments after the watermelon exploded all over the participants, our own children arrived (they were with friends) and we excitedly told them what we had witnessed, but they were unmoved by the information . . . apparently "everyone has seen that on YouTube" and the second thing I learned at the pool is that intestinal gas is visible in an x-ray; I learned this fun fact from a friend (a lady friend!) who will remain nameless (her request) when she recounted her last visit to the chiropractor, he took a full upper body x-ray, put it on display, and began assessing her spine, but she wasn't paying attention to his chiropractic wisdom, and instead was looking at the numerous black balls in her stomach and intestines . . . she knew what they represented and was appropriately mortified (even more so when the chiropractor said, "Wow, you're quite gassy," but she still had the wherewithal to reply, "I had Thai food for lunch").

Alfred Hitchcock Presents . . . The Flies

I certainly can't complain about the weather on our trip to Sea Isle City, but after an idyllic six days of ocean breezes and warm water, on our last day, the wind start blowing from the west, and with the west wind, the flies-- hordes of flies-- and with the flies . . . madness.

You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Identify Half of a Fish

My son Ian caught a little flat fish in his net today, but it looked like half of a fish, just a swimming head . . . and it had red spikes on each "tail" end-- we tried to identify it on the internet, to no avail: does anyone know what kind of fish this?

Whitesnake Foretells the Future

I finished two books at the beach yesterday, both on the the theme of human nature, and one was inspirational and disconcerting and the other satirical and reassuring;

1) the disconcerting and inspirational award goes to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari; this is a Guns, Germs, and Steel-style Big History book that cuts a broad swath while telling the story of "an animal of no significance" that emerges from several other hominid species to conquer the earth-- it's one revolution after the next: cognitive, agricultural, religious, scientific, industrial, economic, nuclear, philosophical, and digital-- and we become the most wild and unnatural of all the animals, at first hunting and gathering in small tight-knit groups, but with a desire to create art (the Lion Man is 32,000 years old) and a desire for conquest (we probably took out the Neanderthals and we certainly killed all the megafauna) and this led to something larger and larger, but in no way inevitable or "natural" . . . in fact, according to Harari, there was just as much lost as gained when we settled down and became farmers (peasants ate worse, toiled harder, died of starvation and disease more often, and the great inequalities of wealth and class began) but this paved the way for one revolution after another, eventually leading to out effete, technological capitalist miracle-- fueled by cheap credit and trust in the future-- but, of course, capitalism is efficient but not ethical, so capitalism produced institutions like slavery and led to a devastation of the "natural" world . . . there are 300 million tons of humanity on the planet, and 700 million tons of domesticated factory farmed animals to feed us, but the total tonnage of the surviving large wild animals-- "from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales-- is less than 100 million tons" and so while Harari portrays humanity as progressive, intelligent, conquering beings, he also acknowledges what Whitesnake told us long ago, that we don't know where we're going (though we sure know where we've been) and we're walking, alone down a street of dreams, drifting this way and that, into unknown, unforetold territory, revolution after revolution, looking for answers, and here we go again . . . so get ready to hold on for the rest of your days . . .

2) the second book is a refreshing change from Yuval Harari's big thoughts and philosophical speculations, and it is free on the Kindle and I highly recommend it; Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome is an account of a men's boating holiday down the Thames River, and it is semi-autobiographical, hysterically funny, and was published in 1889 . . . and I shit you not, if you read this book, you'll realize that if you took a time machine back to 1889, you would have no problem hanging out with these folks-- the tone and the jokes and the diction are perfectly modern, and Jerome K. Jerome's observations could have fallen from a Seinfeldian observational comic, here are a few examples:

a) the mildest tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in a boat;

b) few things, I have noticed, come quite up to the pictures of this world;

c) little was in sight to remind us of the nineteenth century;

d) in a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything . . . Harris's notion was, that is was he alone who had been working;

e) each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have what he does want . . . married men have wives, and don't seem to want him; and young single fellows cry out that they can't get them.

One Upping ad Infinitum

You have probably witnessed some one-upmanship, or been the victim of a one-upper, or possibly even one-upped someone yourself, but this one-upping is beyond the pale-- and I recognize the irony of saying that I am in possession the best one-upping anecdote in the history of one-upping: my wife and our friend Connell were sitting on the porch at Sea Isle, drinking and discussing the profound beauty of the night sky (and the travesty of light pollution) and my wife reminisced about the vast array of visible stars in the sky that she witnessed when we stayed inside Mesa Verde National Park, high atop the mesa, far from civilization . . . she said "there was a star in every piece of the sky" and Connell replied to this, without malice or premeditated hyperbole, by describing his trip to New Hampshire,  where from beside a mountain lake he could see "a thousand stars in every spot in the sky" and and we all reflected upon this description for a moment and then realized that Connell had one-upped Catherine, but by a thousandfold, and not a simple thousandfold, he one-upped her by a thousandfold per piece of sky, which is enough one-upping to last a lifetime (or at least inspire a lifetime of ridicule, which we have heaped upon him in the succeeding days).

A Surveyor, an Anthropologist, a Psychologist, and a Biologist Walk into a Bar

Jeff Vandermeer's sci-fi novel Annihilation certainly owes some of its tone and plot to the Strugatsky Brothers cult classic Roadside Picnic, but instead of navigating a mysterious area through the eyes of a Stalker, Vandermeer gives us a weird, gothic, and evocatively creepy tour of Area X through the mind and observations of a biologist, and the passages in which she analyzes the bizarre ecosystem of Area X are the most vivid and memorable in a book which is generally ambiguous and confounding . . . the team investigating Area X, purportedly the twelfth mission sent in to contain and understand the zone, consists of a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist . . . but nothing is as it seems, everything goes awry, and the group spirals deeper and deeper into an area that has more to do with the Wallace Stevens poem "Of Mere Being" than an actual location on earth; the book is short and the first of a trilogy, and I liked it enough that I will probably read the other two, but be warned: the plot is more like a dream than a linear sequence of events, and the nature of reality is constantly eroded and called into question-- this is exemplified by the biologist's husband, who went into Area X on the 11th expedition, and came out as the walking dead . . . this was a man who thought he had been abused as a child, but when-- as an adult-- he saw a classic horror film, it "was only then that he realized that the television set must have been left on when he was only a couple years old" and his memories of abuse were a fake and a forgery, and "that splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing" and the looming menace, that all of our consciousness is faulty and false and misguided, takes root on every page of this book, and colors every detail of the lush, variegated environment of Area X and whatever lies beyond and below it.

Thank You Netflix!

The Netflix series Stranger Things succeeded where I failed, and convinced my kids that The Clash is the only band that matters.

Cult Classics . . . You Get My Drift?

During a recent recording session for The Test, we discussed the definition of a "cult classic" and the idea that cult classics might not even exist any longer (because of the easy access and ubiquity of everything "cult" on the internet) and we arrived at this conclusion-- a cult classic has to be relatively obscure and difficult to access, but not too obscure . . . because it has to last the test of time in this low-grade state of minor fame . . . when I was a kid, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a cult classic, I had to track a copy down and buy it to see the film, but now, of course, the movie is world renowned, but a better example would be the satirical film Porklips Now, which I watched multiple times in high school and college; looking back, it's quite bad, but this is before the advent of YouTube, so I guess we didn't have much to choose from if we wanted to watch something beyond the pale of regular media: anyway, go four minutes and fifteen seconds in for my favorite bit of dialogue . . . so you go down and you find Mertz and you know . . . you go through the gate and you find Mertz  and uh . . . what he means is you find him and you know . . . you find Mertz . . . you find him . . . go through the Chinatown gate . . . you find him and you take care of business . . . you go through the gate . . . you get my drift?

The Future Hasn't Happened Yet

In one corner, you've got Robert Gordon claiming that American growth is over-- the greatest technological leaps happened between 1870 and 1970 and those kinds of radical changes will never happen again-- but his premise is challenged by Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . Kelly envisions a world where we don't own much at all and instead subscribe to services-- the Netflix, Uber model-- but we do this for for everything, and we participate in "dot-Communism" and do a tremendous amount of work for free (e.g. this blog and Wikipedia) including making and placing our own advertisements and photos on the internet for micro-payments, and we live in flowing "real time" of course, where everything happens instantaneously, and most of our jobs are replaced by robots . . . and if you don't think this is possible, check out Kelly's Seven Stages of Robot Replacement (of course my job won't be replaced by a robot-- you say to yourself-- a robot couldn't possibly do what I do . . . it could do some of the things, but not everything . . . and it might break down . . . ok, it can do the routine stuff: grade papers, ask questions, check for reading comprehension . . . but I need to train it to do new stuff and teach new lessons . . . ok, it can do my stupid boring job, but that's because teaching is inhuman and should be done by robots . . . and now my new job-- designing curriculum for robots to teach is much better than my old job and pays more . . . and I'm glad that a robot could never do what I do now . . . and so on) and Kelly readily acknowledges that what will be lost in this real-time, collaborative, cybernetic, collectivist, brand-based, robotic, completely searchable future is what scholars call "literature space," the place your brain goes when you read a book . . . according to scientists, your brain goes to a different place when it is immersed in a large linear logical piece of writing-- what is traditionally known as a book-- as opposed to what Kelly calls "screening," which is using various devices to browse the loosely connected miscellany that is the web . . . but maybe in the future there will be no reason to think that long about any one subject, and it will be considered antiquated to read in that fashion, and we'll be happy wandering from idea to idea, narrative to narrative, video to audio to text to who knows, adding a bit here, taking a bit there, like digital hunter-gatherers, wandering the binary plains.

Lesson Learned . . . The Hard Way

On Tuesday, my son Alex learned that you can't stand behind someone and talk to them while they are hitting tennis balls (Ian's racket hit the ball and then, on the follow through, hit Alex flush in the face . . . Alex immediately hit the deck crying and Ian, to his credit, was really upset-- he had no idea how close Alex was standing to him-- Alex suffered a swollen lip, a sore jaw, and a red mark on his face . . . and I had my usual reaction, which is just terrible but I can't help it, I checked to see if Alex was okay (and he was . . . no blood or dilated eyes or missing teeth) and then I immediately chastised him for being a complete idiot and told him he had learned a valuable lesson: you don't stand near anyone on the tennis court, especially behind them . . . and this pissed him off, so I apologized and said I should have only been concerned with his health and well-being, and I should have talked about the lesson he learned at a later time . . . and-- to Alex's credit-- after sitting out a few minutes, he recovered and play another game with us, and he was quite intimidating, with his misshapen face and all).

The Upside of Genocide

Sentence of Dave does not endorse the act of genocide (although Dave occasionally endorses arachnicide, particularly in the film Starship Troopers) but that doesn't mean that the aftermath of a murderous apocalypse can't have some benefits; in Rwanda, after Hutu extremists slaughtered more than a million people (mainly Tutsis) in 100 days, there weren't many men to be found-- the population was now skewed to 70% women, and so while a typical feminist movement takes time, and goes from Rosie the Riveter to Gloria Steinem to Hillary Clinton, in Rwanda, things moved at a breakneck pace and women's participation in the legislature is mandated; the result is that Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials . . . and this doesn't make everything perfect for women, while they've moved into many typically male professions, they still suffer discrimination at home-- but this may be a last ditch effort for men to preserve traditions that are on the way out (e.g. Donald Trump) and once women enjoy a few generations of economic success and political clout, even those rather sexist Rwandan norms will erode; for more on this topic (and theme) and a compelling story about an all girl Rwandan debate team, listen to Invisibilia: Outside In.

Sorry Chuck, The Inevitable is Coming

Chuck Klosterman concludes his book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past with this thought: "I'm ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it's pretty much like yesterday" and while this is a pleasant thought, there's very little chance of it happening; before he gets to this romantic notion, he speculates on just how much the future will be different from the now, and how that will change the lens through which those future people view our time . . . and he also recognizes that not much will survive the test of time and that we have little to no chance of predicting what those things will be:

1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?

2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;

3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and  to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;

4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;

5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;

BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.

Telekinetic Kids

Not only does my son look like Eleven from Stranger Things, but he can also levitate objects with his mind (and feet).

The Test 58: Can You?

This week on The Test, Stacey puts Cunningham and me on the spot . . . and while we occasionally perform admirably, there's plenty of failure and humiliation as well; as a bonus, there is a rousing debate on the appropriate use of mnemonic devices . . . so give it a shot, keep score, and see if you can too.
 

The Tale of Dave's Consciousness and the Red XLR

On the way to the Outer Banks, I saw a red Cadillac XLR with vanity plates that said "Red XLR," and my first reaction was critical; I found the plates to be overly literal and a bit on-the-nose (I decided it would have been much funnier if those same plates were on a green minivan or a blue SUV) but upon reconsideration, I have decided that selecting such a literal description of your car on your vanity plates is actually a bold move, and here is why: if you commit a crime-- hit and run, bank robbery, kidnapping-- and then try to escape in your red Cadillac XLR, with vanity plates that say "Red XLR," there is little or no hope to escape the clutches of the law, because if someone gets a glimpse of your plates, not only have you cemented the make and model of the car in the memory of the witness, but the witness is also going to remember the plates much easier than if they said "PAZ-76T" . . . so really what that driver is saying with those plates is either "I am not a crook" or "I am the most badass crook around."

Who is Rude? Dave or Catherine? You Be the Judge!

When two married teachers occupy the same space in the summertime, there are bound to be conflicts (and they will usually center around the sink) and I don't think I can write an unbiased report about our latest incident, and so I'll just present the facts of this most recent kitchen controversy and let you be the judge:

1) my wife just finished all the dishes and cleaned the sink;

2) I was in the middle of a rather long-winded oration to my children, moving towards the peroration; the subject matter was their schedule in the following week-- they weren't attending camp and so I was rattling off the different things that they would be doing: Khan Academy math, practicing musical instruments, researching intriguing topics, doing chores, walking the dog . . . and I certainly had no exit strategy from this speech and might have been rambling a bit, and my kids might have been concentrating on reading their cereal boxes rather than taking notes BUT . . . well, I'll try to just state the facts and let you be the judge;

3) in the midst of my monologue, I put my yogurt bowl into the sink;

4) my wife INTERRUPTED my monologue to tell me that I was rude, and that proper etiquette indicated that I should have put my dirty bowl into the dishwasher, because she had just unloaded the dishwasher and cleaned the sink, and dirty dishes belong in the dishwasher, not clogging up a clean sink;

5) I countered and said SHE was being rude, because she interrupted my monologue to the children, and I also argued that it was NOT rude to put a dirty dish in the sink, even if someone had just cleaned it, because we always put dirty dishes in the sink . . . it's sort of a way-station to the dishwasher;

6) she pointed out that I interrupt people all the time, and I acknowledged that I was working on that problem, and that just because I did it, didn't make it right;

7) the kids happily watched us argue, because they were no longer on the receiving end of my monologue;

8) at some point, I told my wife that I would take full responsibility for doing the dishes and that the dishes would be my domain, i would be in charge of them and I would get them done in my own particular style and manner;

9Who Is Rude? Dave or Catherine? You Be the Judge!) several days later, when she arrived home from the gym and saw that I had half-completed the dishes, she gave me an "F" . . . and I argued that now that I was in charge of the dishes, I could do them in any time-frame I was fit . . . she countered with the fact that I knew her friend was coming over and I countered that with the fact that having a few dirty dishes in the house doesn't make the house dirty, and I'd also like to point out that when she chastised me for not finishing the dishes, I was in the midst of an intense game of MarioKart 8 with Alex and his friend, and her comment influenced my play and cost me the race, and so I would also like to receive compensation for damages.

The Test 57: Love Me Some Elevators

This week on The Test, the ladies reveal that they have something in common with Aerosmith: an inordinate passion for vertical people movers; while we avoid politics, we do not avoid controversy (there's an elevator-related religious discussion) and-- as a special bonus-- Coach Brady makes a frenetic cameo appearance . . . give this one a shot, elevate your intelligence, and see if you can beat Stacey (despite the fact that she's married to a dude who builds elevators for a living).

Blue Pill AND Red Pill in One Podcast

The current political climate is coloring everything I listen to, and so when The Magic Bureaucrat and his Riverside Miracle, an episode of 99% Invisible, began with a story of welfare reform that seemed to be a conservative's wet dream, I was wary; 99% Invisible, though usually about design, takes a fairly liberal view of the world-- innovation is good, new ideas and designs can empower people, and we are progressing towards better and better designs of nearly everything-- the story begins with Larry Townsend's new welfare program in Riverside, which would come to be known as workfare and would encourage welfare recipients to "find a job, any job" instead of getting education and training . . . and this was during the Clinton years and the program was regarded as a huge success . . . BUT the story takes a predictably liberal turn, and the reasons are significant and very topical and I think both liberals and conservatives could learn something from the piece, about the economy, economic research, and the power of music . . . Townsend enlisted his staff to make an album of original songs in various genres to inspire people on welfare to get a job (and spent a few thousand dollars of taxpayer money to produce the album) and, in case you were wondering: yes there's some '90's rap on there and it's stupendous.

Taking the Purple Pill: Trying to Step Outside the Moral Matrix

This sentence is going to be a random, stream-of-consciousness mess, but I think (for once) my form fits my function: lately, I have been trying my damndest to understand the polarization between liberals and the conservatives in our country, and how this is shaping the current economic policy and the election platforms . . . I've been doing my homework and listening to conservative talk radio-- some Rush Limbaugh and plenty of Mark Levin, and in between the overblown rhetoric, the ranting about Hillary "Rotten" Clinton . . . how she is a felon and a serial liar and the devil incarnate, the disgust with poor people and immigrants, the lack of empathy for people of color, the absolute hatred for the government and its programs and the possibility that our liberties might be curtailed (guns!), the fear of socialism and any redistribution of wealth, the paranoia that taxation and public works projects will just allow the government to get its dirty hands on our money, and like the mafia, take its cut-- as a public school teacher, it's hard to listen to this-- but in between all this vitriol, there is a kernel of an idea that these conservative blowhards are trying to espouse . . . that the government should be smaller and taxes should be lower and regulations should be less and that the best way to produce wealth is an unfettered free market-- and while is think this is true in a limited sense, for certain goods and products, I also think a free market is expensive and volatile with certain things, especially things that we wish to flow: electricity, water, health care, infrastructure . . . we just want these things to be reliable so that other things can work on top of them, and I also think there's a question of externalities, which the conservatives rarely mention . . . but underneath all the hatred there is something to talk about, and I find it interesting that the conservatives don't agree with all Trump has to say, especially on jobs and government infrastructure spending and protectionism and minimum wage . . . meanwhile, the liberals want a revolution-- free college, free healthcare, higher living wages, alternative energy, restrictions on corporations, control of externalities, and equal treatment for all people: rich, poor, immigrant, native, white, black, gay, transgender, and don't mind some redistribution of wealth to encourage this, and I've been listening to the ultra-liberal and fairly funny Citizen Radio to get a bead on some real radical left wing logic and emotions, and while I have more in common with those ideas, they can be really annoying and idealistic and insular and obnoxious as well . . . and it doesn't seem like any of these candidates or their followers are going to do what Jonathan Haidt suggests in his TED talk and "step outside the moral matrix" and actually look at what some smart people have figured out, which is that it's a combination of free markets and regulations that make economies work, and no one knows the exact balance . . . read some Ha-joon Chang to understand "kicking away the ladder," which is how many developed countries arrived at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . in other words, there's no magic bullet for an economy and it takes a mixture of ideology to understand this, which is what Jonathan Haidt's TED talk is about, his research shows that while there is some consensus between liberals and conservative on fairness/reciprocity and harm/care as valid moral concerns, conservatives tend to be much less open to experience and thus much more concerned with three moral traits that liberals don't interest liberals: purity/sanctity . . . so the strict interpretation of the Constitution . . . in-group/loyalty . . . so "real" Americans and patriotism and military jingoism and Ronald Reagan as God . . . and authority/respect . . . so law and order and belief in the police and a more traditional patriarchy and Christmas and religion and all that . . . and Haidt points out to the mainly liberal crowd (he polled them, and it's a typical TED talk audience: open to progress, science, and new ideas and almost entirely liberal) that BOTH of these mentalities are required to create a great society . . . there needs to be some revolution and progress, but order is also delicate and hard to maintain and actually requires the three moral traits that liberals tend to ignore . . . now Trump throws a bit of a monkey wrench in this because he doesn't seem to be concerned with some typical conservative values-- purity and respect for authority-- and so his economic and policy plans might be something entirely new (and unpalatable in some respects to the "true" conservative) while Clinton certainly can be more jingoistic about the military and more loyal to her group (the Democrats) than a typical rebellious, progress-minded liberal might like and while I know that these two sides are never going to love each other, or even see eye-to-eye . . . conservatives work on a five-channel moral system while liberals work on two-channels, so conservatives will always be annoying to liberals because they care passionately about more stuff and seem angry, and liberals will always seem to be amoral libertine radicals because they don't care about enough things, but we are going to have to embrace the fact that what makes America great is diversity, and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ronald Reagan are part of that diversity, and those conservative views-- which I often find hateful and ranting and humorless-- are important, just as important as the stereotypical diversity most liberals embrace: multi-cultural, multi-gender, pan-religious, multi-ethnic diversity . . . diversity that appeals to people who are open to all kinds of experience, the diversity that leads to a wide-variety of good restaurants, many of them quite cheap . . . such as the new Tacoria in New Brunswick . . . and that's what this is all about, right?

Two Books with White Covers (Both Containing Allusions)

I recently finished two new books with white covers: But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer and while both of these authors are generally regarded as critics . . . of popular culture, the arts, and-- in the case of Klosterman-- sports (and both write novels as well) and they both share a precise, crisp writing style that is almost mock-epic in laying bare the logic of thought (Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, in this review, described Dyer as "one of our greatest living critics, not of art, but of life itself, and one of our most original writers") but the big difference-- for me at least-- is that reading Klosterman is a smooth transference of thought, because Klosterman is around my age and he refers to things that I know a lot about (The Sex Pistols, Nick Bostrom, The Cosby Show, American football, Roseanne, Dan Carlin, the intelligence of octopi, the Higgs Boson, and Star Wars are a few that come to mind from his new book) while Geoff Dyer, a fifty year old Brit, will often refer to things just outside my purview . . . I think this is purposeful: Klosterman wants to appeal to a certain category of forty-something semi-literate, semi-intelligent, semi-athletic nerdy hipster (Dave is pegged) while Dyer, though easy enough to read, designs his references and allusions to take you beyond your normal thoughts and logic . . . in this new book, you will "experience the outside world" a world of art and culture and music that you know exists, but probably never investigated; anyway, here are some references and allusions from Geoff Dyer's new book, divided into two categories, the ones I knew and the ones I had to Google:

some of the references I got . . .

1) Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty;

2) Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come;

3) the life and works of Matisse, Pissarro, and Gauguin;

4) Dick Diver in Tender is the Night;

5) Art Pepper . . . I learned about him in the Bosch mysteries;

6) full moon parties at Ko Pha Ngan

7) Don Delillo's novel Underworld;

8) David Mamet and Thomas Pynchon;

and here are some of the people, places, and things I was unfamiliar with . . .

1) the critical works of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer;

2) Walter de Maria's landwork The Lightning Field . . . this giant rectangular collection of tall metal poles is in New Mexico, if I had know about it we could have taken a detour on our cross-country trip and tried to see it . . . although it's difficult to access;

3) Chaiwat Subprasom's photo Koh Tao;

4) Taryn Simon's photo series The Innocents;

5) Simon Rodia and The Watts Towers;

6) jazz bassist Charlie Haden, who played with Ornette Coleman;

7) seminal jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders;

8) Don Cherry's funky fusion album Brown Rice, with Charlie Haden on bass . . . I really like this album and I would have never listened to it if I hadn't read the book . . .

and so thanks to Geoff Dyer for introducing me to some new things, and making me feel a bit dumb, and thanks to Chuck Klosterman for explicating things I already know about, and making me feel smart.

OBFT XXIII

Another successful Outer Banks Fishing Trip . . . thanks to Whitney and everyone else on this year's rather light team of fishermen . . . here are a few things that happened (or might have happened or almost happened) and some notes for next year:

1) I got hit in the genitals by a stray frisbee, thrown by Rob, who might be trying to take me out (as Rob, Whitney and I are the only fishermen who have perfect attendance);

2) best water ever;

3) we were chastised at Tortuga's for clapping and cheering too passionately for a little league baseball game on the TV . . . Jersey Phenom!

4) we learned that the bartender who chastised us for clapping too much while "families are eating lunch" was actually mad at the kitchen for not making him a sandwich and took it out on us;

5) Friday morning Jerry, Rob and I almost played tennis (and Whitney almost almost played tennis but he forgot his racket back in Norfolk);

6) Saturday morning, we actually played tennis, and while I like tennis and Jerry, Rob and I had a good time, the real motivation was my wife's face when I packed the tennis gear . . . the face she made said: all you old guys do is sit around and drink beer and maybe wade into the water, there's no way you're going to play tennis . . . and so while tennis is fun, proving my wife wrong is priceless;

7) Brewmanji . . . a drinking game that involved a bottle cap, the top of a cardboard pizza box, and a magic marker;

8) cornhole on the beach, cornhole tournament with randomized partners, and surprise cornhole aptitude by ringer Matt Rodell . . . but we did NOT have new cornhole bags;

9) we ordered entrees as appetizers at Tortugas and cut them up tapas style . . . Bajan burger bites and Coco Loco chunks;

10) McWhinney surfed;

11) Whitney brought a bucket of music . . . a stereo system consisting of a cell-phone in a bucket;

12) Whitney, in a hungover haze on Saturday, used his bottle of Red Stripe as a condiment . . . he thought he was grabbing a bottle of hot sauce, but it was his beer, which he poured all over his fish taco . . . he said it didn't taste too bad;

13) we did not pound any deck nails but Paci fixed the shower door;

14) Rob's poison ivy was aesthetically unpleasing and did not fit the beach theme;

15) next year, everyone needs to bring a tennis racket;

16) after twenty two years at the Martha Wood cottage, we finally figured out how to use the coffee maker;

17) when I got up at 4 AM on Thursday morning to drive to Jerry's house in Arlington, and Whitney and Gormley were just going to bed in Norfolk, and it took me eleven hours to get back to Jersey on Sunday . . . there's got to be a better mode of transport to get down there . . . a boat? . . . anyway, thanks again to all in attendance, Whitney for hosting, the Martha Wood cottage for remaining, and another year of good weather.

The Agricultural Revolution: It Was a Trap

One of the controversial, mind-bending Guns, Germs and Steel type ideas in Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that the Agricultural Revolution, while advancing human institutions and increasing population, did more harm than good to the individual-- your typical farmer/peasant had it worse than your typical hunter/gatherer; the peasant ate a less varied diet, starved more often, worked much harder, and became bent, broken and diseased while tilling the fields . . . and Harari insists that we didn't domesticate wheat . . . wheat domesticated us (Malcolm Gladwell frames a similar argument in a more positive manner with Asian culture and rice production in Outliers) and with every toilsome step that humans took to make wheat more bountiful, we became more addicted to the high yields of the plant-- we buried the seeds deep instead of scattering them, we hunched over and cleared the fields of rocks and weeds-- though were meant to climb trees and chase antelopes-- we carried buckets of water to the fields instead of roaming the land in search of diverse nutrition, we built fences to keep out the animals and we dug canals to bring even more water, we fought diseases and blight . . . all so we could stay put and rely more and more on these few staple crops, which were flourishing, now that they had found willing slaves to take care of them . . . and in the lean years, when the crops failed, instead of moving on, people stayed and starved . . . and each step of the way towards this agricultural society was so miniscule that no one noticed what now seems obvious: cultivating wheat . . . it's a trap!

Dave Collects Forms, Finally Reaches Adulthood

Four years ago, I volunteered to coach my son's travel soccer team, and I felt mature and responsible and civic-minded . . . I'm helping the community! . . . I'm helping my family! . . . I'm a good role model for the youth! . . . but that was idealistic collegiate bullshit; coaching kids was mainly fun and easy, especially if you already know what you're doing . . .  all I had to do was show up with the equipment and a good attitude; it took an unfortunate sequence of events has show me the light on what comprises real civic and parental duty: I lost two team managers in the past two seasons, and so I elected to "take one for the team" and manage as well as coach this summer (temporarily, I hope) and now I realize who was doing the real work-- it's not setting up fun and fundamental drills and games to encourage team play, skillful soccer, and player development . . . adulthood is collecting checks and birth certificates and medical release forms, checking them over, learning what a "tape runner" is so you can affix a one inch by one inch photo onto the league approved cardstock, printing rosters onto stickers, disbursing referee money, communicating with the ref assigner, and a hundred other details that I've learned from the elders of the tribe (mainly women) and while I consider the registration system an insane bureaucratic nightmare, it's one of those byzantine realpolitik labyrinths that you have to navigate in order to participate . . . so while it's easy to change the line-up if a kid is sick, or switch practice plans to focus on a different skill, or run a new set-piece play-- which is what makes coaching so much fun-- it's really hard to change how the Mid-New Jersey Youth Soccer Association works, and so the real heroes are the people laboring under the yoke of those rules and regulations . . . I hope I can convince some civic-minded, team-spirited, gullible parent into taking this job off my hands, but I'm glad I'm learning how it works, because not only will I appreciate (and be able to advise) future team managers, but-- once I get this team registered) I will finally feel like a real adult (not the way I usually feel: like a surly teen masquerading masquerading as a real adult, with a bunch of props to lend my costume veracity: wife, kids, dog, house, two mundane cars, etc.)

Second Tier Time Machine Suggestions

If you had access to a time machine and you could visit any two events in the past (without altering them) I've always espoused that you should see a Shakespeare play (in Elizabethan times) and a dinosaur, but here are a worthy alternatives, inspired by the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harris:

1) go back 20,000 years to the island of Flores, and watch three foot tall humans (Homo floresiensis) hunt pygmy elephants . . . so cute;

2) go back 10,000 years to the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina and watch this piece of cave art being created:

3) go back 45,000 years to Eurasia, and check out warfare and interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals . . . this moment exemplifies the seminal paradox of the human spirit: there are some strange people on the other side of the valley . . . should we court them or kill them?

Craft Beer or Crafty Beer?

If you like Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin and think you're a craft beer connoisseur, then I recommend you cleanse your palate and listen to Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything "sudculture part I."

It's Fun to Think About How Wrong We Are

The premise of Chuck Klosterman's new book But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past is stated succinctly in the subtitle . . . the way a time period is perceived in the future is never the same as the time period is perceived while people are living in it, because of future discoveries and progress in art, science, ethics, and technology and the cultural shifts that accompany these . . . and Klosterman concedes that everyone will admit this in the abstract, but once you get specific-- once you tell people that Abraham Lincoln will be perceived differently, or Led Zeppelin, or the American system of government-- then they have trouble getting on board; from my perspective in the present, this is another excellent Klosterman book, and by excellent, I mean that Klosterman discusses things-- both eminent and obscure-- of which I have working knowledge: American football, Kurt Vonnegut, Kafka, George Saunders, Citizen Kane, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Star Wars, The Constitution, Renata Adler's novel Speedboat, string theory, Ohio, Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, etcetera-- and he writes about these disparate things so lucidly and logically, that once I read his ideas, I immediately digest them and believe they are my own . . . now this could mean he's just a middle-of-the-road thinker and a really compelling and clear stylist, so that reading his books makes me (and anyone my age who likes literature, science, pop culture and sports) feel really smart, because we get the allusions and can put everything in context, but I like to think otherwise: I like to think that Klosterman takes the time to think extensively, precisely, and comprehensively about the things that people of my generation and proclivities only half-think about, because it's not our job to think full time about hair bands and conspiracy theories and why the hell people still love Ronald Reagan, and Klosterman takes a real critical eye to these things and makes you rethink your half-baked thoughts about them . . . so thanks Chuck, I don't know how people are going to view your books in the future-- probably as mindless drivel about obscure minutia-- but I love and look forward to them here in the present.

Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . Yuck

The United States led the world in hops production in 2015, surpassing Germany for only the third time ever, and the majority of these hops were poured into Ithaca's Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . of course this beer is highly rated on BeerAdvocate, because it tastes nothing like a flower, and everything like Pine-Sol Multi-surface cleaner; I give it a big thumbs down for three reasons:

1) it doesn't taste very good;

2) when I drank three of them, it gave me a stomach-ache;

3) it cost me 14.99 for a six pack;

but, in case you want to give it a try, here are some of the positive descriptions culled from BeerAdvocate reviews:

1) piney tropical hops flavors;

2) the taste follows the nose;

3) an airy white head that lasts before heavy lacing;

4) heavy tropical flavors, including guava and coconut;

5) hazy honey hue;

6) residual astringent hop bitterness;

7) looks a bit like an orange snow globe in the light.

The Test 56: Politics, Naps, and Canine Mating Rituals

This week on The Test, Cunningam asks some pointed political questions-- both general and germane-- and Stacey, God and I do our best to answer them . . . we occasionally get sidetracked by other important issues (such as how to encourage a romantic interlude at the dog park, and the secret rules of napping) and in the end, everyone learns something or other about the upcoming election and our political process . . . so give it a whirl, keep score, and see how you fare . . . and remember: there's going to to be three more months of this shit.